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The present problem is to find out who murdered Miss Melhuish. Now, had I been the victim you would be thinking hard, Bates." "I tell 'ee, sir, it wur a loony." Nor was Bates to be moved from that opinion. He held to it, through thick and thin, for many days. Grant wandered into the front garden.
Both men had donned coarse overalls, and Melhuish, the mining expert, held his candle so that its light fell upon his companion as well as upon the dripping surface of the rock. Moisture fell from the wet stone into the gloomy rift, and a faint monotonous splashing rose up from far below. Melhuish, however, was watching Thurston too intently to notice anything else.
For some reason Miss Tattersall was to be kept out of the case. Possibly she had made terms to that effect. More probably, I thought, Jervaise was a trifle ashamed of the source of his evidence against me. "Oh! look here, Melhuish," he said, with a return to his bullying manner. "You're only making things look worse for yourself by all this beating about the bush.
In a word, the passing of Adelaide Melhuish was exploited thoroughly as an indictment of her one-time lover, and the only two in Steynholme not aware of the fact were Grant, himself, and Wally Hart. By a singular coincidence, not ridiculously beyond the ken of a verger, when Doris went to church on Sunday morning, she found herself beside Mr. Franklin.
As it happens, I can fix the time you opened your window almost to a minute, because the church clock had chimed the quarter just before you appeared." Grant, however, was not to be soothed by this matter-of-fact reasoning. "I am vexed at the mere notion of your name, and possibly your portrait, appearing in the newspapers," he protested. "Miss Melhuish was a celebrated actress.
"You'll be writing a play about us," Anne remarked carelessly. I was astonished to find that she knew I had written plays. "How did you know that I did that sort of thing?" I asked. "I've seen one of them," she said. "'The Mulberry Bush'; when mother and I were in London last winter. And Arthur said you were the same Mr. Melhuish. I suppose Frank Jervaise had told him."
Half-hidden trodden in amongst the roughened wool, he found it a morsel of bright steel the needle of a hypodermic syringe. Who had spoken lately of a morphinomaniac that carried his syringe always with him? Why, Caldegard, Caldegard! "Melhuish? Melford? Meldrum? Melcher?-Melchard! By God, the swine that stank!"
He had taken his punishment stoically enough then, and might take another with equal fortitude now; though he had been weakened in the past five or six years by the immunity his frowning face had won for him. But he could not meet the promise of a thrashing. I saw that he would do anything, make any admission, to avoid that. "Look here, Melhuish..." he began, but I cut him short.
Melhuish says," she went on with a little gasp of annoyance, "we really have very little evidence, as yet."
The discovery that Adelaide Melhuish was another man's wife had stunned him. It was not until the fire of sacrifice had died into parched ashes that its earlier banality became clear. He realized then that he had given his love to a phantom. By one of nature's miracles a vain and selfish creature was gifted in the artistic portrayal of the finer emotions.
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