The House of the Whispering Pines by Anna Katherine Green Page B

lip curled, and for a minute he hesitated; then something in my
aspect or the straight-forward look I gave him, softened him and he
answered frankly, if coldly:
    "Word has gone there, of course, but only the servants are affected by
it so far. Miss Cumberland, the younger, is very ill, and the boy—I
don't know his name—has not shown up since last evening. He's very
dissipated, they say, and may be in any one of the joints in the lower
part of the town."
    I stopped in dismay, clutching wildly at the railing of the stairs we
were descending. I had hardly heard the latter words, all my mind was on
what he had said first.
    "Miss Carmel Cumberland ill?" I stammered, "too ill to be told?"
    I was sufficiently master of myself to put it this way.
    "Yes," he rejoined, kindly, as he urged me down the very stairs I had
seen her descend in such a state of mind a few hours before. "A servant
who had been out late, heard the fall of some heavy body as she was
passing Miss Cumberland's rooms, and rushing in found Miss Carmel, as she
called her, lying on the floor near the open fire. Her face had struck
the bars of the grate in falling, and she was badly burned. But that was
not all; she was delirious with fever, brought on, they think, by anxiety
about her sister, whose name she was constantly repeating. They had a
doctor for her and the whole house was up before ever the word came of
what had happened here."
    I thanked him with a look. I had no opportunity for more. Half a dozen
officers were standing about the front door, and in another moment I was
bustled into the conveyance provided and was being driven away from the
death-haunted spot.
    I had heard the last whisper of those pines for many, many days. But not
in my dreams; it ever came back at night, sinister, awesome, haunted with
dead hopes and breathing of an ever doubtful future.

VII - Clifton Accepts My Case
*
    This hand of mine
Is yet a maiden and an innocent hand,
Not painted with the crimson spots of blood.
Within this bosom never enter'd yet
The dreadful motion of a murd'rous thought.
    King John
.
    My first thought (when I could think at all) was this:
    "She has some feeling, then! Her terror and remorse have maddened her. I
can dwell upon her image with pity." The next, "Will they find her wet
clothes and discover that she was out last night?" The latter possibility
troubled me. My mind was the seat of strange contradictions.
    As the day advanced and I began to realise that I, Elwood Ranelagh,
easy-going man of the world, but with traditions of respectable living on
both sides of my house and a list of friends of which any man might be
proud, was in a place of detention on the awful charge of murder, I found
that my keenest torment arose from the fact that I was shut off from the
instant knowledge of what was going on in the house where all my
thoughts, my fears, and shall I say it, latent hopes were centred. To
know Carmel ill and not to know how ill! To feel the threatening arm of
the law hovering constantly over her head and neither to know the instant
of its fall nor be given the least opportunity to divert it. To realise
that some small inadvertance on her part, some trivial but incriminating
object left about, some heedless murmur or burst of unconscious frenzy
might precipitate her doom, and I remain powerless, bearing my share of
suspicion and ignominy, it is true, but not the chief share if matters
befell as I have suggested, which they were liable to do at any hour,
nay, at any minute.
    My examination before the magistrate held one element of comfort.
Nothing in its whole tenor went to show that, as yet, she was in the
least suspected of any participation in my so-called crime. But the
knowledge which came later, of how the police first learned of trouble
at the club-house did not add to this sense of relief, whatever
satisfaction it gave my curiosity. A cry of distress had come to them
over the telephone; a wild cry, in a woman's choked and tremulous