Read The Best Crime Stories Ever Told for Free Online Page B

peasants. She was an orphan of only ten years old when Colonel Stamer and his wife went to lodge at her brother’s farm for the fishing. They fell in love with the child, and, having none of their own, they adopted her. All this my brother told me. He knew, he wrote, just what I would think; he only asked me to meet her, and then to judge. Of course, I did so at the first opportunity.”
    Lord Aviemore paused and stared thoughtfully at the portrait. “She charmed everyone who came near her,” he went on presently. “I resisted the spell, but before they had been long married she had vanquished all my prejudice. Her life was all generous impulses and frank enjoyment. But she was not childish. It was not that she was what is called intellectual; but she had a singular spaciousness of mind in which nothing little or mean could live; it had, I used to fancy, some kinship with her Norwegian landscapes of mountain and sea. She was, as you say, extremely beautiful, with the vigorous purity of the fair-haired northern race. All sorts of men were at her feet; but my brother’s marriage was the happiest I have ever known.”
    Trent worked busily upon his canvas, and soon the low, meditative voice resumed.
    “It was almost this time six years ago—the middle of March—that I received the terrible news from Taormina. I had just returned from Canada, and I went out there at once. When I saw her she showed no emotion; but there was in her calmness the most unearthly sense of desolation that I have ever perceived. She believed, I found, that she was to blame. You have heard that a slight shock of earthquake caused the villa to collapse, and that my brother and his child were found dead in the ruins; you have heard that Lady Aviemore was sailing in the bay at the time. But you have probably not heard that my brother had a presentiment that their visit to Sicily would end in death, and wished to abandon it; that his wife laughed away his forebodings with her strong modern common sense. But we are of Highland blood and tradition, Mr. Trent, and such interior warnings are no trifles to us. . . . On the tenth day her husband and son were killed. She did not think, as you may suppose, that there was merely coincidence here. The shock changed her whole mental being; she believed then, as I believed, that my brother inwardly foreknew that death awaited him if he went to that place.”
    He said no more, until Trent remarked, “I know slightly a man called Selby, a solicitor, who was with Lady Aviemore just after her husband’s death.”
    Lord Aviemore said that he remembered Mr. Selby. He said it with such a total absence of expression of any kind that the subject of Selby was killed instantly; and he did not resume that of the tragedy of her whom all the world remembered still as Lillemor Wergeland.
    A few months later, when the portrait of Lord Aviemore was to be seen at the show of the N.S.P.P., Trent received a friendly note from Arthur Selby, who asked if Trent would do him the favour of calling at his office by appointment for a private talk. “I should like,” he wrote, “to put a certain story before you, a story with a problem in it. I gave it up as a bad job long ago myself; but seeing your portrait of A. at the show reminded me of your reputation as an unraveller.”
    Thus it happened that, a few days later, Trent was closeted with Selby in one of the rooms of the firm in which that very capable, somewhat dandified, lawyer was a partner. Selby, who never wasted words, came quickly to the point.
    “The story I referred to,” he said, “is the Aviemore story. I was with her at the time of her suicide. I am an executor of her will. In the strictest confidence, I should like to tell you that story as I know it.” He folded his arms upon the broad writing-table between them, and went on: “You know all about the accident. I will start with March l0th, when Lord Aviemore and his son were buried in the cemetery at Taormina. His