Marlowe stared at the light above his head and Trent moved impatiently in his chair. “Before we come to that,” he said, “will you tell us exactly on what footing you were with Manderson during the years you were with him?”
“We were on very good terms from beginning to end,” answered Marlowe. “Nothing like friendship—he was not a man for making friends—but the best of terms as between a trusted employee and his chief. I went to him as private secretary just after getting my degree at Oxford. I was to have gone into my father’s business, where I am now, but my father suggested that I should see the world for a year or two. So I took this secretaryship, which seemed to promise a good deal of varied experience, and I had let the year or two run on to four years before the end came. The offer came to me through the last thing in the world I should have put forward as a qualification for a salaried post, and that was chess.”
At the word Trent struck his hands together with a muttered exclamation. The others looked at him in surprise.
“Chess!” repeated Trent. “Do you know,” he said, rising and approaching Marlowe, “what was the first thing I noted about you at our first meeting? It was your eye, Mr. Marlowe. I couldn’t place it then, but I know now where I had seen your eyes before. They were in the head of no less a man than the great Nikolay Korchagin, with whom I once sat in the same railway carriage for two days. I thought I should never forget the chess eye after that, but I could not put a name to it when I saw it in you. I beg your pardon,” he ended suddenly, resuming his marmoreal attitude in his chair.
“I have played the game from my childhood, and with good players,” said Marlowe simply. “It is an hereditary gift, if you can call it a gift. At the University I was nearly as good as anybody there, and I gave most of my brains to that and the O.U.D.S. and playing about generally. At Oxford, as I dare say you know, inducements to amuse oneself at the expense of one’s education are endless, and encouraged by the authorities. Well, one day toward the end of my last term, Dr. Munro of Queen’s, whom I had never defeated, sent for me. He told me that I played a fairish game of chess. I said it was very good of him to say so. Then he said, ‘They tell me you hunt, too.’ I said, ‘Now and then.’ He asked, ‘Is there anything else you can do?’ ‘No,’ I said, not much liking the tone of the conversation—the old man generally succeeded in putting people’s backs up. He grunted fiercely, and then told me that enquiries were being made on behalf of a wealthy American man of business who wanted an English secretary. Manderson was the name, he said. He seemed never to have heard it before, which was quite possible, as he never opened a newspaper and had not slept a night outside the college for thirty years. If I could rub up my spelling—as the old gentleman put it—I might have a good chance for the post, as chess and riding and an Oxford education were the only indispensable points.
“Well, I became Manderson’s secretary. For a long time I liked the position greatly. When one is attached to an active American plutocrat in the prime of life one need not have many dull moments. Besides, it made me independent. My father had some serious business reverses about that time, and I was glad to be able to do without an allowance from him. At the end of the first year Manderson doubled my salary. ‘It’s big money,’ he said, ‘but I guess I don’t lose.’ You see, by that time I was doing a great deal more than accompany him on horseback in the morning and play chess in the evening, which was mainly what he had required. I was attending to his houses, his farm in Ohio, his shooting in Maine, his horses, his cars, and his yacht. I had become a walking railway-guide and an expert cigar-buyer. I was always learning something.
“Well, now you understand what my position was in regard to Manderson during the last two or three years of my connection with him. It was a happy life for me on the whole. I was busy, my work was varied and interesting; I had time to amuse myself too, and money to spend. At one time I made a fool of myself about a girl, and that was not a happy time; but it taught me to understand the great goodness of Mrs. Manderson.” Marlowe inclined his head to Mr. Cupples as he said this. “She may choose to tell you about it. As for her husband, he had never varied in his attitude towards me, in spite of the change that came over him in the last months of his life, as you know. He treated me well and generously in his unsympathetic way, and I never had a feeling that he was less than satisfied with his bargain—that was the sort of footing we lived upon. And it was that continuance of his attitude right up to the end that made the revelation so shocking when I was suddenly shown, on the night on which he met his end, the depth of crazy hatred of myself that was in Manderson’s soul.”
The eyes of Trent and Mr. Cupples met for an instant.
“You never suspected that he hated you before that time?” asked Trent; and Mr. Cupples asked at the same moment, “To what did you attribute it?”
“I never guessed until that night,” answered Marlowe, “that he had the smallest ill-feeling toward me.
