Mr. Bunner misunderstood his glance. “Don’t you think I’m giving a man away, Mr. Trent,” he said. “Marlowe isn’t that kind. Célestine just took a fancy to him because he talks French like a native, and she would always be holding him up for a gossip. French servants are quite unlike English that way. And servant or no servant,” added Mr. Bunner with emphasis, “I don’t see how a woman could mention such a subject to a man. But the French beat me.” He shook his head slowly.
“But to come back to what you were telling me just now,” Trent said. “You believe that Manderson was going in terror of his life for some time. Who should threaten it? I am quite in the dark.”
“Terror—I don’t know,” replied Mr. Bunner meditatively. “Anxiety, if you like. Or suspense—that’s rather my idea of it. The old man was hard to terrify, anyway; and more than that, he wasn’t taking any precautions—he was actually avoiding them. It looked more like he was asking for a quick finish—supposing there’s any truth in my idea. Why, he would sit in that library window, nights, looking out into the dark, with his white shirt just a target for anybody’s gun. As for who should threaten his life well, sir,” said Mr. Bunner with a faint smile, “it’s certain you have not lived in the States. To take the Pennsylvania coal holdup alone, there were thirty thousand men, with women and children to keep, who would have jumped at the chance of drilling a hole through the man who fixed it so that they must starve or give in to his terms. Thirty thousand of the toughest aliens in the country, Mr. Trent. There’s a type of desperado you find in that kind of push who has been known to lay for a man for years, and kill him when he had forgotten what he did. They have been known to dynamite a man in Idaho who had done them dirt in New Jersey ten years before. Do you suppose the Atlantic is going to stop them? … It takes some sand, I tell you, to be a big business man in our country. No, sir: the old man knew—had always known—that there was a whole crowd of dangerous men scattered up and down the States who had it in for him. My belief is that he had somehow got to know that some of them were definitely after him at last. What licks me altogether is why he should have just laid himself open to them the way he did—why he never tried to dodge, but walked right down into the garden yesterday morning to be shot at.”
Mr. Bunner ceased to speak, and for a little while both men sat with wrinkled brows, faint blue vapours rising from their cigars. Then Trent rose. “Your theory is quite fresh to me,” he said. “It’s perfectly rational, and it’s only a question of whether it fits all the facts. I mustn’t give away what I’m doing for my newspaper, Mr. Bunner, but I will say this: I have already satisfied myself that this was a premeditated crime, and an extraordinarily cunning one at that. I’m deeply obliged to you. We must talk it over again.” He looked at his watch. “I have been expected for some time by my friend. Shall we make a move?”
“Two o’clock,” said Mr. Bunner, consulting his own, as he got up from the footboard. “Ten a.m. in little old New York. You don’t know Wall Street, Mr. Trent. Let’s you and I hope we never see anything nearer hell than what’s loose in the Street this minute.”
VII
The Lady in Black
The sea broke raging upon the foot of the cliff under a good breeze; the sun flooded the land with life from a dappled blue sky. In this perfection of English weather Trent, who had slept ill, went down before eight o’clock to a pool among the rocks, the direction of which had been given him, and dived deep into clear water. Between vast grey boulders he swam out to the tossing open, forced himself some little way against a coastwise current, and then returned to his refuge battered and refreshed. Ten minutes later he was scaling the cliff again, and his mind, cleared for the moment of a heavy disgust for the affair he had in hand, was turning over his plans for the morning.
It was the day of the inquest, the day after his arrival in the place. He had carried matters not much further after parting with the American on the road to Bishopsbridge. In the afternoon he had walked from the inn into the town, accompanied by Mr. Cupples, and had there made certain purchases at a chemist’s shop, conferred privately for some time with a photographer, sent off a reply-paid telegram, and made an enquiry at the telephone exchange. He had said but little about the case to Mr. Cupples, who seemed incurious on his side, and nothing at all about the results of his investigation or the steps he was about to take. After their return from Bishopsbridge, Trent had written a long dispatch for the Record and sent it to be telegraphed by the proud hands of the paper’s local representative. He had afterwards dined with Mr. Cupples, and had spent the rest of the evening in meditative solitude on the veranda.
This morning as he scaled the cliff he told himself that he had never taken up a case he liked so little, or which absorbed him so much. The more he contemplated it in the golden sunshine of this new day, the more evil and the more challenging it appeared. All that he suspected and all that he almost knew had occupied his questing brain for hours to the exclusion of sleep; and in this glorious light and air, though washed
