Free The Bradmoor Murder by Melville Davisson Post Page B

story. He must follow the Rajah. And so Mahadol had acted in a wisdom large and comprehensive to him.…
    â€œHe had been swift to act and cunning to conceal the evidences of that action. It was as though he had strangled, weighted and sunk the body of this crime, and here it was, unfastened from the weights, rising into the sun.
    â€œLady Gault stood for some time before the open window, the cold air on her face. Presently she observed two figures walking in the garden below. They moved slowly without speaking and without touching one another—a young man and a girl, come out into the garden from the dance. The night was like a fairy day. There was a soft moon veiled by a distant mist, and the myriad stars sown over the dome of the sky gave a white light. And the two lovers silent, and in a wrapt melancholy drew down the attention of the woman above them in the window. She leaned over the sill, in the dark, and regarded them …here was God at His eternal game! Her face hardened into a cynical smile.
    â€œGod at His game in the garden below, and she at her game, above, in the sitting room of Mahadol of Gujrat! And she had suddenly a profoundly curious impulse; was this thing that labored with every trick, with every artifice, eternally, without ceasing, to the end that life should continue, merely an impulse in nature, continuous and persistent, but blind—or was it an intelligence behind the world? If it were nature there would be waste and it would often fail. It would labor when it could not win with precisely the same vigor, the same care, the same patience with which it labored when it could win. And was she—that was to say, the human intelligence—in its directing of events superior to this thing?
    â€œShe leaned over in the window.
    â€œThe two figures walking in the garden advanced and seated themselves on a bench before a flowering vine, and a rift, thinned out in the mist, let the moon through. The faces of the two person were now visible in the light, and she knew them. It was the young Duke of Dorset and the girl from America.
    â€œLady Gault said that she very nearly laughed!
    â€œGod was wasting His effort! The properties just inherited by the young duke were bankrupt—she knew to a shilling the value of every estate in England—the girl had no fortune. A union of these two was out of the question. This youth could not take a duchess into beggary, and he knew it; the girl beside him knew it. The fact, certain and inevitable, was between them like a partition of steel.
    â€œAnd yet this Thing—this Thing behind the world—had labored with an endless patience to accomplish it. It had drawn them together across three thousand miles of sea; it had lured them, enticed them, drugged them with its opiates, enveloped them with emotions until they dared not touch their hands, trust their voices! It was all done with such superb intelligence up to this point. Lady Gault saw that. All that this boy lacked the girl possessed. She was an exquisite blend of distant bloods. She had the fine nerve, the delicate beauty, the mysterious charm that this old English race needed to revitalize it. Everything was right; amazingly, inconceivably right… and it was all for nothing! The woman at the window reflected.
    â€œIt was as though she had gone to every care to blackmail one who had nothing in his pocket, or had threatened one with her menace when she had no fact behind it.
    â€œAnd the comprehension of it stimulated her like a victory. She was superior to this Thing. It would lose in the game it played, but she would win in hers. And she rose and went back into the sitting room.
    â€œThe Indian was standing, his back against a table, a polo mallet in his hand.
    â€œLady Gault laughed.
    â€œâ€˜It won’t do, Mahadol,’ she said, ‘you are not lucky at murder. Break the pastern of Lord Winton’s gray pony to-morrow in the first chukker; it will