Last Truths

"My friends," said Monsieur Dupont, "you have already heard a great part of the story. John Tranter was the son of Oscar Winslowe. He was mad. He was, as he called himself truly, a Beauty-Killer. That strange lust he inherited from his mother, who had been robbed of all she cared for, and hoped for, in life by a beautiful woman, and rendered insane three months before his birth. It was a most pathetic tragedy. We shall now hear——"

"One moment," Inspector Fay interrupted. "As I represent the police here, I should be glad to know, before we go any further, whose house I am in."

"Pardon me," Monsieur Dupont apologized. "I had forgotten. You are in the house of Doctor Lessing," he inclined himself towards the doctor, "who will in due course repeat to you a statement which he made to me yesterday. This lady is Miss Masters, who was Tranter's nurse. Mrs. Astley-Rolfe and Mr. Copplestone—which, I fancy, is not his correct name—you know already."

He added a high compliment to the inspector's present position and past achievements, and then turned to Copplestone.

"Mr. Copplestone, when Tranter did not return to me at the appointed time this afternoon, I went to your house. I found great changes. I found it, as you say, upside down."

Copplestone was radiant with happiness. Every trace of the old gloom had left him. He was a new man.

"I should think you did!" he retorted. "And you'd have found the earth upside down as well, if I'd been able to turn it."

"I was puzzled," Monsieur Dupont admitted. "I could not understand it. But I knew this—that when the shadows roll away from a man's house, they roll away from his life. When he draws the blinds and throws open the windows of his house to the light and the air, he draws the blinds and throws open the windows of his soul. When he straightens his garden, he straightens himself. I knew that before you would lift the cloud from your house something must have lifted the cloud from you. You had been delivered——"

"There was a fellow in the Bible," said Copplestone—"I think he was a king—who was cured of leprosy by taking a dip in a river. I don't know what happened afterwards, but I am quite sure that he turned his palace upside down when he got back."

He sprang up, his face illuminated with all the wonder of his new birth.

"I am free!" he cried. "Free! That's what my house told you. I had been brought out into the light after half a life of darkness. I had been released after forty years of prison, of torment that all the tortures of the Inquisition at once couldn't have equalled!"

He stared about him, like an intoxicated man.

"This room is too small!" he almost shouted. "Everything is too small. I want to dance on the Universe. I want the world to be a football. I want to play enormous games with giants—" He checked himself abruptly, and sat down. "Forgive me," he said. "You would understand, if you knew what I have suffered."

"I can, for one," agreed the doctor heartily.

"And I, indeed," said Monsieur Dupont. "But to proceed with the story—I think it would be better to commence with what Miss Masters has to tell us."

He bowed to a gray-haired, grief-stricken woman. There was a pause before she overcame her emotion sufficiently to speak.

"I took charge of Mary Winslowe's child from its birth," she began, at last. "She entrusted it to me in her sane moments, and I kept my trust faithfully. Perhaps it would have been better if I had not."

"You did your duty," the doctor said.

"It was a condition that he should never come under his father's influence, or even know his real name. He was to be kept in complete ignorance of the tragedy of his birth. It was necessary for him to be christened in his proper name to legalize the inheritance of his mother's fortune, but after that I took him away, and brought him up in strict accordance with my promises. He was told that both his parents had been drowned at sea. I gave him the name of John Tranter—Tranter was an old family name of mine. He was a bonny little fellow. I never thought that he might have inherited his mother's madness."

"The Laws of Nature are inexorable," said the doctor. "If only the Second Commandment were given to people as the Law of Nature instead of the threat of God, it would be of some value."

"I hardly realized it," she went on, "even when the symptoms had unmistakably developed. But it increased too plainly to be denied. I hoped and prayed that the horrible disease would pass away from him as he grew up—but it grew stronger and stronger with him. At last he made me tell him what it really was. It was against my promise, but he had to know. I pledged my word that I would keep his secret, and it was arranged that whenever he felt the approach of an attack he would come to me. I kept things for him. At first smaller things satisfied him. He was content to destroy flowers, pictures, prettily colored china, anything that was beautiful. But after that visit to France, when he was twenty, there was a change. He never told me what had happened—that he had killed a woman—but from that time only a woman's beauty would satisfy him. The attacks became few and far between, but when they came he would have died with the very force of his madness if he had not had some representation of a beautiful woman to expend it on."

"It's frightful—incredible," the inspector exclaimed.

"It was all the more pitiful," she said, "because his sanity was so wonderful. He had a towering intellect. He succeeded in anything he put his hand to."

"He was looked upon as one of the greatest authorities on finance in the country," said the inspector.

"He could have been a Member of Parliament before he was thirty if he had cared for politics. He refused a title. To be a Privy Councillor was the only honor he accepted. And he—one of England's great men—came to my little house at Streatham to gratify his madness to destroy."

She looked round at them defiantly, anger displacing the sorrow on her face.

"But he was not guilty," she declared. "His hands may have killed those three women—but he was not guilty. Nor was that poor innocent woman, his mother, who died in the madhouse. They were both clean of sin. It was on his wicked father that the guilt lay. It was Oscar Winslowe who was responsible for the lives that have fallen to his sins. Oscar Winslowe, and no one else."

"I bear witness to that," agreed Doctor Lessing. "Mary Winslowe was the gentlest, the sweetest, and the most patient woman that ever walked this earth, as you will see when I tell you my story. And he was the biggest blackguard that ever blasphemed the likeness of his Maker."

"It is true," said the woman.

She drew back in her chair, and pressed a hand to her forehead.

"That is all I have to tell you," she concluded. "Last night," said Monsieur Dupont, "I called at your house, and was told by the lady who lives next door that you had left in a hurry two hours before."

"Yes," she said.

"I presume that you did so on instructions from Tranter?"

"Yes."

"Evidently he shadowed me to Paddington Station, as I expected he would, and decided to remove you in case I should get on the right track."

"He sent me an urgent message," she said, "saying that a great disaster hung over his head, and that I must go away without leaving any trace. He told me where to go, and promised to come to me and explain."

"He knew that it was only you who could give any proof against him?"

"After forty years," she returned, with a touch of bitterness, "he ought to have known that I should not betray him."

"Even if one had told you of those three dreadful crimes that he had committed, and that an innocent man was accused of the last one?"

She locked her hands together.

"Don't ask me," she cried. "I don't know what I should have done."

"He foresaw that problem," said Monsieur Dupont. "His sanity was, as you have said, wonderful. But the sanity of madness is always wonderful—that is why madmen are such superb criminals. It is only a madman who can be really sane. Although I allowed him to see that I knew already something of the truth, he never betrayed himself by even a tremor. He had all the grand egotism of the born criminal. His disguise was impenetrable. He was never sure how far my knowledge went, but not a sign of anxiety did he ever show. We played a game of cross purposes. I used him, under the pretense of requiring his assistance, to keep him by my side, and in the hope that as he saw me draw nearer to him step by step, he would break down. He, on his side, allowed himself to be used in order to keep watch on my moves, and safeguard himself against them, as he did in the case of Miss Masters. He dared not leave me. In all my conversations with him, I placed him more and more at his wit's end to know how much I really knew. As much from curiosity as from anything, I instructed him to discover the secret of Mr. Copplestone's house, for I was convinced that it did contain an interesting secret. He was quite willing to make the attempt. It did not promise to lead me any nearer to him. He little thought when he went—and I had little thought when I sent him—that he was going to his own undoing."

"And my salvation," Copplestone added.

"There," said Monsieur Dupont, "it passes to you to enlighten me."

"First," returned Copplestone, "I should like to know what caused you to be so positive, after being in my house only two or three hours, that there was a secret in it."

"My instinct for the mysterious is seldom at fault," said Monsieur Dupont. "Have you not observed how, by their characters, their habits, and their desires, human beings draw to themselves certain events and conditions of life? And it is equally true that houses draw to themselves certain contents and certain kinds of inhabitants. If a house is particularly adapted to contain a secret, in the course of time will certainly contain one. By a few strokes of his pencil an architect can condemn a house to become the scene of a murder, as surely as he can make it a convenient or inconvenient dwelling. Your house was constructed to hide a secret. And I was not only sure that it did hide one, but that it hid one which was in some way connected with the crime in the garden."

"I have had some experience of that instinct of yours," the inspector remarked, with a somewhat rueful smile.

"Well," said Copplestone, "instinct or no instinct, it certainly did hide a secret, and that secret was that Oscar Winslowe lived in it—if his condition could be called living. For the last five years he had been practically a helpless imbecile. He seldom uttered a sound beyond a gibber, and hardly seemed to be conscious. He was suffering the natural consequences of his vices. He had been gradually reaching that condition since nature had dealt him her first stroke of vengeance more than thirty years ago. One by one his faculties had rotted. He was a living mass of decay."

"It was a sure thing," the doctor said. "Such a condition was bound to come. I prophesied it to his face when I first knew him."

"That was the secret of my house," Copplestone proceeded. "My own secret was that I believed myself to be his son—the inheritor of the curse that really belonged to Tranter. And the horror of it, the helplessness, the constant contemplation of the awful state of the man I knew as my father, and the morbid certainty that sooner or later I must come to the same state, actually drove me to the madness that was not really in me at all."

"But how had you come to believe yourself to be his son?" the inspector asked.

"That was the last of Winslowe's diabolical acts. He inherited a large fortune on condition that a child of his, to whom it could succeed, was alive at the time of the testator's death. He did not know anything of his own child, and did not want to. He was afraid that if he made public inquiries for it, he might learn publicly that it was dead, and lose his claim. Also, he was afraid of other complications and exposures."

"And with good reason," said the doctor grimly.

"He wanted a child of five to produce as his son, George Copplestone Winslowe—and possibly make away with in due course after the business was settled. I am quite sure that would have been my fate if nature had not come to my rescue by striking him. He knew, from his knowledge of the underworld of London, how such things could be arranged without risk. No doubt he bought me for a few pounds. I am not the first heir to an estate who has been produced by such means."

"True enough," agreed the inspector. "The heir to a million has been bought for a fiver."

"But a few years after taking possession of the fortune, he was struck down, as I have said, by the first instalment of nature's retribution, and was incapable of carrying out his plans. No one cared for me. No one thought of removing me from the sight and influence of his growing imbecility. I was brought up under the shadow of it. And so the horror was born in me—the belief that I was mad. What chance had I to resist it, in those surroundings? When I came to an age to do so, I searched out the story of my birth, of my father's excesses and my mother's madness, and my doom crashed upon me. Can you wonder that I became what I was?"

"No, indeed," said Monsieur Dupont.

"I dropped the name of Winslowe. It was loathsome to me. I used my other two names, George Copplestone. They, at least, had come from my mother's side. My old manservant and his wife stuck to me, and kept my secrets. The income devolved on me in consequence of Winslowe's incapability. And so things went on. In my morbid demoralization I saw myself growing nearer and nearer to that wretched creature day by day."

"Dreadful!" shuddered the doctor. "It must have been a living hell."

"Then, last night, Tranter came. He climbed up on the ivy, and tried to spy into Winslowe's room. But I was there, and heard him. I dragged him in through the window. I suppose it was some look, some likeness to his mother, that stirred Winslowe's memory. He recognized him, and a flash of sanity came back to him. Under that sudden mental stimulation he recovered his power of movement, and was able to confess at least a part of the truth. Tranter was taken off his guard, and I forced him to admit his madness. I compelled him to take Winslowe and myself to Miss Masters, and she, in her turn, brought us here."

"I imagined she would," Monsieur Dupont remarked.

Copplestone drew a deep breath, and laughed aloud.

"And I am like other men! I can live as other men live. I can do what other men do. I can——" His eyes rested on the woman beside him, and his face grew tender. "Yes," he repeated slowly, "I can ... I can...."

There was a pause.

"And it was Tranter who killed Christine Manderson...." the inspector said, almost to himself.

"It was," said Monsieur Dupont. "He admitted to you on the night of the crime that he had known her in America years ago. And here we have a curious study in conflicting emotions. When he first met her, he had already killed two beautiful women. She was certainly more beautiful than either—yet he was able to associate with her on intimate terms for a considerable time, and even to tear himself away from her at last, without adding her to the victims of his madness. How was he able to do that? It was undoubtedly because he loved her. He had not loved either of the other two, so there had been no opposing emotion to his mania. But he loved Christine Manderson, and love was capable of holding the madness in check, because love, in its full strength, is the strongest of all human emotions. Love is stronger than madness, and ten times stronger than sanity. But after he left her the love faded to a certain extent, while the madness increased. Therefore, when he was suddenly confronted with her extraordinary beauty a few nights ago, the love that had faded was unable to restrain the madness that had not. And he killed her." "My God!" exclaimed Copplestone, "to think that he stood there with us over the body he had torn—and even lifted it into my arms—without so much as a quiver."

"He was not capable of remorse or regret," Monsieur Dupont returned. "If he had been, he would have killed himself long ago." He paused. "There remain now a few points of my own part in this affair to tell you, and we will then ask the doctor for his statement."

"Before you do that," said Doctor Lessing, bluntly, "I, for one, am curious to know who you really are, and how you came to take such a large hand in the whole business."

"My connection with the whole business," replied Monsieur Dupont, "is a long story. I have already told it to Inspector Fay, and I will tell it again with pleasure when all the more important statements have been made. As regards myself——"

Inspector Fay took upon himself the continuation of the sentence.

"Up to a few years ago," he said, "Monsieur Dupont was, under a certain pseudonym, the most brilliant member of the French Secret Service—and was, in fact, admitted to have no equal in the whole of Europe."

"A gross exaggeration, my friends," protested Monsieur Dupont. He waved the inspector to silence. "When I came to London last week," he told them, "I came knowing that John Tranter had killed two women. I had known that when I returned from America six months before. You can imagine the difficulties in front of me then. I was to prove that an English Privy Councillor, a well-known and highly respected man, was in reality a madman who was responsible for two of the most dreadful crimes that had ever been committed. I had never seen him, but fortunately he was in Paris at that time, and I had no difficulty in making his acquaintance. By extreme good fortune, I was able to render him a service in the streets which placed him under an obligation to me. I observed him carefully, only to find him to all appearances the sanest and most level-headed man I had ever met. But there was one thing—he shut himself away completely from the society of women, and he avoided all places where beauty was to be found in any form. But I was so far from any proof. My next step was to test my own belief that his madness was an inherent disease, and to do that I employed inquiry agents in this country to discover whether there were any records of such a case in existence. It is only two weeks since I received information from them that a woman named Mary Winslowe had died in an asylum from that very kind of madness, forty years ago."

"That is true," corroborated the doctor.

"I came to London immediately. While following up my clues, I renewed my acquaintance with Tranter, and pressed him to act as my cicerone in London society, hoping to be able to entrap him into a situation that would lead him to betray himself. And he took me to Richmond. What happened there, you know. Though he knew when Christine Manderson first came into the room what the outcome would be, he was unable to tear himself away. And in the garden she forced herself upon him. He tried to resist her, but his madness overcame him. That is the explanation of the absence of a cry for help, which once I stated to be the key to the mystery. If she had been walking along that path to the house, she would have had time to cry out, no matter how quickly the assailant had sprung out at her. But she did not utter a cry because she was already in the arms of the assailant, compelling him to a passionate embrace, and without doubt it was a simple thing to strangle her silently in that very position."

"Good God!" Copplestone shuddered.

"His account of how she had asked him to find Mr. Copplestone, and tell him she was not well, and of how he had left her on her way to the house, was a succession of ingenious lies which could not be disproved. That is my story," concluded Monsieur Dupont. "The next most important point at the moment is that James Layton is cleared of a charge from which he could not possibly have saved himself."

"Layton will be released with full honors to-morrow," the inspector said.

"And I think," added Monsieur Dupont, "that there will be another matter—not unconnected with a young lady named Jenny West—upon which we shall have to congratulate him—and with very good reason."