The waiter did not know, being a foreigner, and unacquainted with the tittle-tattle of the day, that Sir William Gouldesbrough, the famous scientist, was generally known to be a practical teetotaller, and one who abhorred the general use of alcoholic beverages.
When the brandy came, amber in the electric lights of the smoking-room, and with a piece of ice floating in the liquid, Sir William took a small white tabloid from a bottle in his pocket and dropped it into the glass.
It fizzed, spluttered, and disappeared.
Then he raised the tumbler to his lips, and as he did so the floating ice tinkled against the sides of the glass like a tiny alarum.
"Nerves gone," the stock-broking gentleman close by said to his friend, with a wink.
In five minutes or so, after he had lit a cigarette, Gouldesbrough rose and left the smoking-room. He put on his coat in the hall and went out of the front door.
It was not yet late, and the huge crescent of electric lights, which seemed to stretch right away beyond Hove to Worthing, gleamed like a gigantic coronet.
It was a clear night. The air was searching and keen, and it seemed to steady the scientist as he walked down the steps and came out from under the hotel portico on to the pavement.
A huge round moon hung over the sea, which was moaning quietly. The lights in front of the Alhambra Music Hall gleamed brightly, and on the promenade by the side of the shore innumerable couples paced and re-paced amid a subdued hum of talk and laughter.
The pier stretched away into the water like a jewelled snake. It was Brighton at ten o'clock, bright, gay, and animated.
Sir William was staying at the Brighton Royal, the other great hotel which towers up upon the front some quarter of a mile away from the Palace, where Marjorie and Lady Poole were.
He strode through the crowds, seeing nothing of them, hearing nothing but the beat of his own heart.
Even for a man so strong as he, the last hour had been terrible. Never before in all his life, at the moment of realization when some great scientific theory had materialized into stupendous fact, when first Marjorie had promised to marry him--at any great crisis of his life--had he undergone so furious a strain as this of the last hour.
He came out of the Palace Hotel, knowing that he had carried out his intentions with the most consummate success. He came out of it, realizing that not half-a-dozen men in England could have done what he had done, and as the keen air smote upon his face like a blow from the flat of a sword, he realized also that not six men in England, walking the pleasant, happy streets of any town, were so unutterably stained and immeasurably damned as he.
As he passed through the revolving glass doors of his own hotel, and the hall-porters touched their caps, he exerted all the powers of his will.
He would no longer remember or realize what he had done and what it meant to him. He would only rejoice in his achievement, and he banished the fear that comes even to the most evil when they know they have committed an almost unpardonable sin.
He did not use the lift to go to his sitting-room on the second floor; he ran lightly up the stairs, wanting the exercise as a means of banishing thought.
He entered his own room, switched on the electric light, took off his coat, and stood in front of the fire, stretching his arms in pure physical weariness.
Yes! That was over! Another step was taken. Once more he had progressed a step towards his desire, in spite of the most adverse happenings and the most forbidding aspects of fate.
The unaccustomed brandy at the Palace Hotel, and the bromide solution he had dropped into it, had calmed his nerves, and suddenly he laughed aloud in the rich, silent room, a laugh of pure triumph and excitement.
Even as the echoes of his voice died away, his eyes fell upon the table and saw that there was a letter lying there addressed to him. The address was written in a well-known handwriting. He took it up, tore open the envelope and read the communication.
It was this--
"I have been down here for several days, trying to escape from London and the thoughts which London gives me. But it has been quite useless. I saw to-day, quite by chance, in the hotel register, that you have arrived here. I did not think that we were ever likely to meet again, except in the most casual way. I hope not. Since I have been here, the torture of my life has increased a thousand-fold, and I have come to the conclusion that my life must stop. I am not fit to live. I don't blame you too much, because if I hadn't been a scoundrel and a wastrel all my life, I should never have put myself in your hands. As far as your lights go, you have acted well to me. You have paid me generously for the years of dirty work I have done at your bidding. For what I have done lately, you have made me financially free, and I shall die owing no man a penny, and with no man, save you only, knowing that I die without hope--lost, degraded and despairing. Don't think I blame you, William Gouldesbrough, because I don't. When I was at Eton, I was always a pleasure-loving little scug. I was the same at Oxford.
I have been the same in all my life in town. I have never been any good to myself, and I have disappointed all the hopes my people had for me. It's all been my own fault. Then I became entangled with you, and I was too weak to resist the money you were prepared to pay me for the things I have done for you.
"But it's all over now. I have gone too far. I have helped you, and am equally guilty with you, to commit a frightful crime. Lax as I have always been, I can no longer feel I have any proper place among men of my own sort. All I can say is that I am glad I shall die without anybody knowing what I really am.
"I write this note after dinner, and, finding the number of your room from the hotel clerk, I leave it here for you to see. I am going to make an end of it all in an hour or two, when I have written a few notes to acquaintances and so on. I can't go on living, Gouldesbrough, because night and day, day and night, I am haunted by the thought of that poor young man you have got in your foul house in Regent's Park. What you are doing to him I don't know. The end of your revenge I can only guess at. But it is all so horrible that I am glad to be done with life. I wish you good-bye; and I wish to God--if there is really a God--that I had never crossed your path and never been your miserable tool.
"EUSTACE CHARLIEWOOD."
As Sir William Gouldesbrough read this letter, his whole tall figure became rigid. He seemed to stiffen as a corpse stiffens.
Then, quite suddenly, he turned round and pushed the letter into the depths of the glowing fire, pressing the paper down with the poker until every vestige of it was consumed.
He strode to the door of the room, opened it, came out into the wide carpeted corridor and hurried up to the lift.
He pressed the button and heard it ring far down below.
In a minute or two there came the clash of the shutting doors, the "chunk" of the hydraulic mechanism, and he saw the shadow of the lift-roof rising up towards him.
The attendant opened the door.
"Will you take me up to the fourth floor, please," he said, "to Mr.
Eustace Charliewood's room?"
"Mr. Charliewood, sir?" the man replied. "Oh, yes, I remember, number 408. Tall, clean-shaved gentleman."
"That's him," Sir William said. "I have only just learnt that he has been staying in the hotel. He is an old friend, and I had no idea he was here."
The iron doors clashed, the lift shot upward, and the attendant and Sir William arrived at the fourth floor.
"Down the corridor, sir, and the first turning on the right," the lift-man said. "But perhaps I'd better show you."
He ran the ironwork gates over their rollers and hurried down the corridor with Sir William. They turned the corner, and the man pointed to a door some fifteen yards away.
"That's it, sir," he said. "That's Mr. Charliewood's room."
Even as he spoke there was a sudden loud explosion which seemed to come from the room to which he had pointed--a horrid crash in the warm, richly-lit silence of the hotel.
The man turned to Sir William with a white face.
"Come on," he said, forgetting his politeness. "Something has happened.
Come, quick!"
When they burst into the room they found the man about town lying upon the hearth-rug with a little blue circle edged with crimson in the centre of his forehead. The hands were still moving feebly, but what had been Eustace Charliewood was no longer there.
CHAPTER XI
BEEF TEA AND A PHOSPHATE SOLUTION
Sir William Gouldesbrough remained in Brighton for three days. Eustace Charliewood had died in two minutes after the lift-man and the scientist had burst into the room. The suicide had said no word, and indeed was absolutely unconscious from the moment the shot had been fired, until his almost immediate death.
Sir William had made all the necessary arrangements. He had communicated with old Sir Miles Charliewood, of Norfolk, he had expedited the arrangements for the inquest, and he was, as the newspapers said, "overcome with grief at the death of his old and valued friend."