Austin Turold brushed past the doctor and opened the door of the lighted room. At his entrance Mrs. Pendleton sprang from her seat to greet him. Grief and horror were in her look, but surprise contended with other emotions in Austin’s face. She kissed him with clinging hands on his shoulders.
“Oh, Austin,” she cried, “Robert is dead—killed!”
“The news has shocked me to the last degree,” responded her brother. “What has happened? Did somebody send for you? Is that what brought you here?”
Mrs. Pendleton shook her head, embarrassed in her grief. She remembered that she wished to keep the object of her visit secret from her younger brother, and she could not very well disclose the truth then.
“Not exactly,” she replied, a trifle incoherently. “I wanted to see Robert again before I returned to London in the morning. So we motored over after dinner, and found him—dead.” Fresh tears broke from her.
Austin Turold wandered around the room quickly and nervously, then drew Dr. Ravenshaw to the door with a glance. “I should like to go upstairs before the police come,” he whispered.
Dr. Ravenshaw nodded, and they went upstairs together. The shattered door creaked open to their touch, revealing the lighted interior and the dead man prone on the floor. Austin approached his brother’s corpse, eyed it shudderingly, and turned away. Then he stooped to look at the small revolver lying alongside, but did not touch it. Again he bent over the corpse, this time with more composure in his glance.
The object on which the outstretched arms rested was an old Dutch hood clock, which had fallen or been dragged from a niche in the wall, and lay face uppermost, the glass case open and smashed, the hands: stopped at the hour of half-past nine. It was a clock of the seventeenth century, of a design still to be found occasionally in old English houses. A landscape scene was painted in the arch above the dial, showing the moon above a wood, in a sky crowded with stars. The moon was depicted as a human face, with eyes which moved in response to the swing of the pendulum. But the pendulum was motionless, and the goggle eyes of the mechanism stared up almost reproachfully, as though calling upon the two men to rescue it from such an undignified position. At the bottom of the dial appeared the name of Jan Fromantel, the famous Dutch clockmaker, and underneath was an inscription in German lettering—
"Every tick that I do give
Cuts short the time you have to live.
Praise thy Maker, mend thy ways,
Till Death, the thief, shall steal thy days."
“Look at the blood!” said Austin Turold, pointing to a streak of blood on the large white dial. “How did it happen?”
“I know very little more than yourself. Your sister called at my house about an hour ago and asked me to accompany her here. She wished to see your brother on some private business, and she was very anxious that I should accompany her. Thalassa let us in, and said he was afraid that there was something wrong with his master. We came upstairs immediately, burst in the door, and found—this.”
“Did Thalassa hear the shot?”
“He says not, only the crash.”
“That would be the clock, of course. Was my brother quite dead when you found him?”
“Just dead. The body was quite warm.”
“The door was locked from inside, I think you said.”
“We found it locked.”
“Then it must have been locked from inside,” returned the other, who appeared to be pursuing some hidden train of thought. “But where’s the key? I do not see it in the door. Oh, here it is!” He stooped swiftly and picked up a key from the floor. “Robert must have taken it out after locking the door.”
“Perhaps it fell out when we were breaking in the door,” observed the doctor.
“Of course. I forgot that. I notice that the clock is stopped at half-past nine.” He bent down to examine it. “My brother kept private papers in the clock-case,” he added. “Yes—it is as I thought. Here are some private documents, including his will. I had better take charge of them.”
“Yes; I should if I were you,” counselled his companion.
Austin rose to his feet and placed the papers in his pocket.
“It is plain to me—now—how it happened,” he said. “Poor Robert must have shot himself, then tried to get his will from the clock-case when he fell, bringing down the clock with him.”
“Is that what you think?” said Dr. Ravenshaw.
“I see no other way of looking at it,” returned Austin rapidly. “The door was locked on the inside, and the room couldn’t be reached from the window. This house stands almost on the edge of the cliff, which is nearly two hundred feet high. My feeling is that after my poor brother shot himself he remembered in his dying moments that his will was hidden in the clock-case and might not be found. He made a desperate effort to reach it and dragged it down as he fell.”
The doctor listened attentively to this imaginary picture of Robert Turold’s last moments.
“But why should he destroy himself?” he queried.
“Grief and remorse. Do you remember the disclosure he made to us this afternoon? It is a matter which might well have preyed upon his mind.”
“I see,” said the other thoughtfully. “Yes, perhaps you may be right.”
Their conversation was interrupted by the sound of a loud knocking downstairs.
“That must be the police,” observed Dr. Ravenshaw. “Let us go down.”
CHAPTER X
“Why should Robert commit suicide?”
That was the burden of Mrs. Pendleton’s cry, then and afterwards. There was an angry scene in the old cliff house between brother and sister before the events of that night were concluded. She utterly refused to accept Austin’s theory that their brother, with his own hand, had discharged the revolver bullet which had put an end to his life and ambitions. Sitting bolt upright in indignant amazement, she rejected the idea in the sharpest scorn. It was nothing to her that the police sergeant from the churchtown shared her brother’s view, and that Dr. Ravenshaw was passively acquiescent. She brushed aside the plausible web of circumstances with the impatient hand of an angry woman. They might talk till Doomsday, but they wouldn’t convince her that Robert, of all men, had done anything so disgraceful as take his own life. Arguments and events, the locked door and the inaccessible windows—pathetically masculine insistence on mere details—were wasted on her. The marshalled array of facts made not the slightest impression on her firm belief that Robert had not shot himself.
Shaking a large finger of angry import at Austin, and addressing herself to him alone, she had said—
“Robert has been murdered, Austin, I feel sure. I don’t care what you say, but if there’s law in England I’ll have his murderer discovered.”
And with that conclusion she had indignantly left the house with her husband, leaving her brother to walk back to his lodgings at the churchtown in moody solitude across the rainy darkness of the moors.
For herself, she returned to her hotel to pass a sleepless night, tossing by the side of her placidly unconscious husband as she passed the tragic events of the night in review and vainly sought for some clue to the mystery. The dreadful logic of the circumstances which pointed to suicide, hammered at her consciousness with deadening persistence, but she resolutely refused to give it entry. Why should Robert commit suicide? Why indeed? It was the question which had sprung to her lips when she first heard Austin’s belief,