“Oh no, no, no!” cried Mrs. Manderson. “I don’t know anything at the moment, except that your talking must be stopped somehow, if we are to get any further with that letter to Mr. Marlowe. You shall not get out of it. Come!” She put the pen into his hand.
Trent looked at it with distaste. “I warn you not to discourage my talking,” he said dejectedly. “Believe me, men who don’t talk are even worse to live with than men who do. Oh, have a care of natures that are mute. I confess I’m shirking writing this thing. It is almost an indecency. It’s mixing two moods to write the sort of letter I mean to write, and at the same time to be sitting in the same room with you.”
She led him to his abandoned chair before the escritoire and pushed him gently into it. “Well, but please try. I want to see what you write, and I want it to go to him at once. You see, I would be contented enough to leave things as they are; but you say you must get at the truth, and if you must, I want it to be as soon as possible. Do it now—you know you can if you will—and I’ll send it off the moment it’s ready. Don’t you ever feel that—the longing to get the worrying letter into the post and off your hands, so that you can’t recall it if you would, and it’s no use fussing any more about it?”
“I will do as you wish,” he said, and turned to the paper, which he dated as from his hotel. Mrs. Manderson looked down at his bent head with a gentle light in her eyes, and made as if to place a smoothing hand upon his rather untidy crop of hair. But she did not touch it. Going in silence to the piano, she began to play very softly. It was ten minutes before Trent spoke.
“If he chooses to reply that he will say nothing?”
Mrs. Manderson looked over her shoulder. “Of course he dare not take that line. He will speak to prevent you from denouncing him.”
“But I’m not going to do that anyhow. You wouldn’t allow it—you said so; besides, I won’t if you would. The thing’s too doubtful now.”
“But,” she laughed, “poor Mr. Marlowe doesn’t know you won’t, does he?”
Trent sighed. “What extraordinary things codes of honour are!” he remarked abstractedly. “I know that there are things I should do, and never think twice about, which would make you feel disgraced if you did them—such as giving anyone who grossly insulted me a black eye, or swearing violently when I barked my shin in a dark room. And now you are calmly recommending me to bluff Marlowe by means of a tacit threat which I don’t mean; a thing which hell’s most abandoned fiend did never, in the drunkenness of guilt—well, anyhow, I won’t do it.” He resumed his writing, and the lady, with an indulgent smile, returned to playing very softly.
In a few minutes more, Trent said: “At last I am his faithfully. Do you want to see it?” She ran across the twilight room, and turned on a reading lamp beside the escritoire. Then, leaning on his shoulder, she read what follows:
Dear Mr. Marlowe—You will perhaps remember that we met, under unhappy circumstances, in June of last year at Marlstone.
On that occasion it was my duty, as representing a newspaper, to make an independent investigation of the circumstances of the death of the late Sigsbee Manderson. I did so, and I arrived at certain conclusions. You may learn from the enclosed manuscript, which was originally written as a dispatch for my newspaper, what those conclusions were. For reasons which it is not necessary to state I decided at the last moment not to make them public, or to communicate them to you, and they are known to only two persons beside myself.
At this point Mrs. Manderson raised her eyes quickly from the letter. Her dark brows were drawn together. “Two persons?” she said with a note of enquiry.
“Your uncle is the other. I sought him out last night and told him the whole story. Have you anything against it? I always felt uneasy at keeping it from him as I did, because I had led him to expect I should tell him all I discovered, and my silence looked like mystery-making. Now it is to be cleared up finally, and there is no question of shielding you, I wanted him to know everything. He is a very shrewd adviser, too, in a way of his own; and I should like to have him with me when I see Marlowe. I have a feeling that two heads will be better than one on my side of the interview.”
She sighed. “Yes, of course, uncle
