e numberless
dinners and congresses where they appeared, made it hard to believe,
somehow, that he had ever been anything so morbid as either a
dram-drinker or a Calvinist. He was, one felt, the most seriously merry
of all the sons of men.

He had lived on the rural skirt of Hampstead in a handsome house, high
but not broad, a modern and prosaic tower. The narrowest of its narrow
sides overhung the steep green bank of a railway, and was shaken by
passing trains. Sir Aaron Armstrong, as he boisterously explained, had
no nerves. But if the train had often given a shock to the house, that
morning the tables were turned, and it was the house that gave a shock
to the train.

The engine slowed down and stopped just beyond that point where an angle
of the house impinged upon the sharp slope of turf. The arrest of most
mechanical things must be slow; but the living cause of this had been
very rapid. A man clad completely in black, even (it was remembered)
to the dreadful detail of black gloves, appeared on the ridge above
the engine, and waved his black hands like some sable windmill. This in
itself would hardly have stopped even a lingering train. But there came
out of him a cry which was talked of afterwards as something utterly
unnatural and new. It was one of those shouts that are horridly distinct
even when we cannot hear what is shouted. The word in this case was
"Murder!"

But the engine-driver swears he would have pulled up just the same if he
had heard only the dreadful and definite accent and not the word.

The train once arrested, the most superficial stare could take in many
features of the tragedy. The man in black on the green bank was Sir
Aaron Armstrong's man-servant Magnus. The baronet in his optimism had
often laughed at the black gloves of this dismal attendant; but no one
was likely to laugh at him just now.

So soon as an inquirer or two had stepped off the line and across the
smoky hedge, they saw, rolled down almost to the bottom of the bank, the
body of an old man in a yellow dressing-gown with a very vivid
scarlet lining. A scrap of rope seemed caught about his leg, entangled
presumably in a struggle. There was a smear or so of blood, though very
little; but the body was bent or broken into a posture impossible to any
living thing. It was Sir Aaron Armstrong. A few more bewildered moments
brought out a big fair-bearded man, whom some travellers could salute
as the dead man's secretary, Patrick Roy