Once more he hesitated. Then he took a cigar from the box which his host held out to him, and said, in a kind of rush: "No one could make any use of it now. For there's no longer any evidence but my word, and I should deny it. It's overwork John Rymer died of. Let us not forget it."
And then he told the story of the Brown Book. At the end of it his cigar was still alight, for he smoked while he talked. But it was the only cigar alight in that room.
I was twenty-five, and I had bought a practice at Chailsey, a village deep amongst tall, dark trees in the very heart of the Berkshire Downs. You'll hardly find a place more pastoral and remote in all that country of remote villages. But a couple of training stables were established there, and, what with kicks and jumping accidents, there was a good deal of work at times. I quite liked the spot, and I liked it still more when Bradley Rymer and his daughter took the big house on the slope of the Down above the village.
John Rymer, the surgeon, had then been dead eight months, and Bradley Rymer was his brother, a shortish, broad man of forty-five with a big, pleasant face. Gossip had it that he had been very poor, so poor, indeed, that his daughter had made her living at a typewriting machine. There was no doubt, however, that he was rich now. "Canada's the country," he used to say. "I made my money out of Canadian land," and when he fell into conversation of a morning with any of the stable-boys on the gallops he was always urging them to better themselves in that country.
His daughter Violet--a good many of you know her as my wife--had little of his fore-gathering disposition. She was an extremely pretty girl of nineteen, with eyes which matched her name. But she held herself apart. She seldom came down into the village, and even when one met her in her own house there was a constraint in her manner and a look upon her face which I was at a loss to understand. It wasn't merely trouble. It was a kind of perplexity, as though she did not know where to turn. For the rest, the couple did not entertain.
"We have had hard lives," Bradley Rymer said to me one rare evening when I dined there, "and a year or two of quiet is what we want beyond everything." And never did man speak a truer word.