CARLYN HALL was looking its brightest. Outside, the park was sweet with lilac and syringa, drooping laburnums shone pale gold against a background of evergreens, and everywhere there were May trees in blossom. Inside the house all the preparations for the home-coming of the Squire’s bride that had been stopped last year had been set on foot again. Certain rooms that had been got ready for Barbara and closed when the engagement was broken off had been opened again. Everything was putting on its best face for the young mistress who was soon to be brought to it.
Mrs. Carlyn was frankly delighted at the turn things had taken. Yet, as Frank Carlyn got up from the arm-chair and strolled over to the window, his face was gloomy and preoccupied; he looked like anything but a successful lover.
“You will be in at tea-time, Frank?” his mother asked as he stepped out on to the terrace. “The Sheringhams are coming to tennis, and Barbara said she would very likely walk up.”
“Oh, yes. I don’t know. I expect so,” Carlyn rejoined vaguely. “I can’t tell, mother. I have promised to go out with Davenant. Ah, there he is.”
“Well, really, I can’t imagine what Sir Oswald Davenant is about, staying all this time at the ‘Carlyn Arms.’ And, if he does like this part of the country so much, I wish he would take up his quarters here and behave like a civilized being, instead of sending for you at all sorts of odd times and seasons,” Mrs. Carlyn grumbled.
Her son made no answer. He was moving forward to meet Sir Oswald who was coming up to the Hall from the direction of the Home Wood. Like Carlyn he was looking worried and anxious.
“You had my note?” he said, as they got within speaking distance.
“Of course,” Carlyn said shortly. “And here I am, though what on earth you want with me I can’t make out.”
“I told you the time would come when I should claim your help,” Sir Oswald went on, ignoring the other’s evident ill humour. “You remember what day this is? The anniversary of Winter’s death?”
Carlyn nodded. “I am not likely to forget it.”
“I hope in future years it may be remembered as the day on which the truth was discovered,” Sir Oswald said gravely. “I want you to come with me to the Home Wood, Carlyn.”
Carlyn did not make any demur, but there was sullen displeasure in every line of his face, in the hunch of his broad figure, as he walked by Sir Oswald’s side.
“Well, I can’t get the hang of it all, but you must do as you please,” he said at last.
“You will understand it just now I hope and trust,” Sir Oswald told him gravely. “For the rest I am much obliged to you for letting me have a free hand, Carlyn.”
The other shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, I could do nothing else.”
Sir Oswald gave him one keen glance, then he relapsed into silence, a silence that remained unbroken until they had entered the Home Wood and were nearing the gamekeeper’s cottage.
Then Sir Oswald stepped behind a clump of rhododendrons, and motioned to Carlyn to follow him. The surprise in the latter’s face deepened as he saw that an opening had been carefully arranged through which a view of the front of the cottage could be obtained. In the last day or two a curious change had taken place. All appearance of disuse and decay had been cleared away, it was apparently as trim, the little garden as gay with flowers, as if the Winters had been living there to-day. The door stood half-open and it was evident that some one was moving about inside.
Carlyn turned to Sir Oswald.
“What does it all mean? What is going to happen?”
Sir Oswald hurriedly motioned him to be quiet. “We may not have long to wait!” he whispered. “But you must be absolutely silent.”
Carlyn turned aside with an impatient gesture. He had been brought there against his will, and the whole affair seemed to him to be the veriest mummery. He disliked the stirring up of the muddy waters involved in the reopening of the inquiry into Winter’s death. Sympathize though he might with Sir Oswald, he had not the faintest belief in Mrs. Winter’s innocence; none at all in Sir Oswald’s capability of proving it. However, he had no choice but to give the latter the help he claimed, and he resigned himself to the inevitable, and waited, gazing across the clearing at the front of the cottage.
Sir Oswald, for his part, was not looking at the house at all. His eyes were fixed on the undergrowth opposite. When at last he detected a faint movement, he drew a long breath of satisfaction. They had stood there perhaps half an hour, and Carlyn was beginning to feel cramped and restless, when the silence around them, which had been previously uninterrupted, save for the twitter of the birds and the faint multitudinous hum of the insects, was broken by a new sound. There were voices inside the cottage which were raised in anger. It was evident that some altercation was taking place. At last the door was flung violently open—Carlyn stared and rubbed his eyes-—surely the man who strolled rapidly down the path and off in the direction of the Hall bore a curious likeness to himself. His interest was quickened, he leaned forward eagerly.
The perspiration stood on Sir Oswald’s brow. His eyes grew very eager as he noted a rustling among the undergrowth.
Another moment and another man came out of the cottage. He was garbed in loose velveteens, and he held a gun which he was examining with some care, but presently with a muttered oath he set it against the garden palings and catching up a spade began to dig in the flower-beds beside.
Carlyn’s face grew more and more bewildered. Had it been possible for the dead to revisit their old haunts he would have believed it to be his murdered gamekeeper, John Winter, whom he saw in the flesh before him. He had little time for speculation, however. The bushes Sir Oswald had been watching, were suddenly burst apart. There was an appalling howl—a sound of which Carlyn had never heard the like before, then, quick as a panther, Sir Oswald sprang across and dragged a sobbing, bellowing mass into the open.
“Make a clean breast of it, my lad,” he counselled. “It will be best for you in the end.”
To his amazement Carlyn saw that the boy was young Jim Retford, his gamekeeper’s son. He went across to them.
Retford’s sobs redoubled when he saw his master. He tried to tear himself out of Sir Oswald’s clasp, to throw himself on the ground. In vain, Sir Oswald’s grasp was as firm as a vice.
“Father! Father!” the boy cried. “Don’t let him come near me, I never meant no harm.” His terrified eyes were fixed upon the figure in the path—a figure that was now standing perfectly still with its back to them. “Don’t let him get me!” Softly Retford sobbed.
Sir Oswald set him on his feet and held him there. “He shall not get you if you tell me the truth. If not—” He paused suggestively.
Young Retford howled again. “It wasn’t my fault. Dad told me to say naught,” he blubbered. “Might have hanged me-—they might, and I couldn’t know as the gun was loaded.”
“What?” a curious change came over Sir Oswald’s face, but his hold on the boy did not relax. “What was it you never meant to do?” he demanded sternly, giving him a shake. “Speak the truth, lad.”
Young Retford’s teeth chattered, his legs tottered under him. “I never meant to harm John Winter,” he howled, amid a fresh paroxysm of sobbing. “I had just come up here to see if I could find our Esther, what was lost and the gun stood by the gate. I took it up and it went off in my hand and shot him right in the face. Oh, oh, oh!”
Sir Oswald drew a deep breath. “So that is the solution of the Home Wood mystery. To think it never occurred to any of us before. Why did you not speak out and tell the truth, Jim Retford?”
“Father told me not, sir,” the boy sobbed. “Many a man has been hanged for less, he said, or shut up in a reformatory. And that would have killed me, too, sir. So I never said a word, not till he came back to make me,” with a shuddering glance at the cottage garden from which the figure had disappeared now.
Carlyn took off his hat and passed his hand over his forehead, staring at the boy in amazement. “So you mean to tell us that it—was you who killed John Winter,” he said slowly.
“I never meant to do it, sir.” The lad’s grimy, tear-stained face was contorted anew. “And Father—Father said—oh, oh!” And he made a last desperate attempt to free himself.
Carlyn saw that his keeper was hurrying towards them from a side path. His face was white and frightened.
“Let the lad go, sir,” he said heavily. “I will make a clean breast of it.”
Carlyn turned to him almost savagely.
“Do you mean to say that you have known all the time that your son killed Winter, and you have allowed an innocent woman to be hunted all over the country for it?” he demanded sternly.
“’Twasn’t my fault that Mrs. Winter ran away,” Retford said sullenly. “That was what made folks say it was her. If she had bided at home there would have been no harm done.”
“At any rate you have done harm enough—you and your son,” Carlyn thundered. His share of the family temper was beginning to assert itself. Sir Oswald touched his arm, others were coming on the scene. Garth Davenant and a stranger were emerging from the cottage, the Inspector of Police and one of his subordinates were following Retford up the path. Sir Oswald addressed himself to these two latter. “I promised you, you should find your work done for you, didn’t I, inspector? Now I charge this boy, James Retford, on his own confession, with having caused the death of John Winter, and his father, Robert Retford, with being an accessory after the fact.”
“I shall have to get a warrant, sir,” the man was beginning when Retford interrupted him.
“You needn’t bother yourself, inspector. We will go quietly with you, I promise you. For me, I shall be glad enough to get the thing off my chest. It was a big mistake when I didn’t tell all about it at the time. It was two years ago to-day, sir.” Insensibly he looked away from the others, and addressed himself to Carlyn.
“We were in sore trouble at home and I was in a rare way about it. I was on my way back to work after I had had my bit of dinner when, coming along, I heard a shot. I thought nothing of it at the moment, but I had only gone a few steps further when I met my boy Jim. He was nearly mad with fright, but I made him tell me what he had done, how he had taken up Winter’s gun and pointed it at him, not dreaming it was loaded, and how it had gone off in his hands and killed the keeper. I didn’t suppose the man was really dead, I thought the gun had gone off and hurt him a bit, but when I got to the cottage I saw the lad was right enough, Winter was dead, and a ghastly sight at that.”
“But why on earth didn’t you tell people that it was an accident? Why didn’t you go for help?” Carlyn questioned excitedly.
Retford scratched his head in a puzzled fashion.
“It seemed to me as we might not have been believed. I was a fool. I see that plain enough now. But I had lost one child, or as good as lost her, and I thought I couldn’t run the risk of losing the other. Jim there, he wasn’t the poor creature then that he is now—but a fine upstanding lad he was, just the pride of my life. It came across me that they might think he had done it on purpose, or they might have said he wasn’t under proper control, and sent him away from us to a reformatory or something of that kind. I lost my head, sir, that is what it come to, and when my senses did come back to me it was too late to speak out, least it seemed so to me. But I always thought as they would have said it was an accident; I never guessed they would think it was murder, and if Mrs. Winter had been took I should have spoke out. That is all, sir.”
His head sank on his breast as he finished, his son was leaning against a tree trunk close at hand, the picture of abject misery.
The inspector, after conferring for a minute with Sir Oswald and Carlyn beckoned to them.
“You had better come down to the station with me, Mr. Retford, you and your boy, and we will have all this put down in writing.”
The keeper made no demur. He turned quietly with the policeman, Jim shambling along in his wake.
Frank Carlyn stared after them in a state bordering on stupefaction.
Sir Oswald touched his arm. “Come, we must follow them, our evidence may be wanted.”
Carlyn turned and stared at him, “What in Heaven’s name made you suspect this?”
Sir Oswald shook his head. “As a matter of fact I did not suspect this. I felt sure that Retford knew something of the matter. An accident showed me that young Retford was in the habit of coming here most days. Instinct told me he would be here to-day, and with Garth’s help I arranged that little tableau, hoping to frighten the truth out of him. Garth and his friends are capital amateur actors, and I got the idea of reconstructing the crime partly from the French Police and partly from ‘The Bells.’ You remember Irving’s big scene? But I must confess I really suspected his father, who I fancied had shot Winter in his rage at his daughter’s betrayal. However, it seems I was wrong, and the Home Wood mystery turns out to have been accidental, and no murder at all.”
Carlyn held out his hand.
“I can’t realize it yet. But I congratulate you most heartily, Davenant, and later on I shall hope to have an opportunity of congratulating Lady Davenant personally.”