“But it was never tried,” I ejaculated.
“No, happily for us, it was never tried. Fortune favoured us. Yorke-Bannerman had a weak heart, a conveniently weak heart, which the inquest sorely affected; and besides, he was deeply angry at what he persisted in calling Sebastian’s defection. He evidently thought Sebastian ought to have stood by him. His colleague preferred the claims of public duty—as he understood them, I mean—to those of private friendship. It was a very sad case—for Yorke-Bannerman was really a charming fellow. But I confess I was relieved when he died unexpectedly on the morning of his arrest. It took off my shoulders a most serious burden.”
“You think, then, the case would have gone against him?”
“My dear Hubert,” his whole face puckered with an indulgent smile, “of course the case must have gone against us. Juries are fools; but they are not such fools as to swallow everything—like ostriches: to let me throw dust in their eyes about so plain an issue. Consider the facts, consider them impartially. Yorke-Bannerman had easy access to aconitine; had whole ounces of it in his possession; he treated the uncle from whom he was to inherit; he was in temporary embarrassments—that came out at the inquest; it was known that the Admiral had just made a twenty-third will in his favour, and that the Admiral’s wills were liable to alteration every time a nephew ventured upon an opinion in politics, religion, science, navigation, or the right card at whist, differing by a shade from that of the uncle. The Admiral died of aconitine poisoning; and Sebastian observed and detailed the symptoms. Could anything be plainer—I mean, could any combination of fortuitous circumstances”—he blinked pleasantly again—“be more adverse to an advocate sincerely convinced of his client’s innocence—as a professional duty?” And he gazed at me comically.
The more he piled up the case against the man who I now felt sure was Hilda’s father, the less did I believe him. A dark conspiracy seemed to loom up in the background. “Has it ever occurred to you,” I asked, at last, in a very tentative tone, “that perhaps—I throw out the hint as the merest suggestion—perhaps it may have been Sebastian who—”
He smiled this time till I thought his smile would swallow him.
“If Yorke-Bannerman had not been my client,” he mused aloud, “I might have been inclined to suspect rather that Sebastian aided him to avoid justice by giving him something violent to take, if he wished it: something which might accelerate the inevitable action of the heart-disease from which he was suffering. Isn’t that more likely?”
I saw there was nothing further to be got out of Mayfield. His opinion was fixed; he was a placid ruminant. But he had given me already much food for thought. I thanked him for his assistance, and returned on foot to my rooms at the hospital.
I was now, however, in a somewhat different position for tracking Hilda from that which I occupied before my interview with the famous counsel. I felt certain by this time that Hilda Wade and Maisie Yorke-Bannerman were one and the same person. To be sure, it gave me a twinge to think that Hilda should be masquerading under an assumed name; but I waived that question for the moment, and awaited her explanations. The great point now was to find Hilda. She was flying from Sebastian to mature a new plan. But whither? I proceeded to argue it out on her own principles; oh, how lamely! The world is still so big! Mauritius, the Argentine, British Columbia, New Zealand!
The letter I had received bore the Basingstoke postmark. Now a person may be passing Basingstoke on his way either to Southampton or Plymouth, both of which are ports of embarcation for various foreign countries. I attached importance to that clue. Something about the tone of Hilda’s letter made me realise that she intended to put the sea between us. In concluding so much, I felt sure I was not mistaken. Hilda had too big and too cosmopolitan a mind to speak of being “irrevocably far from London,” if she were only going to some town in England, or even to Normandy, or the Channel Islands. “Irrevocably far” pointed rather to a destination outside Europe altogether—to India, Africa, America: not to Jersey, Dieppe, or Saint-Malo.