Chapter 4 - Page 2

clue to identify the stranger. He hadn't entered the house by any
regular way, it seemed; unless, indeed, Mr. Callingham had brought
him home himself and let him in with the latchkey. None of the
servants had opened the door that evening to any suspicious
character; not a soul had they seen, nor did any of them know a man
was with their master in the library. They heard voices, to be
sure--voices, loud at times and angry,--but they supposed it was Mr.
Callingham talking with his daughter. Till roused by the fatal
pistol-shot, the gardener said, they had no cause for alarm. Even
the footmarks the stranger might have left as he leaped from the
window were obliterated by the prints of the gardener's boots as he
jumped hastily after him. The only person who could cast any light
upon the mystery at all was clearly Miss Callingham, who was in the
room at the moment. But Miss Callingham's mind was completely
unhinged for the present by the nervous shock she had received as
her father fell dead before her. They must wait a few days till she
recovered consciousness, and then they might confidently hope that
the murderer would be identified, or at least so described that the
police could track him.

After that, I read the report of the coroner's inquest. The facts
there elicited added nothing very new to the general view of the
case. Only, the servants remarked on examination, there was a
strange smell of chemicals in the room when they entered; and the
doctors seemed to suggest that the smell might be that of
chloroform, mixed with another very powerful drug known to affect
the memory. Miss Callingham's present state, they thought, might
thus perhaps in part be accounted for.

You can't imagine how curious it was for me to see myself thus
impersonally discussed at such a distance of time, or to learn so
long after that for ten days or more I had been the central object
of interest to all reading England. My name was bandied about
without the slightest reserve. I trembled to see how cavalierly the
press had treated me.

As I went on, I began to learn more and more about my father. He had
made money in Australia, it was said, and had come to live at
Woodbury some fourteen years earlier, where my mother had died when
I was a child of four; and some accounts said she was a widow of
fortune. My father had been interested in chemistry and photography,
it seemed, and had lately completed a new invention, the acmegraph,
for taking successive photographs at measured intervals of so many
seconds by electric light. He was a grave, stern man, the papers
said, more feared than loved by his servants and neighbours; but
nobody about was known to have a personal grudge against him. On the
contrary,