The Bittermeads Mystery/Chapter 26
CHAPTER XXVI
A RACE AGAINST TIME
Even when he had said this aloud it was still as though he could not grasp its full meaning.
“Walter,” he repeated vaguely. “Walter.”
His thoughts, that had seemed as frozen by the sudden shock of the tremendous revelation so unconsciously made to him by Ella, began to stir and move again, and almost at once, with an extraordinary and abnormal rapidity.
As a drowning man is said to see flash before his eyes the whole history and record of his life, so now Dunn saw the whole story of his life-long friendship with Walter pictured before him.
For when he was very small, Walter had been to him like an elder brother, and when he was older, it was Walter who had taught him to ride and to shoot, to hunt and to fish, and when he was at school it was Walter to whom he looked up as the dashing young man of the world, who knew all life's secrets, and when he was at college it was Walter who had helped him out of the inevitable foolish scrapes into which it is the custom of the undergraduate to fall.
Then, when he had come to man's estate, Walter had still been his confidential friend and adviser. In Walter's hand he had been accustomed to leave everything during his absences on his hunting and exploring trips; and at what time during this long and kindly association of good-fellowship had such black hate and poison of envy bred in Walter's heart?
“Walter!” he said aloud once more, and he uttered the name as though it were a cry of anguish.
Yet, too, even in his utter bewilderment and surprise, it seemed strange to him that he had never once suspected, never dreamed, never once had the shadow of a suspicion.
Little things, trifling things, a word, an accent, a phrase that had passed at the time for a jest, a thousand such memories came back to him now with a new and terrible significance.
For, after all, Walter was in the direct line. Only just a few lives stood between him and a great inheritance, a great position. Perhaps long brooding on what might so easily be had made him mad.
Dunn remembered now, too, that it was Walter who had discovered that first murderous attempt which had first put them on their guard, but perhaps he had discovered it only because he knew of it, and when it failed, saw his safest plan was to be foremost in tracking it out.
And it was Walter who had last seen poor Charley Wright alone, and far from Bittermeads. But perhaps that was a lie to confuse the search for the missing man, and a reason why that search had failed so utterly up to the moment of Dunn's own grim discovery in the attic.
With yet a fresh shock so that he reeled as he stood with the impact of the thought, Dunn realized that all this implied that every one of his precautions had been rendered futile, that of all his elaborate plans not one would take effect since all had been entrusted to the care of the very man against whom they were aimed.
It was Walter for whom the net had been laid in Ottam's Wood; and Walter to whom had been entrusted the task of drawing that net tight at the right moment.
It was Walter's friends and agents who were to break into Wreste Abbey, and Walter to whom had been entrusted the task of defeating and capturing them. It was Walter from whom Ella stood in most danger if her action that morning had been observed, and it was Walter to whom he had given the task of protecting her.
At this thought, he turned and began to run as fast as he could in the direction of Bittermeads.
At all costs she must be saved, she who had exposed the whole awful plot. For a hundred yards or so he fled, swift as the wind, till on a sudden he stopped dead with the realization of the fact that every yard he took that way took him further and further from Ottam's Wood.
For there was danger there, too—grim and imminent—and sentences in Ella's hasty letter that bore now to his new knowledge a deep significance she had not dreamed of.
As when a flash of lightning lights all the landscape up and shows the traveller dreadful dangers that beset his path, so a wave of intuition told Dunn clearly the whole conspiracy; so that he saw it all, and saw how every detail was to be fitted in together. His father, General Dunsmore, was to be murdered first at the Brook Bourne Spring, to which he was being lured; and afterwards, when Dunn arrived, he was to be murdered, too. And on him, dead and unable to defend himself, the blame of his father's death would be laid. It would not be difficult to manage. Walter would arrange it all as neatly as he had been accustomed to arrange the Dunsmore business affairs placed in his hands for settlement.
A forged letter or two, Dunn's own revolver used to shoot the old man with and then placed in Dunn's dead hand when his own turn had come, convincing detail like that would be easy to arrange. Why, the very fact of his disguise, the tangled beard that he had grown to hide his features with, would appear conclusive. Any coroner's jury would return a verdict of wilful murder against his memory on that one fact alone.
Walter would see to that all right. A little false evidence apparently reluctantly given would be added, and all would be kneaded together into the one substance till the whole guilt of all that happened would appear to lie solely on his shoulders.
As for motive, it would simply be put forward that he had been in a hurry to succeed his uncle. And very likely some tale of a quarrel with his father or something of that sort would be invented, and would go uncontradicted since there would be no one to contradict it.
And most probably what was contemplated at Wreste Abbey was no ordinary burglary, but the assassination of old Lord Chobham, of which the guilt would also be set down to him.
Very clearly now he realized that this tremendous plot was aimed, not only at life, but at honour—that not only was his life required, but also that he should be thought a murderer.
With the realization of the danger that threatened at Wreste Abbey he turned and began to run back in the direction where it lay, that he might take timely warning there, but he did not run a dozen strides when he remembered Ella again, and paused.
Surely he must think of her first, alone and unprotected. For she was the woman he loved; and besides, she had summoned him to her help, and then she was a woman, and at least, the others were men.
All this flood of thoughts, this intuitive grasping of a situation terrible beyond conception, almost unparalleled in bloody and dreadful horror, passed through his mind with extreme rapidity.
Once more he turned and began to run—to run as he had never run before, for now he saw that all depended on the speed with which he could cover the eight miles that lay between him and Ottam's Wood, whether he could still save his father or not.
The district was lonely in the extreme, there was no human habitation near, no place where he could obtain any help or any swift means of conveyance. His one hope must be in his speed, his feet must be swift to save, not only his own life and his father's, but his honour, too, and Ella and his old uncle as well; and all—all hung upon the speed with which he could cover the eight long miles that lay between him and Brook Bourne Spring in Ottam's Wood. Even as he ran, as he thought of Ella, he came abruptly to a pause, wrung with sudden anguish. For each fleet stride he was making towards Brook Bourne Spring was taking him further and further away from Bittermeads just as before each step to Bittermeads had been taking him further from Ottam's Wood.
He began to run again, even faster than before, and it was towards Ottam's Wood that he ran, each step taking him further from Bittermeads and further from the woman he loved in her bitter need and peril, who looked to him for the help he could not give. With pain and anguish he ran on, ran as men have seldom run—as seldom so much was hung upon their running.
On and on he sped, fleet as the wind, fleet as the light breeze that blew lightly by. A solitary villager trudging on some errand in this lonely place, tells to this day the tale of the bearded, wild-eyed man who raced so madly by him, raced on and down the long, straight road till his figure dwindled and vanished in the distance.
A shepherd boy went home with a tale of a strange thing he had seen of a man running so fast it seemed he was scarcely in sight before he was gone again.
And except for those two and one other none saw him at all and he ran his race alone beneath the skies, across the bare country side.
It was at a spot where the path ran between two high hedges that he came upon a little herd of cows a lad was driving home.
It seemed impossible to pass through that tangle of horns and tails and plunging hoofs, and so indeed it was, but Dunn took another way, and with one leap, cleared the first beast clean and alighted on the back of the second.
Before the startled beast could plunge away he leaped again from the vantage of its back and landed on the open ground beyond and so on, darting full speed past the staring driver, whose tale that he told when he got home caused him to go branded for years as a liar.
On and on Dunn fled, without stay or pause, at the utmost of his speed every second of time, every yard of distance. For he knew he had need of every ounce of power he possessed or could call to his aid, since he knew well that all, all, might hang upon a second less or more, and now four miles lay behind him and four in front.
Still on he raced with labouring lungs and heart near to bursting—onward still, swift, swift and sure, and now there were six miles behind and only two in front, and he was beginning to come to a part of the country that he knew.
Whether he was soon or late he had no idea or how long it was that he had raced like this along the lonely country road at the full extremity and limit of his strength.
He dared not take time to glance at his watch, for he knew the fraction of a second he would thus lose might mean the difference between in time and too late. On he ran still and presently he left the path and took the fields.
But he had forgotten that though the distance might be shorter the going would be harder, and on the rough grass he stumbled, and across the bare ground damp earth clung to his boots and hindered him as though each foot had become laden with lead.
His speed was slower, his effort greater if possible, and when he came to a hedge he made no effort to leap, but crashed through it as best he could and broke or clambered or tumbled a path for himself.
Now Ottam's Wood was very near, and reeling and staggering like a man wounded to the death but driven by inexorable fate, he plunged on still, and there was a little froth gathering at the corners of his mouth and from one of his nostrils came a thin trickle of blood.
Yet still he held on, though in truth he hardly knew any longer why he ran or what his need for haste, and as he came to the wood round a spur where a cluster of young beeches grew, he saw a tall, upright, elderly man walking there, well-dressed and of a neat, soldier-like appearance.
“Hallo—there you are—father—” he gasped and fell down, prone unconscious.