The Woman in Black | Page 7

the case.
You know you do. If it's anything you don't want to handle, you're free
to drop it. By the bye, where are you?"
"I am blown along a wandering wind," replied the voice irresolutely,
"and hollow, hollow, hollow all delight."
"Can you get here within an hour?" persisted Sir James.
"I suppose I can," the voice grumbled. "How much time have I?"
"Good man! Well, there's time enough--that's just the worst of it. I've
got to depend on our local correspondent for to-night. The only good
train of the day went half an hour ago. The next is a slow one, leaving
Paddington at midnight. You could have the Buster, if you like"--Sir
James referred to a very fast motor-car of his--"but you wouldn't get
down in time to do anything to-night."

"And I'd miss my sleep. No, thanks. The train for me. I am quite fond
of railway-traveling, you know; I have a gift for it. I am the stoker and
the stoked, I am the song the porter sings."
"What's that you say?"
"It doesn't matter," said the voice sadly. "I say," it continued, "will your
people look out a hotel near the scene of action, and telegraph for a
room?"
"At once," said Sir James. "Come here as soon as you can!" He
replaced the receiver. As he turned to his papers again a shrill outcry
burst forth in the street below. He walked to the open window. A band
of excited boys was rushing down the steps of the Sun building and up
the narrow thoroughfare toward Fleet Street. Each carried a bundle of
newspapers and a large broadsheet with the simple legend:
MURDER OF SIGSBEE MANDERSON
Sir James smiled and rattled the money in his pockets cheerfully.
"It makes a good bill," he observed to Mr. Silver, who stood at his
elbow.
Such was Manderson's epitaph.
CHAPTER II
BREAKFAST
At about eight o'clock in the morning of the following day Mr.
Nathaniel Burton Cupples stood on the veranda of the hotel at
Marlstone. He was thinking about breakfast. In his case the
colloquialism must be taken literally; he really was thinking about
breakfast, as he thought about every conscious act of his life when time
allowed deliberation. He reflected that on the preceding day the
excitement and activity following upon the discovery of the corpse had
disorganized his appetite and led to his taking considerably less

nourishment than usual. This morning he was very hungry, having
already been up and about for an hour; and he decided to allow himself
a third piece of toast and an additional egg; the rest as usual. The
remaining deficit must be made up at luncheon; but that could be gone
into later.
So much being determined, Mr. Cupples applied himself to the
enjoyment of the view for a few minutes before ordering his meal. With
a connoisseur's eye he explored the beauty of the rugged coast, where a
great pierced rock rose from a glassy sea, and the ordered loveliness of
the vast tilted levels of pasture and tillage and woodland that sloped
gently up from the cliffs toward the distant moor. Mr. Cupples
delighted in landscape.
He was a man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old,
by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his age.
A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin but
kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and
narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression
was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. He
was a man of unusually conscientious, industrious and orderly mind,
with little imagination. His father's household had been used to recruit
its domestic establishment by means of advertisements in which it was
truthfully described as a serious family. From that fortress of gloom he
had escaped with two saintly gifts somehow unspoiled: an
inexhaustible kindness of heart and a capacity for innocent gaiety
which owed nothing to humor. In an earlier day and with a clerical
training he might have risen to the scarlet hat. He was, in fact, a highly
regarded member of the London Positivist Society, a retired banker, a
widower without children. His austere but not unhappy life was spent
largely among books and in museums; his profound and patiently
accumulated knowledge of a number of curiously disconnected subjects
which had stirred his interest at different times had given him a place in
the quiet, half-lit world of professors and curators and devotees of
research; at their amiable, unconvivial dinner-parties he was most
himself. His favorite author was Montaigne.

Just as Mr. Cupples was finishing his meal at a little table on the
veranda, a big motor-car turned into the drive