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Merriton had known the loneliness of Indian nights, far away from any signs of civilization: the loneliness of the jungle when the air was so still that the least sound was like the dropping of a bomb; the strange mystical loneliness which comes to the only white man in a town of natives. But all these were as nothing as compared to this.
There was the smoking-room door, open and showing the type of room behind it; there the hall-stand from which Dacre Wynne had fatefully wrenched his coat and hat, to go lurching out into oblivion, half-drunk and maddened with something more than intoxication if Merriton had told his story truly, and Cleek believed he had.
Nigel Merriton fired a shot that night when Dacre Wynne disappeared, Mr. Headland; fired it after he had gone up to his room, a little over-excited with too much champagne, a little over-wrought by the scene through which he had just passed with the man who had always exercised such a sinister influence over his life."
Merriton bent his head. His eyes had a dumb, hurt look, but over the crowded room his voice sounded firm and steady. "It is." "Then I take it that, as this bullet was extracted from the head of the dead man, and as this revolver which you gave to the police yourself, and from which you say that you fired a shot that night, that you are guilty of his murder. Is it not so?" "I am not guilty."
Get 'em in one's house and they're like doctors including, of course, my humble self difficult to get out. Part of the profession, my boy. But a beastly nuisance. Seems to me I'd rather have the mystery than the men. Simpler, anyway. And fees, you know, are heavy." Merriton swung round upon his heel suddenly, his brows like a thunder cloud. "I don't care a damn about that," he broke out angrily.
That he and Dacre Wynne were really enemies, who had posed as friends made not a particle of difference. Dacre Wynne had disappeared during the brief time that he was a guest in Merriton's house. The subject did not die with the owner of Merriton Towers.
He squeezed the hand, manacled so grimly to the other, and smiled a smile brimming over with hope and promise. "God bless you, Mr. Headland," Merriton replied, and as Cleek beckoned to the two policemen, took his stand between them and entered the closed vehicle.
And then, as the days wore themselves away and turned into months, Merriton woke up to the fact that he could wait no longer before putting his luck to the test so far as 'Toinette was concerned. He had already confided his secret to Brellier, who laughed and patted him on the back and told him that he had known of it a long time and wished him luck.
Marsh-gas was there in plenty, though there is no heat from the tiny flames, as you know, from which fact, no doubt, our friend Brellier derived the very theatrical name for them, but the light of which Merriton spoke I took to be something bigger than that. And I had noticed, too, that here and there among the flames danced brilliant patches that seemed, well more than natural.
That was in the old Hawksley days. Chap's lately come into his inheritance, I believe. Uncle disappeared some five or six years ago and legal time being up, young Merriton has come over to claim his own. The thing made a newspaper story for a week when it happened, but they never found any trace of the old man.
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