“It was awful. He was trying to get rid of her. He wasn’t much and I told him so, but he was all she had. When I first came to her she said she was an orphan, that she hadn’t anybody anywhere, that they were all dead.”
“She may have meant,” Peacock with even profounder psychology interjected, “that she was dead to them.”
But this insinuation Blanche resented. “She could be lively enough when she liked.”
“Who came to see her?”
“Mr. L.”
“No one else?”
Blanche shook her head.
“Whom did she write to?”
“How do I know?”
“Didn’t you ever see her write to anyone?”
“Well, the last night, after he had gone, she did write a letter and gave it to me to post. When I came back—”
“Whom was it addressed to?”
Blanche shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know, I can’t read. When I came back she was crying and getting a few duds together and I helped her.”
“Did she tell you where she was going?”
“Sure. To Europe. I saw her off the next day. She went in the sewerage.”
“In the steerage, do you mean?” asked Peacock. “But she hadn’t any money? Didn’t Loftus give her any?”
“She wouldn’t take his money, she threw it back at him. She would not take anything he had given her. She left a room full of dresses and jewelry. They are at the Arundel now. She told me—”
“Did you see her on board?”
Blanche nodded.
“Mightn’t she have left the ship before it sailed?”
“Yes, if she had wanted. I wouldn’t have stopped her. But I stood there and as the ship went out she waved her little hand at me and—and—”
“Do you remember the ship’s name?”
But now Blanche was weeping profusely.
“No matter,” said Peacock. “I can find out.”
He did. He found out, too, that when Loftus was shot Marie Leroy was on the high seas. And there he was without a clue. What is worse, there was the eager public quite as deficient.
Yet though the clue which the girl represented was necessarily abandoned, there remained a theory. There remained even two theories. The first was robbery.
Loftus, when found, had about him not so much as a five-cent piece. The wad of bills which men of means are supposed to carry, and which, having credit everywhere, they never do, was absent. Absent too was the customary watch. The precise use which a man of means and particularly of leisure can have for a watch the police and press did not stop to consider. The absence of watch and money suggested a theory. That was enough.
The theory, however, like all theories, had its defects. Loftus had been found within the park, a few feet from the fence. The shooting might have occurred from without, but unless the assassin had a key or a ladder or a balloon or wings he could not possibly have got in to go through him. Eliminating ladder, balloon and wings, a key the assassin could not have had unless he were a resident in the neighborhood, the agent of a resident, or a caretaker of the park itself. People of this order are as eliminable as balloons and wings.
The theory therefore had its defects. It had, though, this in its favor—the lock of one of the gates might have been picked. It had something else in its favor. It suited the Loftus clan.
Mrs. Loftus, though childless now, was not otherwise alone. Behind her were all the Loftuses, a contingent of relatives socially eminent, ponderable politically, super-respectable, synonymous with the best. To them the death of Royal, however dismal, was not disgraceful—not disgraceful, that is, assuming that it was a footpad’s work. On their escutcheon it put a mourning band but not a blackening blot. That blot they feared. They had cause to. The dark, donjuanesque story about Marie Leroy might have been followed by other stories darker still, dirtier if possible, that would begrime them all.
The footpad theory they accepted therefore at once. Had they been able, had circumstances favored them, had the man, for instance, been shot in some way or in some place unknowable to the police, they would have arranged to have had him die decorously, if suddenly, of some genteel complaint, of appendicitis or pleuropneumonia. Then there would have been no stories, no extras, no pictures, no notoriety, no fear of that blot.
The fear subsisting, they accepted the footpad theory, glad to find it ready-made, declining to consider any other, desisting from further effort, hushing the matter as well as they could, refusing, though urged, to offer a reward.
Yet, though the theory suited them it did not satisfy the public. It was too tame. They demanded something else. That demand the press, as was its duty, attempted to supply. Through methods unfathomably vidocqesque, the young gentleman connected with the Chronicle—one of the most enterprising sheets—discovered more about Loftus dead than Loftus living could himself have known. They discovered that in the panic he had dropped a bagatelle of five millions, and announced that he had committed suicide. But while at the autopsy it was not demonstrated that Loftus could not have shot himself, at the inquest it was shown that the obligatory instrument had not been found. Even to vidocqesque young gentlemen the suicide theory ceased then to appeal.
But that only deepened the mystery. To dissipate it and, at the same time, to display an endearing pro bono publicanism, the Chronicle offered a reward of five thousand dollars for such information as would lead to the arrest and conviction of the assassin.
Immediately there was a clue.
It was Harris who produced it. Under the guidance of a reporter he was led to the office of the Chronicle, where the young gentleman turned him over to the managing editor quite as though the clue were his own.
“Here, Mr. Digby, is a party that knows who shot Loftus.”
Mr. Digby was a small man with a big beard, very well dressed, remarkably civil.
“Yes,” he said. “And who did?”
“Mr. Arthur Annandale.”
Mr. Digby smiled. He
