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Page 60
"Gaeki," cried my father, "you have trapped a rogue!"
"And I have lost a measure of good acid," replied the old man.
And he began to gather up the bits of his broken bottle from the
table.
VIII. The Hole in the Mahogany Panel
Sir Henry paused a moment, his finger between the pages of the
ancient diary.
"It is the inspirational quality in these cases" he said, "that
impresses me. It is very nearly absent in our modern methods of
criminal investigation. We depend now on a certain formal
routine. I rarely find a man in the whole of Scotland Yard with
a trace of intuitive impulse to lead him . . . . Observe how
this old justice in Virginia bridged the gaps between his
incidents."
He paused.
"We call it the inspirational instinct, in criminal investigation
. . . genius, is the right word."
He looked up at the clock.
"We have an hour, yet, before the opera will be worth hearing;
listen to this final case."
The narrative of the diary follows:
The girl was walking in the road. Her frock was covered with
dust. Her arms hung limp. Her face with the great eyes and the
exquisite mouth was the chalk face of a ghost. She walked with
the terrible stiffened celerity of a human creature when it is
trapped and ruined.
Night was coming on. Behind the girl sat the great old house at
the end of a long lane of ancient poplars.
This was a strange scene my father came on. He pulled up his big
red-roan horse at the crossroads, where the long lane entered the
turnpike, and looked at the stiff, tragic figure. He rode home
from a sitting of the county justices, alone, at peace, on this
midsummer night, and God sent this tragic thing to meet him.
He got down and stood under the crossroads signboard beside his
horse.
The earth was dry; in dust. The dead grass and the dead leaves
made a sere, yellow world. It looked like a land of unending
summer, but a breath of chill came out of the hollows with the
sunset.
The girl would have gone on, oblivious. But my father went down
into the road and took her by the arm. She stopped when she saw
who it was, and spoke in the dead, uninflected voice of a person
in extremity.
"Is the thing a lie?" she said.
"What thing, child?" replied my father.
"The thing he told me!"
"Dillworth?" said my father. "Do you mean Hambleton Dillworth?"
The girl put out her free arm in a stiff, circling gesture. "In
all the world," she said, "is there any other man who would have
told me?"
My father's face hardened as if of metal. "What did he tell
you?"
The girl spoke plainly, frankly, in her dead voice, without
equivocation, with no choice of words to soften what she said:
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