The Woman in Black

The Woman in Black, by Edmund Clerihew Bentley

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Woman in Black, by Edmund Clerihew Bentley This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Woman in Black
Author: Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Release Date: June 18, 2007 [EBook #21854]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN IN BLACK ***

Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was made using scans of public domain works from the University of Michigan Digital Libraries.)

THE WOMAN IN BLACK
BY EDMUND CLERIHEW BENTLEY

Copyright, 1913, by The Century Co. NEW YORK Published, March, 1913

"... So shall you hear Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning, and forc'd cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall'n on the inventors' heads ..."
--Hamlet.

TO GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON
My dear Gilbert:
I dedicate this story to you. First: because the only really noble motive I had in writing it was the hope that you would enjoy it. Second: because I owe you a book in return for "The Man Who Was Thursday." Third: because I said I would when I unfolded the plan of it to you, surrounded by Frenchmen, two years ago. Fourth: because I remember the past.
I have been thinking again to-day of those astonishing times when neither of us ever looked at a newspaper; when we were purely happy in the boundless consumption of paper, pencils, tea and our elders' patience; when we embraced the most severe literature, and ourselves produced such light reading as was necessary; when (in the words of Canada's poet) we studied the works of nature, also those little frogs; when, in short, we were extremely young.
For the sake of that age I offer you this book.
Yours always, E. C. BENTLEY.

CONTENTS
Prologue
I Knocking the Town Endways
II Breakfast
III Handcuffs in the Air
IV Poking About
V Mr. Brunner on the Case
VI The Lady in Black
VII The Inquest
VIII A Hot Scent
IX The Wife of Dives
X Hitherto Unpublished
XI Evil Days
XII Eruption
XIII Writing a Letter
XIV Double Cunning
XV The Last Straw

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

PROLOGUE
Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely?
When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of such wealth as this dead man had piled up--without making one loyal friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to the least honor. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those living in the great vortices of business as if the earth, too, shuddered under a blow.
In all the lurid commercial history of his country there had been no figure that had so imposed itself upon the mind of the trading world. He had a niche apart in its temples. Financial giants, strong to direct and augment the forces of capital, and taking an approved toll in millions for so doing, had existed before; but in the case of Manderson there had been this singularity, that a pale halo of piratical romance, a thing especially dear to the hearts of his countrymen, had remained incongruously about his head through the years when he stood in every eye as the unquestioned guardian of stability, the stamper-out of manipulated crises, the foe of the raiding chieftains that infest the borders of Wall Street.
The fortune left by his grandfather, who had been one of those chieftains, on the smaller scale of his day, had descended to him with accretion through his father, who during a long life had quietly continued to lend money and never had margined a stock. Manderson, who had at no time known what it was to be without large sums to his hand, should have been altogether of that newer American plutocracy which is steadied by the tradition and habit of great wealth. But it was not so. While his nurture and education had taught him European ideas of a rich man's proper external circumstance; while they had rooted in him an instinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which does not shriek of itself with a thousand tongues; there had been handed on to him, nevertheless, much of the Forty-Niner and financial buccaneer, his forbear. During that first period of his business career which had been called his early bad manner he had been little more than a gambler of genius, his hand against every man's, an infant prodigy who brought to the enthralling pursuit of speculation a brain better endowed than any