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"That I cannot tell you." Another question was in Mr. Brimsdown's mind, but the young man's haggard face, the mingled misery and expectation of his glance, checked the utterance of it. He had the idea that Charles's manner suggested something more some revelation yet to come. But the young man did not speak. "Is this all you wanted to show me?" Mr. Brimsdown hinted. "Is it not enough?"
The tremulous urgent words stared out from the surface of the grey paper in all the piteous futility of an appeal made too late. Glancing up, Mr. Brimsdown's eye rested on the shelf where the deed box of Robert Turold reposed, and he mechanically reflected that it would be necessary to have the word "Deceased" added to the white-lettered inscription on the black surface. Mr. Brimsdown sighed.
Brierly's ineffectual art, and had given him tea, as he had given Barrant tea some days before. But there was a subtle difference in the manner of Mr. Brimsdown's reception; the tone was pitched higher, with fine shades and inflections attuned for a more gentlemanly ear. "It disposes of the suicide theory finally and utterly," added the lawyer thoughtfully.
"Was Robert Turold's daughter a girl of this sort?" asked the lawyer in surprise. "She was not." It was Charles Turold who made answer, with an angry glance at his father. Austin, looking at him, gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head. Slight as the warning was, it was intercepted by Mr. Brimsdown's watchful eye, and he wondered what it meant.
Brimsdown's mind, never to be forgotten. Who was it that had staged such a crime in such a proscenium, in that vast amphitheatre of black rocks which stretched dizzily down beneath those gleaming windows? Then came other impressions: the dead man upstairs, the disordered dusty study, the stopped clock, the litter of papers. It was in the room where Robert Turold had been murdered that Mr.
He hesitated, but his hesitation was useless before the swiftness of Barrant's deduction. "Was Charles Turold showing you the marks when I found you in the other room?" he asked with a keen glance. Mr. Brimsdown's admission of that fact was coupled with an assurance that the young man had shown him the marks because he was convinced of Sisily's innocence.
He pondered over the point with the nervous anxiety of a puzzled brain, and it seemed to him now that he had not devoted as much investigation to this peculiar clue as it deserved. He recalled Mr. Brimsdown's conversation on the matter.
Mr. Robert Turold arranged it with me beforehand. I had never done anything of the kind before, but our means my husband's and mine are insufficient for the stress of these times. After all, people must live." Mr. Brimsdown's slight shake of the head seemed to imply that this last statement was by no means an incontrovertible proposition, but Mrs. Brierly was not looking at him.
Brimsdown's bosom was no shimmering thing of thistledown and fancy, but took the concrete shape of the peerage law of England, out of which he had fashioned an image of worship to the old nobility and the days of chivalry. Barrant gathered so much from the lawyer's description of that first meeting.
He sat now, with a kind of sombre thoughtfulness, listening to Mr. Brimsdown's account of his first meeting with his dead client. That story carried with it a suggestion of adventure and mystery, but it was difficult to say whether those elements had anything to do with Robert Turold's death, thirty years later.
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