Detective and mystery stories; Villages -- England -- Fiction
It took nearly three weeks before the unhappy business was finally
disposed of. A Treasury solicitor was given the chance of his career by
the medico-legal disquisition which cleared up an extraordinary record.
The annals of the disease which predisposed Theodore Siddle to crime
went back many years. He was a fairly wealthy man by inheritance, and
adopted the profession of chemistry as a hobby. One fact stood out
boldly. He was aware of his hereditary taint, and had settled down in
Steynholme believing that a quiet life, free from care or the
distractions of a town, would enable him to overcome it. Probably, the
lawyer held, the man owned two distinct individualities, and the baser
instincts gradually overpowered the humane ones.
Of course, the whole history of those trying days had to come out in
open court, and the postmaster’s daughter was given a descriptive and
pictorial boom which many an actress envied. Peters was restored to
grace when he showed plainly that his articles had kept the fickle
barometer of public opinion at “set fair,” in so far as Grant and Doris
were concerned.
“But,” as Hart drawled during a dinner of reconciliation, “you needn’t
have been so infernally personal about my hat.”
Grant and Doris were married before the year was out. Mr. Martin
retired on a pension, and the young couple decided that they could
never dissociate _The Hollies_ from the tragic memories bound up with
its ghost-window and lawn. So the place was sold, and Steynholme knows
“the postmaster’s daughter” no more. Winter and Furneaux week-ended
with them recently at a pretty little nook in Dorset. Hart, just home
from the Balkans, traveled from town with the detectives, and Doris, a
radiant young matron, was as flippant as the best of them.
One evening, when the men were sitting late in the smoking-room, the
talk turned on the now half-forgotten drama in which the hapless
Adelaide Melhuish played her last rôle.
“I met Peters in the Savage Club the other night,” said Hart, filling
the negro-head pipe with care while he talked, “and he was chortling
about his ‘psychological study,’ as he called it, of that unfortunate
chemist. He still clings to the theory that your wife was the intended
victim, Grant. Do you agree with him?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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