The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(78)

                By the time he had pulled on his vest and drawers, I came out suddenly from my ambush and faced him. A fresh shock awaited me. I could hardly believe my eyes. It was not Le Geyt—no, nor anything like him!

                Nevertheless, the man rose with a little cry and advanced, half crouching, towards me. “You are not hunting me down—with the police?” he exclaimed, his neck held low and his forehead wrinkling.

                The voice—the voice was Le Geyt’s. It was an unspeakable mystery. “Hugo,” I cried, “dear Hugo—hunting you down?—could you imagine it?”

                He raised his head, strode forward, and grasped my hand. “Forgive me, Cumberledge,” he cried. “But a proscribed and hounded man! If you knew what a relief it is to me to get out on the water!”

                “You forget all there?”

                “I forget it—the red horror!”

                “You meant just now to drown yourself?”

                “No! If I had meant it I would have done it.… Hubert, for my children’s sake, I will not commit suicide!”



                             “Then listen!” I cried. I told him in a few words of his sister’s scheme—Sebastian’s defence—the plausibility of the explanation—the whole long story. He gazed at me moodily. Yet it was not Hugo!

                “No, no,” he said, shortly; and as he spoke it was he. “I have done it; I have killed her; I will not owe my life to a falsehood.”

                “Not for the children’s sake?”

                He dashed his hand down impatiently. “I have a better way for the children. I will save them still.… Hubert, you are not afraid to speak to a murderer?”

                “Dear Hugo—I know all; and to know all is to forgive all.”

                He grasped my hand once more. “Know all!” he cried, with a despairing gesture. “Oh, no; no one knows all but myself; not even the children. But the children know much; they will forgive me. Lina knows something; she will forgive me. You know a little; you forgive me. The world can never know. It will brand my darlings as a murderer’s children.”

                “It was the act of a minute,” I interposed. “And—though she is dead, poor lady, and one must speak no ill of her—we can at least gather dimly, for your children’s sake, how deep was the provocation.”

                He gazed at me fixedly. His voice was like lead. “For the children’s sake—yes,” he answered, as in a dream. “It was all for the children! I have killed her—murdered her—she has paid her penalty; and, poor dead soul, I will utter no word against her—the woman I have murdered! But one thing I will say: If omniscient justice sends me for this to eternal punishment, I can endure it gladly, like a man, knowing that so I have redeemed my Marian’s motherless girls from a deadly tyranny.”

                It was the only sentence in which he ever alluded to her.

                I sat down by his side and watched him closely. Mechanically, methodically, he went on with his dressing. The more he dressed, the less could I believe it was Hugo. I had expected to find him close-shaven; so did the police, by their printed notices. Instead of that, he had shaved his beard and whiskers, but only trimmed his moustache; trimmed it quite short, so as to reveal the boyish corners of the mouth—a trick which entirely altered his rugged expression. But that was not all; what puzzled me most was the eyes—they were not Hugo’s. At first I could not imagine why. By degrees the truth dawned upon me. His eyebrows were naturally thick and shaggy—great overhanging growth, interspersed with many of those stiff long hairs to which Darwin called attention in certain men as surviving traits from a monkey-like ancestor. In order to disguise himself, Hugo had pulled out all these coarser hairs, leaving nothing on his brows but the soft and closely pressed coat of down which underlies the longer bristles in all such cases. This had wholly altered the expression of the eyes, which no longer looked out keenly from their cavernous penthouse; but being deprived of their relief, had acquired a much more ordinary and less individual aspect. From a good-natured but shaggy giant, my old friend was transformed by his shaving and his costume into a well-fed and well-grown, but not very colossal, commercial gentleman. Hugo was scarcely six feet high, indeed, though by his broad shoulders and bushy beard he had always impressed one with such a sense of size; and now that the hirsuteness had been got rid of, and the dress altered, he hardly struck one as taller or bigger than the average of his fellows.