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Read books online » Fiction » Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley (thriller book recommendations txt) 📖

Book online «Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley (thriller book recommendations txt) 📖». Author E. C. Bentley



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that curious mind of yours and found out everything, and stamped down the earth upon it all.” She continued her reading.

Quite recently, however [the letter went on], facts have come to my knowledge which have led me to change my decision. I do not mean that I shall publish what I discovered, but that I have determined to approach you and ask you for a private statement. If you have anything to say which would place the matter in another light, I can imagine no reason why you should withhold it.
    I expect, then, to hear from you when and where I may call upon you; unless you prefer the interview to take place at my hotel. In either case I desire that Mr. Cupples whom you will remember, and who has read the enclosed document, should be present also.—Faithfully yours,

Philip Trent.

“What a very stiff letter!” she said. “Now I am sure you couldn’t have made it any stiffer in your own rooms.”

Trent slipped the letter and enclosure into a long envelope. “Yes,” he said, “I think it will make him sit up suddenly. Now this thing mustn’t run any risk of going wrong. It would be best to send a special messenger with orders to deliver it into his own hands. If he’s away it oughtn’t to be left.”

She nodded. “I can arrange that. Wait here for a little.”

When Mrs. Manderson returned, he was hunting through the music cabinet. She sank on the carpet beside him in a wave of dark brown skirts. “Tell me something, Philip,” she said.

“If it is among the few things that I know.”

“When you saw uncle last night, did you tell him about—about us?”

“I did not,” he answered. “I remembered you had said nothing about telling any one. It is for you—isn’t it?—to decide whether we take the world into our confidence at once or later on.”

“Then will you tell him?” She looked down at her clasped hands. “I wish you to tell him. Perhaps if you think you will guess why.... There! that is settled.” She lifted her eyes again to his, and for a time there was silence between them.

He leaned back at length in the deep chair. “What a world!” he said. “Mabel, will you play something on the piano that expresses mere joy, the genuine article, nothing feverish or like thorns under a pot, but joy that has decided in favour of the universe? It’s a mood that can’t last altogether, so we had better get all we can out of it.”

She went to the instrument and struck a few chords while she thought. Then she began to work with all her soul at the theme in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony which is like the sound of the opening of the gates of Paradise.

Chapter XV.
Double Cunning

An old oaken desk with a deep body stood by the window in a room that overlooked St. James’s Park from a height. The room was large, furnished and decorated by some one who had brought taste to the work; but the hand of the bachelor lay heavy upon it. John Marlowe unlocked the desk and drew a long, stout envelope from the back of the well.

“I understand,” he said to Mr. Cupples, “that you have read this.”

“I read it for the first time two days ago,” replied Mr. Cupples, who, seated on a sofa, was peering about the room with a benignant face. “We have discussed it fully.”

Marlowe turned to Trent. “There is your manuscript,” he said, laying the envelope on the table. “I have gone over it three times. I do not believe there is another man who could have got at as much of the truth as you have set down there.”

Trent ignored the compliment. He sat by the table gazing stonily at the fire, his long legs twisted beneath his chair. “You mean, of course, he said, drawing the envelope towards him, “that there is more of the truth to be disclosed now. We are ready to hear you as soon as you like. I expect it will be a long story, and the longer the better, so far as I am concerned; I want to understand thoroughly. What we should both like, I think, is some preliminary account of Manderson and your relations with him. It seemed to me from the first that the character of the dead man must be somehow an element in the business.”

“You were right, Marlowe answered grimly. He crossed the room and seated himself on a corner of the tall cushion-topped fender. “I will begin as you suggest.”

“I ought to tell you beforehand,” said Trent, looking him in the eyes, “that although I am here to listen to you, I have not as yet any reason to doubt the conclusions I have stated here.” He tapped the envelope. “It is a defence that you will be putting forward—you understand that?”

“Perfectly.” Marlowe was cool and in complete possession of himself, a man different indeed from the worn-out, nervous being Trent remembered at Marlstone a year and a half ago. His tall, lithe figure was held with the perfection of muscular tone. His brow was candid, his blue eyes were clear, though they still had, as he paused collecting his ideas, the look that had troubled Trent at their first meeting. Only the lines of his mouth showed that he knew himself in a position of difficulty, and meant to face it.

“Sigsbee Manderson was not a man of normal mind,” Marlowe began in his quiet voice. “Most of the very rich men I met with in America had become so by virtue of abnormal greed, or abnormal industry, or abnormal personal force, or abnormal luck. None of them had remarkable intellects. Manderson delighted too in heaping up wealth; he worked incessantly at it; he was a man of dominant will; he had quite his share of luck; but what made him singular was his brainpower. In his own country they would perhaps tell you that it was his ruthlessness in pursuit of his aims that was his most striking characteristic; but there are hundreds of them who would have carried out his plans with just as little consideration for others if they could have formed the plans.

“I’m not saying Americans aren’t clever; they are ten times cleverer than we are, as a nation; but I never met another who showed such a degree of sagacity and foresight, such gifts of memory and mental tenacity, such sheer force of intelligence, as there was behind everything Manderson did in his money-making career. They called him the ‘Napoleon of Wall Street’ often enough in the papers; but few people knew so well as I did how much truth there was in the phrase. He seemed never to forget a fact that might be of use to him, in the first place; and he did systematically with the business facts that concerned him what Napoleon did, as I have read, with military facts. He studied them in special digests which were prepared for him at short intervals, and which he always had at hand, so that he could take up his report on coal or wheat or railways, or whatever it might be, in any unoccupied moment. Then he could make a bolder and cleverer plan than any man of them all. People got to know that Manderson would never do the obvious thing, but they got no further; the thing he did do was almost always a surprise, and much of his success flowed from that. The Street got rattled, as they used to put it, when it was known that the old man was out with his gun, and often his opponents seemed to surrender as easily as Colonel Crockett’s coon in the story. The scheme I am going to describe to you would have occupied most men long enough. Manderson could have plotted the thing, down to the last detail, while he shaved himself.

“I used to think that his strain of Indian blood, remote as it was, might have something to do with the cunning and ruthlessness of the man. Strangely enough, its existence was unknown to any one but himself and me. It was when he asked me to apply my taste for genealogical work to his own obscure family history that I made the discovery that he had in him a share of the blood of the Iroquois chief Montour and his French wife, a terrible woman who ruled the savage politics of the tribes of the Wilderness two hundred years ago. The Mandersons were active in the fur trade on the Pennsylvanian border in those days, and more than one of them married Indian women. Other Indian blood than Montour’s may have descended to Manderson, for all I can say, through previous and subsequent unions; some of the wives’ antecedents were quite untraceable, and there were so many generations of pioneering before the whole country was brought under civilization. My researches left me with the idea that there is a very great deal of the aboriginal blood present in the genealogical make-up of the people of America, and that it is very widely spread. The newer families have constantly intermarried with the older, and so many of them had a strain of the native in them—and were often rather proud of it, too, in those days. But Manderson had the idea about the disgracefulness of mixed blood, which grew much stronger, I fancy, with the rise of the negro question after the war. He was thunderstruck at what I told him, and was anxious to conceal it from every soul. Of course I never gave it away while he lived, and I don’t think he supposed I would; but I have thought since that his mind took a turn against me from that time onward. It happened about a year before his death.”

“Had Manderson,” asked Mr. Cupples, so unexpectedly that the others started, “any definable religious attitude?”

Marlowe considered a moment. “None that ever I heard of,” he said. “Worship and prayer were quite unknown to him, so far as I could see, and I never heard him mention religion. I should doubt if he had any real sense of God at all, or if he was capable of knowing God through the emotions. But I understood that as a child he had had a religious upbringing with a strong moral side to it. His private life was, in the usual limited sense, blameless. He was almost ascetic in his habits, except as to smoking. I lived with him four years without ever knowing him to tell a direct verbal falsehood, constantly as he used to practise deceit in other forms. Can you understand the soul of a man who never hesitated to take steps that would have the effect of hoodwinking people, who would use every trick of the markets to mislead, and who was at the same time scrupulous never to utter a direct lie on the most insignificant matter? Manderson was like that, and he was not the only one. I suppose you might compare the state of mind to that of a soldier who is personally a truthful man, but who will stick at nothing to deceive the enemy. The rules of the game allow it; and the same may be said of business as many business men regard it. Only with them it is always wartime.”

“It is a sad world,” observed Mr. Cupples.

“As you say,” Marlowe agreed. “Now I was saying that one could always take Manderson’s word if he gave it in a definite form. The first time I ever heard him utter a downright lie was on the night he died; and hearing it, I believe, saved me from being hanged as his murderer.”

Marlowe stared at the light above his head and Trent moved impatiently in his chair. “Before we come to that,” he said, “will you tell us exactly on what footing you were with Manderson during the years you were with him?”

“We were on very good terms from beginning to end,” answered Marlowe. “Nothing like friendship—he was not a man for making friends—but the best of terms as between a trusted employee and his chief. I went to him as private secretary just after getting my degree at Oxford. I was to have gone into my father’s business, where I am now, but my father suggested that I should see the world for a year or two. So I took this secretaryship, which seemed to promise a good deal of varied experience, and I had let the year or two run on to four years before the end came. The offer came to me through the last thing in the world I should have put forward as a qualification for

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