The Witness for the Defense by A. E. W. Mason (best mystery novels of all time TXT) 📖

was returned to him at once that Mrs. Repton had given orders that she was not to be disturbed. Thresk however insisted:

"Will you please give my name to her—Henry Thresk," and he waited with his ear to the receiver for a century. At last a voice spoke to him, but it was again the voice of the servant.

"The Memsahib very sorry, sir, but cannot speak to any one just now;" and he heard the jar of the instrument as the receiver at the other end was sharply hung up and the connection broken.

Thresk came out from the telephone-box with a face puzzled and very grave. Mrs. Repton refused to speak to him!

It was a fact, an inexplicable fact, and it alarmed him. It was impossible to believe that mere reflection during the last twenty-four hours had brought about so complete a revolution in her feelings. He to whom she had passionately cried "Write! Write!" only yesterday could hardly be barred out from mere speech with her to-day for any fault of his. He had done nothing, had seen no one. Thresk was certain now that the news upon the tape was true. But it could not be all the truth. There was something behind it—something rather grim and terrible.

Thresk walked to the door of the hotel and called up a motor-car. "Tell him to drive to the Khamballa Hill," he said to the porter. "I'll let him know when to stop."

The porter translated the order and Thresk stopped him at Mrs.
Repton's door.

"The Memsahib does not receive any one to-day," said the butler.

"I know," replied Thresk. He scribbled on a card and sent it in. There was a long delay. Thresk stood in the hall looking out through the open door. Night had come. There were lights upon the roadway, lights a long way below at the water's edge on Breach Candy, and there was a light twinkling far out on the Arabian Sea. But in the house behind him all was dark. He had come to an abode of desolation and mourning; and his heart sank and he was attacked with forebodings. At last in the passage behind him there was a shuffling of feet and a gleam of white. The Memsahib would receive him.

Thresk was shown into the drawing-room. That room too was unlit. But the blinds had not been lowered and light from a street lamp outside turned the darkness into twilight. No one came forward to greet him, but the room was not empty. He saw Repton and his wife huddled close together on a sofa in a recess by the fireplace.

"I thought that I had better come up from Bombay," said Thresk, as he stood in the middle of the room. No answer was returned to him for a few moments and then it was Repton himself who spoke.

"Yes, yes," he said, and he got up from the sofa. "I think we had better have some light," he added in a strange indifferent voice. He turned the light on in the central chandelier, leaving the corners of the room in shadow, like—the parallel forced its way into Thresk's mind—like the tent in Chitipur. Then very methodically he pulled down the blinds. He did not look at Thresk and Jane Repton on the couch never stirred. Thresk's forebodings became a dreadful certainty. Some evil thing had happened. He might have been in a house of death. He knew that he was not wanted there, that husband and wife wished to be alone and silently resented his presence. But he could not go without more knowledge than he had.

"A message came up on the tape half an hour ago," he said in a low voice.
"It reported that Ballantyne was dead."

"Yes," replied Repton. He was leaning forward over a table and looking up to the chandelier as if he fancied that its light burnt more dimly than was usual.

"That's true," and he spoke in the same strange mechanical voice he had used before.

"That he was found dead outside his tent," Thresk added.

"It's quite true," Repton agreed. "We are very sorry."

"Sorry!"

The exclamation burst from Thresk's lips.

"Yes."

Repton moved away from the chandelier. He had not looked at Thresk once since he had entered the room; nor did he look towards his wife. His face was very pale and he was busy now setting a chair in place, moving a photograph, doing any one of the little unnecessary things people restlessly do when there is an importunate visitor in the room who will not go.

"You see, there's terribly bad news," he added.

"What news?"

"He was shot, you know. That wasn't in the telegram on the tape, of course. Yes, he was shot—on the same night you dined there—after you had gone."

"Shot!"

Thresk's voice dropped to a whisper.

"Yes," and the dull quiet voice went on, speaking apparently of some trivial affair in which none of them could have any interest. "He was shot by a bullet from a little rook-rifle which belonged to Stella, and which she was in the habit of using."

Thresk's heart stood still. A picture flashed before his eyes. He saw the inside of that dimly lit tent with its red lining and Stella standing by the table. He could hear her voice: "This is my little rook-rifle. I was seeing that it was clean for to-morrow." She had spoken so carelessly, so indifferently that it wasn't conceivable that what was in all their minds could be true. Yet she had spoken, after all, no more indifferently than Repton was speaking now; and he was in a great stress of grief. Then Thresk's mind leaped to the weak point in all this chain of presumption.

"But Ballantyne was found outside the tent," he cried with a little note of triumph. But it had no echo in Repton's reply.

"I know. That makes everything so much worse."

"What do you mean?"

"Ballantyne was found in the morning outside the tent stone-cold. But no one had heard the shot, and there were sentries on the edge of the encampment. He had been dragged outside after he was dead or when he was dying."

A low cry broke from Thresk. The weak point became of a sudden the most deadly, the most terrible element in the whole case. He could hear the prosecuting counsel making play with it. He stood for a moment lost in horror. Repton had no further word to say to him. Mrs. Repton had never once spoken. They wanted him away, out of the room, out of the house. Some insight let him into the meaning of her silence. In the presence of this tragedy remorse had gripped her. She was looking upon herself as one who had plotted harm for Stella. She would never forgive Thresk for his share in the plot.

Thresk went out of the room without a word more to either Repton or his wife. Whatever he did now he must do by himself. He would not be admitted into that house again. He closed the door of the room behind him, and hardly had he closed it when he heard the snap of a switch and the line of light under the door vanished. Once more there was darkness in the drawing-room. Repton no doubt had returned to his wife's side and they were huddled again side by side on the sofa. Thresk walked down the hill with a horrible feeling of isolation and loneliness. But he shook it off as he neared the lights of Bombay.

CHAPTER XI THRESK INTERVENES

Thresk reached his hotel with some words ringing in his head which Jane
Repton had spoken to him at Mrs. Carruthers' dinner-party:

"You can get any single thing in life you want if you want it enough, but you cannot control the price you will have to pay for it. That you will only learn afterwards and gradually."

He had got what he had wanted—the career of distinction, and he wondered whether he was to begin now to learn its price.

He mounted to his sitting-room on the second floor, avoiding the lounge and the lift and using a small side staircase instead of the great central one. He had passed no one on the way. In his room he looked upon the mantelshelf and on the table. No visitor had called on him that day; no letter awaited him. For the first time since he had landed in India a day had passed without some resident leaving on him a card or a note of invitation. The newspapers gave him the reason. He was supposed to have left on the Madras for England. To make sure he rang for his waiter; no message of any kind had come.

"Shall I ask at the office?" the waiter asked.

"By no means," answered Thresk, and he added: "I will have dinner served up here to-night."

There was just a possibility, he thought, that he might after all escape this particular payment. He took from his pocket his unposted letter to Stella Ballantyne. There was no longer any use for it and even its existence was now dangerous to Stella. For let it be discovered, however she might plead that she knew nothing of its contents, a motive for the death of Ballantyne might be inferred from it. It would be a false motive, but just the sort of motive which the man in the street would immediately accept. Thresk burnt the letter carefully in a plate and pounded up each black flake of paper until nothing was left but ashes. Then for the moment his work was done. He had only to wait and he did not wait long. On the very next morning his newspaper informed him that Inspector Coulson of the Bombay Police had left for Chitipur.

The Inspector was a young man devoted to his work, but he travelled now upon a duty which he would gladly have handed to any other of his colleagues. He had met Stella Ballantyne in Bombay upon one of her rare visits to Jane Repton. He had sat at the same dinner-table with her, and he did not find it pleasant to reflect on the tragic destiny which she must now fulfil. For the facts were fatal.

At daybreak on the morning of the Friday a sentry on the outer edge of the camp at Jarwhal Junction had noticed something black lying upon the ground in the open just outside the door of the Agent's big marquee. He ran across the ground and discovered Captain Ballantyne sprawling, face downwards, in the smoking-suit which he had worn at dinner the night before. The sentry shook him gently by the shoulder, but the limpness of the body frightened him. Then he noticed that there was blood upon the ground, and calling loudly for help he ran to the guard-room tent. He returned with others of the native levies and they lifted Ballantyne up. He was dead and the body was cold. The levies carried him into the tent and opened his shirt. He had been shot through the heart. They then roused Mrs. Ballantyne's ayah and bade her wake her mistress. The ayah went into Mrs. Ballantyne's room and found her mistress sound asleep. She waked her up and told her what had happened. Stella Ballantyne said not a word. She got out of bed, and flinging on some clothes went into the outer tent, where the servants were standing about the body. Stella Ballantyne went quite close to it and looked down upon the dead man's face for a long time. She was pale, but there was no shrinking in her attitude—no apprehension in her eyes.

"He has been killed," she said at length; "telegrams must be sent at once: to Ajmere for a doctor, to Bombay, and to His Highness the Maharajah."

Baram Singh salaamed.

"It is as your Excellency wills," he said.

"I will write them," said Stella quietly. And she sat down at her own writing-table there and then.

The doctor from Ajmere arrived during the day, made an examination and telegraphed a report to the Chief Commissioner at Ajmere. That report contained the three significant points which Repton had enumerated to Thresk, but with some still more significant details. The bullet which pierced Captain Ballantyne's heart had been fired from Mrs. Ballantyne's small rook-rifle, and the exploded cartridge was still in the breech. The rifle was standing up against Mrs. Ballantyne's writing-table in a corner of the tent, when the doctor from Ajmere discovered it. In the second place, although Ballantyne was found in the open, there was a patch of blood