Trents Last Case | Page 9

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 tonight. 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 tonight.'
'And I'd miss my sleep. No, thanks. The train for me. I am quite fond of
railway travelling, 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 III
: 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 dead man
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 moustache did not conceal a thin but
kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and
narrow jaw gave him very much of a clerical air, and this impression
was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. The
whole effect of him, indeed, was priestly. 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 humour. 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
favourite 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 before the hotel. 'Who is
this?' he enquired of the waiter. 'Id is der manager,' said the young man
listlessly. 'He