Читать книгу Dilemmas - A.E.W. Mason - Страница 7

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It was at this moment that Joan had torn herself from the window and rushed into Mary Cole's room and dropped upon the floor in a swoon which had drowned all memory of the affair, until now when she sat in Bramley's room.

"I am ashamed of myself," she said, springing up from her chair. "For four years those murderers have walked about their farm, and I have done nothing."

Bramley held up his hand.

"There is no need to do anything. When Mary Cole told me what she knew, the name of Perdoux sounded familiar to me. And that night I remembered a curious story which I had read carelessly in a newspaper. I found the paper." He took a cutting from a drawer in his table.

"The sequel is as astounding as anything you have told me. Listen! Last year Barillier, under the pressure of a growing remorse for his cowardice, began to drop dark hints. Finally he whispered that young Charles Perdoux had not committed suicide at all, but had been murdered by his father. The Perdoux family began to be looked at askance and the old man, Narcisse, who clung to his respectability as closely as he did to his money, actually brought an action for slander against Barillier, thinking no doubt that a coward once would be a coward a second time. But Barillier told his story, glad to rid his conscience of the burden, and told it with so much circumstance that no one in court doubted its truth. Narcisse Perdoux was arrested and the night before he was to be brought into the presence of the examining magistrate, he in fact did hang himself with his braces from the window-bars of his cell."

Bramley handed to Joan the cutting which came from a newspaper six weeks old.

"We can leave it there," he said.

Joan nodded her head. She took up the rope, and looked at it curiously. Then she turned and held out both her hands.

"I cannot thank you enough for what you have done for me," she said. "I am free."