Chapter 4

THE EPISODE OF THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT COMMIT SUICIDE

After my poor friend Le Geyt had murdered his wife, in a sudden access
of uncontrollable anger, under the deepest provocation, the police
naturally began to inquire for him. It is a way they have; the police
are no respecters of persons; neither do they pry into the question of
motives. They are but poor casuists. A murder is for them a murder, and
a murderer a murderer; it is not their habit to divide and distinguish
between case and case with Hilda Wade's analytical accuracy.

As soon as my duties at St. Nathaniel's permitted me, on the evening of
the discovery, I rushed round to Mrs. Mallet's, Le Geyt's sister. I
had been detained at the hospital for some hours, however, watching a
critical case; and by the time I reached Great Stanhope Street I found
Hilda Wade, in her nurse's dress, there before me. Sebastian, it seemed,
had given her leave out for the evening. She was a supernumerary nurse,
attached to his own observation-cots as special attendant for scientific
purposes, and she could generally get an hour or so whenever she
required it.

Mrs. Mallet had been in the breakfast-room with Hilda before I arrived;
but as I reached the house she rushed upstairs to wash her red eyes and
compose herself a little before the strain of meeting me; so I had the
opportunity for a few words alone first with my prophetic companion.

"You said just now at Nathaniel's," I burst out, "that Le Geyt would
not be hanged: he would commit suicide. What did you mean by that? What
reason had you for thinking so?"

Hilda sank into a chair by the open window, pulled a flower abstractedly
from the vase at her side, and began picking it to pieces, floret after
floret, with twitching fingers. She was deeply moved. "Well, consider
his family history," she burst out at last, looking up at me with her
large brown eyes as she reached the last petal. "Heredity counts.... And
after such a disaster!"

She said "disaster," not "crime"; I noted mentally the reservation
implied in the word.

"Heredity counts," I answered. "Oh, yes. It counts much. But what about
Le Geyt's family history?" I could not recall any instance of suicide
among his forbears.

"Well--his mother's father was General Faskally, you know," she replied,
after a pause, in her strange, oblique manner. "Mr. Le Geyt is General
Faskally's eldest grandson."

"Exactly," I broke in, with a man's desire for solid fact in place of
vague intuition. "But I fail to see quite what that has to do with it."

"The General was killed in India during the Mutiny."