I. THE FACE IN THE
TARGET
II. THE VANISHING
PRINCE
III. THE SOUL OF THE
SCHOOLBOY
IV. THE BOTTOMLESS WELL
V. THE FAD OF THE
FISHERMAN
VI. THE HOLE IN THE
WALL
VII. THE TEMPLE OF
SILENCE
VIII. THE VENGEANCE OF
THE STATUE
Harold March, the
rising reviewer and social critic, was walking vigorously across a great
tableland of moors and commons, the horizon of which was fringed with the far-off
woods of the famous estate of Torwood Park. He was a good-looking young man in
tweeds, with very pale curly hair and pale clear eyes. Walking in wind and sun
in the very landscape of liberty, he was still young enough to remember his
politics and not merely try to forget them. For his errand at Torwood Park was
a political one; it was the place of appointment named by no less a person than
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Howard Horne, then introducing his
so-called Socialist budget, and prepared to expound it in an interview with so
promising a penman. Harold March was the sort of man who knows everything about
politics, and nothing about politicians. He also knew a great deal about art,
letters, philosophy, and general culture; about almost everything, indeed,
except the world he was living in.
Abruptly, in the middle
of those sunny and windy flats, he came upon a sort of cleft almost narrow
enough to be called a crack in the land. It was just large enough to be the
water-course for a small stream which vanished at intervals under green tunnels
of undergrowth, as if in a dwarfish forest. Indeed, he had an odd feeling as if
he were a giant looking over the valley of the pygmies. When he dropped into
the hollow, however, the impression was lost; the rocky banks, though hardly
above the height of a cottage, hung over and had the profile of a precipice. As
he began to wander down the course of the stream, in idle but romantic
curiosity, and saw the water shining in short strips between the great gray boulders
and bushes as soft as great green mosses, he fell into quite an opposite vein
of fantasy. It was rather as if the earth had opened and swallowed him into a
sort of underworld of dreams. And when he became conscious of a human figure
dark against the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather
like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of the premonition’s proper to a
man who meets the strangest friendship of his life.
The man was apparently
fishing; or at least was fixed in a fisherman’s attitude with more than a
fisherman’s immobility. March was able to examine the man almost as if he had
been a statue for some minutes before the statue spoke. He was a tall, fair
man, cadaverous, and a little lackadaisical, with heavy eyelids and a
highbridged nose. When his face was shaded with his wide white hat, his light
mustache and lithe figure gave him a look of youth. But the Panama lay on the
moss beside him; and the spectator could see that his brow was prematurely
bald; and this, combined with a certain hollowness about the eyes, had an air
of headwork and even headache. But the most curious thing about him, realized
after a short scrutiny, was that, though he looked like a fisherman, he was not
fishing.
He was holding, instead
of a rod, something that might have been a landing-net which some fishermen
use, but which was much more like the ordinary toy net which children carry,
and which they generally use indifferently for shrimps or butterflies. He was
dipping this into the water at intervals, gravely regarding its harvest of weed
or mud, and emptying it out again.
"No, I haven’t
caught anything," he remarked, calmly, as if answering an unspoken query.
"When I do I have to throw it back again; especially the big fish. But
some of the little beasts interest me when I get ’em."
"A scientific
interest, I suppose?" observed March.
"Of a rather
amateurish sort, I fear," answered the strange fisherman. "I have a
sort of hobby about what they call ’phenomena of phosphorescence.’ But it would
be rather awkward to go about in society crying stinking fish."
"I suppose it
would," said March, with a smile.
"Rather odd to
enter a drawing-room carrying a large luminous cod," continued the
stranger, in his listless way. "How quaint it would, be if one could carry
it about like a lantern, or have little sprats for candles. Some of the
seabeasts would really be very pretty like lampshades; the blue sea-snail that
glitters all over like starlight; and some of the red starfish really shine
like red stars. But, naturally, I’m not looking for them here."
March thought of asking
him what he was looking for; but, feeling unequal to a technical discussion at
least as deep as the deep-sea fishes, he returned to more ordinary topics.
"Delightful sort
of hole this is," he said. "This little dell and river here. It’s
like those places Stevenson talks about, where something ought to happen."
"I know,"
answered the other. "I think it’s because the place itself, so to speak,
seems to happen and not merely to exist. Perhaps that’s what old Picasso and
some of the Cubists are trying to express by angles and jagged lines. Look at
that wall like low cliffs that juts forward just at right angles to the slope
of turf sweeping up to it. That’s like a silent collision. It’s like a breaker
and the back-wash of a wave."
March looked at the
low-browed crag overhanging the green slope and nodded. He was interested in a
man who turned so easily from the technicalities of science to those of art;
and asked him if he admired the new angular artists.
"As I feel it, the
Cubists are not Cubist enough," replied the stranger. "I mean they’re
not thick enough. By making things mathematical they make them thin. Take the
living lines out of that landscape, simplify it to a right angle, and you
flatten it out to a mere diagram on paper. Diagrams have their own beauty; but
it is of just the other sort, They stand for the unalterable things; the calm,
eternal, mathematical sort of truths; what somebody calls the ’white radiance
of’--"
He stopped, and before
the next word came something had happened almost too quickly and completely to
be realized. From behind the overhanging rock came a noise and rush like that
of a railway train; and a great motor car appeared. It topped the crest of
cliff, black against the sun, like a battle-chariot rushing to destruction in
some wild epic. March automatically put out his hand in one futile gesture, as
if to catch a falling tea-cup in a drawing-room.
For the fraction of a
flash it seemed to leave the ledge of rock like a flying ship; then the very
sky seemed to turn over like a wheel, and it lay a ruin amid the tall grasses
below, a line of gray smoke going up slowly from it into the silent air. A
little lower the figure of a man with gray hair lay tumbled down the steep
green slope, his limbs lying all at random, and his face turned away.
The eccentric fisherman
dropped his net and walked swiftly toward the spot, his new acquaintance
following him. As they drew near there seemed a sort of monstrous irony in the
fact that the dead machine was still throbbing and thundering as busily as a
factory, while the man lay so still.
He was unquestionably
dead. The blood flowed in the grass from a hopelessly fatal fracture at the
back of the skull; but the face, which was turned to the sun, was uninjured and
strangely arresting in itself. It was one of those cases of a strange face so
unmistakable as to feel familiar. We feel, somehow, that we ought to recognize
it, even though we do not. It was of the broad, square sort with great jaws,
almost like that of a highly intellectual ape; the wide mouth shut so tight as
to be traced by a mere line; the nose short with the sort of nostrils that seem
to gape with an appetite for the air. The oddest thing about the face was that
one of the eyebrows was cocked up at a much sharper angle than the other. March
thought he had never seen a face so naturally alive as that dead one. And its
ugly energy seemed all the stranger for its halo of hoary hair. Some papers lay
half fallen out of the pocket, and from among them March extracted a card-case.
He read the name on the card aloud.
"Sir Humphrey
Turnbull. I’m sure I’ve heard that name somewhere."
His companion only gave
a sort of a little sigh and was silent for a moment, as if ruminating, then he
merely said, "The poor fellow is quite gone," and added some
scientific terms in which his auditor once more found himself out of his depth.
"As things
are," continued the same curiously well-informed person, "it will be
more legal for us to leave the body as it is until the police are informed. In
fact, I think it will be well if nobody except the police is informed. Don’t be
surprised if I seem to be keeping it dark from some of our neighbors round
here." Then, as if prompted to regularize his rather abrupt confidence, he
said: "I’ve come down to see my cousin at Torwood; my name is Horne
Fisher. Might be a pun on my pottering about here, mightn’t it?"
"Is Sir Howard
Horne your cousin?" asked March. "I’m going to Torwood Park to see
him myself; only about his public work, of course, and the wonderful stand he
is making for his principles. I think this Budget is the greatest thing in
English history. If it fails, it will be the most heroic failure in English
history. Are you an admirer of your great kinsman, Mr. Fisher?"
"Rather,"
said Mr. Fisher. "He’s the best shot I know."
Then, as if sincerely
repentant of his nonchalance, he added, with a sort of enthusiasm:
"No, but really,
he’s a BEAUTIFUL shot."
As if fired by his own
words, he took a sort of leap at the ledges of the rock above him, and scaled
them with a sudden agility in startling contrast to his general lassitude. He
had stood for some seconds on the headland above, with his aquiline profile
under the Panama hat relieved against the sky and peering over the countryside
before his companion had collected himself sufficiently to scramble up after
him.
The level above was a
stretch of common turf on which the tracks of the fated car were plowed plainly
enough; but the brink of it was broken as with rocky teeth; broken boulders of
all shapes and sizes lay near the edge; it was almost incredible that any one
could have deliberately driven into such a death trap, especially in broad
daylight.
"I can’t make head
or tail of it," said March. "Was he blind? Or blind drunk?"
"Neither, by the
look of him," replied the other.
"Then it was
suicide."
"It doesn’t seem a
cozy way of doing it," remarked the man called Fisher. "Besides, I
don’t fancy poor old Puggy would commit suicide, somehow."
"Poor old
who?" inquired the wondering journalist., "Did you know this
unfortunate man?"
"Nobody knew him
exactly," replied Fisher, with some vagueness. "But one KNEW him, of
course. He’d been a terror in his time, in Parliament and the courts, and so
on; especially in that row about the aliens who were deported as undesirables,
when he wanted one of ’em hanged for murder. He was so sick about it that he
retired from the bench. Since then he mostly motored about by himself; but he
was coming to Torwood, too, for the week-end; and I don’t see why he should
deliberately break his neck almost at the very door. I believe Hoggs--I mean my
cousin Howard--was coming down specially to meet him."
"Torwood Park
doesn’t belong to your cousin?" inquired March.
"No; it used to
belong to the Winthrops, you know," replied the other. "Now a new man’s
got it; a man from Montreal named Jenkins. Hoggs comes for the shooting; I told
you he was a lovely shot."
This repeated eulogy on
the great social statesman affected Harold March as if somebody had defined
Napoleon as a distinguished player of nap. But he had another half-formed
impression struggling in this flood of unfamiliar things, and he brought it to
the surface before it could vanish.
"Jenkins," he
repeated. "Surely you don’t mean Jefferson Jenkins, the social reformer? I
mean the man who’s fighting for the new cottage-estate scheme. It would be as
interesting to meet him as any Cabinet Minister in the world, if you’ll excuse
my saying so."
"Yes; Hoggs told
him it would have to be cottages," said Fisher. "He said the breed of
cattle had improved too often, and people were beginning to laugh. And, of
course, you must hang a peerage on to something; though the poor chap hasn’t
got it yet. Hullo, here’s somebody else."
They had started
walking in the tracks of the car, leaving it behind them in the hollow, still
humming horribly like a huge insect that had killed a man. The tracks took them
to the corner of the road, one arm of which went on in the same line toward the
distant gates of the park. It was clear that the car had been driven down the
long straight road, and then, instead of turning with the road to the left, had
gone straight on over the turf to its doom. But it was not this discovery that
had riveted Fisher’s eye, but something even more solid. At the angle of the
white road a dark and solitary figure was standing almost as still as a finger
post. It was that of a big man in rough shooting-clothes, bareheaded, and with
tousled curly hair that gave him a rather wild look. On a nearer approach this
first more fantastic impression faded; in a full light the figure took on more
conventional colors, as of an ordinary gentleman who happened to have come out
without a hat and without very studiously brushing his hair. But the massive
stature remained, and something deep and even cavernous about the setting of
the eyes redeemed. his animal good looks from the commonplace. But March had no
time to study the man more closely, for, much to his astonishment, his guide
merely observed, "Hullo, Jack!" and walked past him as if he had
indeed been a signpost, and without attempting to inform him of the catastrophe
beyond the rocks. It was relatively a small thing, but it was only the first in
a string of singular antics on which his new and eccentric friend was leading
him.
The man they had passed
looked after them in rather a suspicious fashion, but Fisher continued serenely
on his way along the straight road that ran past the gates of the great estate.
"That’s John
Burke, the traveler," he condescended to explain. "I expect you’ve
heard of him; shoots big game and all that. Sorry I couldn’t stop to introduce
you, but I dare say you’ll meet him later on."
"I know his book,
of course," said March, with renewed interest. "That is certainly a
fine piece of description, about their being only conscious of the closeness of
the elephant when the colossal head blocked out the moon."
"Yes, young
Halkett writes jolly well, I think. What? Didn’t you know Halkett wrote Burke’s
book for him? Burke can’t use anything except a gun; and you can’t write with
that. Oh, he’s genuine enough in his way, you know, as brave as a lion, or a
good deal braver by all accounts."
"You seem to know
all about him," observed March, with a rather bewildered laugh, "and
about a good many other people."
Fisher’s bald brow
became abruptly corrugated, and a curious expression came into his eyes.
"I know too
much," he said. "That’s what’s the matter with me. That’s what’s the
matter with all of us, and the whole show; we know too much. Too much about one
another; too much about ourselves. That’s why I’m really interested, just now,
about one thing that I don’t know."
"And that
is?" inquired the other.
"Why that poor
fellow is dead."
They had walked along
the straight road for nearly a mile, conversing at intervals in this fashion;
and March had a singular sense of the whole world being turned inside out. Mr.
Horne Fisher did not especially abuse his friends and relatives in fashionable
society; of some of them he spoke with affection. But they seemed to be an
entirely new set of men and women, who happened to have the same nerves as the
men and women mentioned most often in the newspapers. Yet no fury of revolt
could have seemed to him more utterly revolutionary than this cold familiarity.
It was like daylight on the other side of stage scenery.
They reached the great
lodge gates of the park, and, to March’s surprise, passed them and continued
along the interminable white, straight road. But he was himself too early for
his appointment with Sir Howard, and was not disinclined to see the end of his
new friend’s experiment, whatever it might be. They had long left the moorland
behind them, and half the white road was gray in the great shadow of the
Torwood pine forests, themselves like gray bars shuttered against the sunshine
and within, amid that clear noon, manufacturing their own midnight. Soon,
however, rifts began to appear in them like gleams of colored windows; the
trees thinned and fell away as the road went forward, showing the wild,
irregular copses in which, as Fisher said, the house-party had been blazing
away all day. And about two hundred yards farther on they came to the first
turn of the road.
At the corner stood a
sort of decayed inn with the dingy sign of The Grapes. The signboard was dark
and indecipherable by now, and hung black against the sky and the gray moorland
beyond, about as inviting as a gallows. March remarked that it looked like a
tavern for vinegar instead of wine.
"A good
phrase," said Fisher, "and so it would be if you were silly enough to
drink wine in it. But the beer is very good, and so is the brandy."
March followed him to
the bar parlor with some wonder, and his dim sense of repugnance was not
dismissed by the first sight of the innkeeper, who was widely different from
the genial innkeepers of romance, a bony man, very silent behind a black
mustache, but with black, restless eyes. Taciturn as he was, the investigator
succeeded at last in extracting a scrap of information from him, by dint of
ordering beer and talking to him persistently and minutely on the subject of
motor cars. He evidently regarded the innkeeper as in some singular way an
authority on motor cars; as being deep in the secrets of the mechanism,
management, and mismanagement of motor cars; holding the man all the time with
a glittering eye like the Ancient Mariner. Out of all this rather mysterious
conversation there did emerge at last a sort of admission that one particular
motor car, of a given description, had stopped before the inn about an hour
before, and that an elderly man had alighted, requiring some mechanical
assistance. Asked if the visitor required any other assistance, the innkeeper
said shortly that the old gentleman had filled his flask and taken a packet of
sandwiches. And with these words the somewhat inhospitable host had walked
hastily out of the bar, and they heard him banging doors in the dark interior.
Fisher’s weary eye
wandered round the dusty and dreary inn parlor and rested dreamily on a glass
case containing a stuffed bird, with a gun hung on hooks above it, which seemed
to be its only ornament.
"Puggy was a
humorist," he observed, "at least in his own rather grim style. But
it seems rather too grim a joke for a man to buy a packet of sandwiches when he
is just going to commit suicide."
"If you come to
that," answered March, "it isn’t very usual for a man to buy a packet
of sandwiches when he’s just outside the door of a grand house he’s going to
stop at."
"No . . .
no," repeated Fisher, almost mechanically; and then suddenly cocked his
eye at his interlocutor with a much livelier expression.
"By Jove! that’s
an idea. You’re perfectly right. And that suggests a very queer idea, doesn’t
it?"
There was a silence,
and then March started with irrational nervousness as the door of the inn was
flung open and another man walked rapidly to the counter. He had struck it with
a coin and called out for brandy before he saw the other two guests, who were
sitting at a bare wooden table under the window. When he turned about with a
rather wild stare, March had yet another unexpected emotion, for his guide
hailed the man as Hoggs and introduced him as Sir Howard Horne.
He looked rather older
than his boyish portraits in the illustrated papers, as is the way of
politicians; his flat, fair hair was touched with gray, but his face was almost
comically round, with a Roman nose which, when combined with his quick, bright
eyes, raised a vague reminiscence of a parrot. He had a cap rather at the back
of his head and a gun under his arm. Harold March had imagined many things
about his meeting with the great political reformer, but he had never pictured
him with a gun under his arm, drinking brandy in a public house.
"So you’re
stopping at Jink’s, too," said Fisher. "Everybody seems to be at Jink’s."
"Yes,"
replied the Chancellor of the Exchequer. "Jolly good shooting. At least
all of it that isn’t Jink’s shooting. I never knew a chap with such good
shooting that was such a bad shot. Mind you, he’s a jolly good fellow and all
that; I don’t say a word against him. But he never learned to hold a gun when
he was packing pork or whatever he did. They say he shot the cockade off his
own servant’s hat; just like him to have cockades, of course. He shot the
weathercock off his own ridiculous gilded summerhouse. It’s the only cock he’ll
ever kill, I should think. Are you coming up there now?"
Fisher said, rather
vaguely, that he was following soon, when he had fixed something up; and the
Chancellor of the Exchequer left the inn. March fancied he had been a little
upset or impatient when he called for the brandy; but he had talked himself
back into a satisfactory state, if the talk had not been quite what his
literary visitor had expected. Fisher, a few minutes afterward, slowly led the
way out of the tavern and stood in the middle of the road, looking down in the
direction from which they had traveled. Then he walked back about two hundred
yards in that direction and stood still again.
"I should think
this is about the place," he said.
"What place?"
asked his companion.
"The place where
the poor fellow was killed," said Fisher, sadly.
"What do you
mean?" demanded March.
"He was smashed up
on the rocks a mile and a half from here."
"No, he wasn’t,"
replied Fisher. "He didn’t fall on the rocks at all. Didn’t you notice
that he only fell on the slope of soft grass underneath? But I saw that he had
a bullet in him already."
Then after a pause he
added:
"He was alive at
the inn, but he was dead long before he came to the rocks. So he was shot as he
drove his car down this strip of straight road, and I should think somewhere
about here. After that, of course, the car went straight on with nobody to stop
or turn it. It’s really a very cunning dodge in its way; for the body would be
found far away, and most people would say, as you do, that it was an accident
to a motorist. The murderer must have been a clever brute."
"But wouldn’t the
shot be heard at the inn or somewhere?" asked March.
"It would be
heard. But it would not be noticed. That," continued the investigator,
"is where he was clever again. Shooting was going on all over the place
all day; very likely he timed his shot so as to drown it in a number of others.
Certainly he was a first-class criminal. And he was something else as
well."
"What do you
mean?" asked his companion, with a creepy premonition of something coming,
he knew not why.
"He was a
first-class shot," said Fisher. He had turned his back abruptly and was
walking down a narrow, grassy lane, little more than a cart track, which lay
opposite the inn and marked the end of the great estate and the beginning of
the open moors. March plodded after him with the same idle perseverance, and
found him staring through a gap in giant weeds and thorns at the flat face of a
painted paling. From behind the paling rose the great gray columns of a row of
poplars, which filled the heavens above them with dark-green shadow and shook
faintly in a wind which had sunk slowly into a breeze. The afternoon was
already deepening into evening, and the titanic shadows of the poplars
lengthened over a third of the landscape.
"Are you a
first-class criminal?" asked Fisher, in a friendly tone. "I’m afraid
I’m not. But I think I can manage to be a sort of fourth-rate burglar."
And before his
companion could reply he had managed to swing himself up and over the fence;
March followed without much bodily effort, but with considerable mental
disturbance. The poplars grew so close against the fence that they had some
difficulty in slipping past them, and beyond the poplars they could see only a
high hedge of laurel, green and lustrous in the level sun. Something in this
limitation by a series of living walls made him feel as if he were really
entering a shattered house instead of an open field. It was as if he came in by
a disused door or window and found the way blocked by furniture. When they had
circumvented the laurel hedge, they came out on a sort of terrace of turf,
which fell by one green step to an oblong lawn like a bowling green. Beyond
this was the only building in sight, a low conservatory, which seemed far away
from anywhere, like a glass cottage standing in its own fields in fairyland.
Fisher knew that lonely look of the outlying parts of a great house well
enough. He realized that it is more of a satire on aristocracy than if it were
choked with weeds and littered with ruins. For it is not neglected and yet it
is deserted; at any rate, it is disused. It is regularly swept and garnished
for a master who never comes.
Looking over the lawn,
however, he saw one object which he had not apparently expected. It was a sort
of tripod supporting a large disk like the round top of a table tipped
sideways, and it was not until they had dropped on to the lawn and walked
across to look at it that March realized that it was a target. It was worn and
weatherstained; the gay colors of its concentric rings were faded; possibly it
had been set up in those far-off Victorian days when there was a fashion of
archery. March had one of his vague visions of ladies in cloudy crinolines and
gentlemen in outlandish hats and whiskers revisiting that lost garden like
ghosts.
Fisher, who was peering
more closely at the target, startled him by an exclamation.
"Hullo!" he
said. "Somebody has been peppering this thing with shot, after all, and
quite lately, too. Why, I believe old Jink’s been trying to improve his bad
shooting here."
"Yes, and it looks
as if it still wanted improving," answered March, laughing. "Not one
of these shots is anywhere near the bull’s-eye; they seem just scattered about
in the wildest way."
"In the wildest
way," repeated Fisher, still peering intently at the target. He seemed
merely to assent, but March fancied his eye was shining under its sleepy lid
and that he straightened his stooping figure with a strange effort.
"Excuse me a
moment," he said, feeling in his pockets. "I think I’ve got some of
my chemicals; and after that we’ll go up to the house." And he stooped
again over the target, putting something with his finger over each of the
shot-holes, so far as March could see merely a dull-gray smear. Then they went
through the gathering twilight up the long green avenues to the great house.
Here again, however,
the eccentric investigator did not enter by the front door. He walked round the
house until he found a window open, and, leaping into it, introduced his friend
to what appeared to be the gun-room. Rows of the regular instruments for
bringing down birds stood against the walls; but across a table in the window
lay one or two weapons of a heavier and more formidable pattern.
"Hullo I these are
Burke’s big-game rifles," said Fisher. "I never knew he kept them
here." He lifted one of them, examined it briefly, and put it down again,
frowning heavily. Almost as he did so a strange young man came hurriedly into
the room. He was dark and sturdy, with a bumpy forehead and a bulldog jaw, and
he spoke with a curt apology.
"I left Major
Burke’s guns here," he said, "and he wants them packed up. He’s going
away to-night."
And he carried off the
two rifles without casting a glance at the stranger; through the open window
they could see his short, dark figure walking away across the glimmering
garden. Fisher got out of the window again and stood looking after him.
"That’s Halkett,
whom I told you about," he said. "I knew he was a sort of secretary
and had to do with Burke’s papers; but I never knew he. had anything to do with
his guns. But he’s just the sort of silent, sensible little devil who might be
very good at anything; the sort of man you know for years before you find he’s
a chess champion."
He had begun to walk in
the direction of the disappearing secretary, and they soon came within sight of
the rest of the house-party talking and laughing on the lawn. They could see
the tall figure and loose mane of the lion-hunter dominating the little group.
"By the way,"
observed Fisher, "when we were talking about Burke and Halkett, I said
that a man couldn’t very well write with a gun. Well, I’m not so sure now. Did
you ever hear of an artist so clever that he could draw with a gun? There’s a
wonderful chap loose about here."
Sir Howard hailed
Fisher and his friend the journalist with almost boisterous amiability. The
latter was presented to Major Burke and Mr. Halkett and also (by way of a
parenthesis) to his host, Mr. Jenkins, a commonplace little man in loud tweeds,
whom everybody else seemed to treat with a sort of affection, as if he were a
baby.
The irrepressible
Chancellor of the Exchequer was still talking about the birds he had brought
down, the birds that Burke and Halkett had brought down, and the birds that
Jenkins, their host, had failed to bring down. It seemed to be a sort of
sociable monomania.
"You and your big
game," he ejaculated, aggressively, to Burke. "Why, anybody could
shoot big game. You want to be a shot to shoot small game."
"Quite so,"
interposed Horne Fisher. "Now if only a hippopotamus could fly up in the
air out of that bush, or you preserved flying elephants on the estate, why,
then--"
"Why even Jink
might hit that sort of bird," cried Sir Howard, hilariously slapping his
host on the back. "Even he might hit a haystack or a hippopotamus."
"Look here, you
fellows," said Fisher. "I want you to come along with me for a minute
and shoot at something else. Not a hippopotamus. Another kind of queer animal I’ve
found on the estate. It’s an animal with three legs and one eye, and it’s all
the colors of the rainbow."
"What the deuce
are you talking about?" asked Burke.
"You come along
and see," replied Fisher, cheerfully.
Such people seldom
reject anything nonsensical, for they are always seeking for somethingnew. They
gravely rearmed themselves fromthe gun-room and trooped along at the tail of
their guide, Sir Howard only pausing, in a sort of ecstasy, to point out the
celebrated gilt summerhouse on which the gilt weathercock still stood crooked.
It was dusk turning to dark by the time they reached the remote green by the
poplars and accepted the new and aimless game of shooting at the old mark.
The last light seemed
to fade from the lawn, and the poplars against the sunset were like great
plumes upon a purple hearse, when the futile procession finally curved round,
and came out in front of the target. Sir Howard again slapped his host on the
shoulder, shoving him playfully forward to take the first shot. The shoulder
and arm he touched seemed unnaturally stiff and angular. Mr. Jenkins was
holding his gun in an attitude more awkward than any that his satiric friends
had seen or expected.
At the same instant a
horrible scream seemed to come from nowhere. It was so unnatural and so
unsuited to the scene that it might have been made by some inhuman thing flying
on wings above them or eavesdropping in the dark woods beyond. But Fisher knew
that it had started and stopped on the pale lips of Jefferson Jenkins, of Montreal,
and no one at that moment catching sight of Jefferson Jenkins’s face would have
complained that it was commonplace. The next moment a torrent of guttural but
good-humored oaths came from Major Burke as he and the two other men saw what
was in front of them. The target stood up in the dim grass like a dark goblin
grinning at them, and it was literally grinning. It had two eyes like stars,
and in similar livid points of light were picked out the two upturned and open
nostrils and the two ends of the wide and tight mouth. A few white dots above
each eye indicated the hoary eyebrows; and one of them ran upward almost erect.
It was a brilliant caricature done in bright botted lines and March knew of
whom. It shone in the shadowy grass, smeared with sea fire as if one of the
submarine monsters had crawled into the twilight garden; but it had the head of
a dead man.
"It’s only
luminous paint," said Burke. "Old Fisher’s been having a joke with
that phosphorescent stuff of his."
"Seems to be meant
for old Puggy"’ observed Sir Howard. "Hits him off very well."
With that they all
laughed, except Jenkins. When they had all done, he made a noise like the first
effort of an animal to laugh, and Horne Fisher suddenly strode across to him
and said:
"Mr. Jenkins, I
must speak to you at once in private."
It was by the little
watercourse in the moors, on the slope under the hanging rock, that March met
his new friend Fisher, by appointment, shortly after the ugly and almost
grotesque scene that had broken up the group in the garden.
"It was a
monkey-trick of mine," observed Fisher, gloomily, "putting phosphorus
on the target; but the only chance to make him jump was to give him the horrors
suddenly. And when he saw the face he’d shot at shining on the target he
practiced on, all lit up with an infernal light, he did jump. Quite enough for
my own intellectual satisfaction."
"I’m afraid I don’t
quite understand even now," said March, "exactly what he did or why
he did it."
"You ought
to," replied Fisher, with his rather dreary smile, "for you gave me
the first suggestion yourself. Oh yes, you did; and it was. a very shrewd one.
You said a man wouldn’t take sandwiches with him to dine at a great house. It
was quite true; and the inference was that, though he was going there, he didn’t
mean to dine there. Or, at any rate, that he might not be dining there. It
occurred to me at once that he probably expected the visit to be unpleasant, or
the reception doubtful, or something that would prevent his accepting hospitality.
Then it struck me that Turnbull was a terror to certain shady characters in the
past, and that he had come down to identify and denounce one of them. The
chances at the start pointed to the host--that is, Jenkins. I’m morally certain
now that Jenkins was the undesirable alien Turnbull wanted to convict in
another shooting-affair, but you see the shooting gentleman had another shot in
his locker."
"But you said he
would have to be a very good shot," protested March.
"Jenkins is a very
good shot," said Fisher. "A very good shot who can pretend to be a
very bad shot. Shall I tell you the second hint I hit on, after yours, to make
me think it was Jenkins? It was my cousin’s account of his bad shooting. He’d
shot a cockade off a hat and a weathercock off a building. Now, in fact, a man
must shoot very well indeed to shoot so badly as that. He must shoot very
neatly to hit the cockade and not the head, or even the hat. If the shots had
really gone at random, the chances are a thousand to one that they would not
have hit such prominent and picturesque objects. They were chosen because they
were prominent and picturesque objects. They make a story to go the round of
society. He keeps the crooked weathercock in the summerhouse to perpetuate the
story of a legend. And then he lay in wait with his evil eye and wicked gun,
safely ambushed behind the legend of his own incompetence.
"But there is more
than that. There is the summerhouse itself. I mean there is the whole thing.
There’s all that Jenkins gets chaffed about, the gilding and the gaudy colors
and all the vulgarity that’s supposed to stamp him as an upstart. Now, as a
matter of fact, upstarts generally don’t do this. God knows there’s enough of ’em
in society; and one knows ’em well enough. And this is the very last thing they
do. They’re generally only too keen to know the right thing and do it; and they
instantly put themselves body and soul into the hands of art decorators and art
experts, who do the whole thing for them. There’s hardly another millionaire
alive who has the moral courage to have a gilt monogram on a chair like that
one in the gun-room. For that matter, there’s the name as well as the monogram.
Names like Tompkins and Jenkins and Jinks are funny without being vulgar; I
mean they are vulgar without being common. If you prefer it, they are
commonplace without being common. They are just the names to be chosen to LOOK
ordinary, but they’re really rather extraordinary. Do you know many people
called Tompkins? It’s a good deal rarer than Talbot. It’s pretty much the same
with the comic clothes of the parvenu. Jenkins dresses like a character in
Punch. But that’s because he is a character in Punch. I mean he’s a fictitious
character. He’s a fabulous animal. He doesn’t exist.
"Have you ever considered
what it must be like to be a man who doesn’t exist? I mean to be a man with a
fictitious character that he has to keep up at the expense not merely of
personal talents: To be a new kind of hypocrite hiding a talent in a new kind
of napkin. This man has chosen his hypocrisy very ingeniously; it was really a
new one. A subtle villain has dressed up as a dashing gentleman and a worthy
business man and a philanthropist and a saint; but the loud checks of a comical
little cad were really rather a new disguise. But the disguise must be very
irksome to a man who can really do things. This is a dexterous little
cosmopolitan guttersnipe who can do scores of things, not only shoot, but draw
and paint, and probably play the fiddle. Now a man like that may find the
hiding of his talents useful; but he could never help wanting to use them where
they were useless. If he can draw, he will draw absent-mindedly on blotting
paper. I suspect this rascal has often drawn poor old Puggy’s face on blotting
paper. Probably he began doing it in blots as he afterward did it in dots, or
rather shots. It was the same sort of thing; he found a disused target in a
deserted yard and couldn’t resist indulging in a little secret shooting, like
secret drinking. You thought the shots all scattered and irregular, and so they
were; but not accidental. No two distances were alike; but the different points
were exactly where he wanted to put them. There’s nothing needs such
mathematical precision as a wild caricature. I’ve dabbled a little in drawing
myself, and I assure you that to put one dot where you want it is a marvel with
a pen close to a piece of paper. It was a miracle to do it across a garden with
a gun. But a man who can work those miracles will always itch to work them, if
it’s only in the dark."
After a pause March
observed, thoughtfully, "But he couldn’t have brought him down like a bird
with one of those little guns."
"No; that was why
I went into the gun-room," replied Fisher. "He did it with one of
Burke’s rifles, and Burke thought he knew the sound of it. That’s why he rushed
out without a hat, looking so wild. He saw nothing but a car passing quickly,
which he followed for a little way, and then concluded he’d made a
mistake."
There was another
silence, during which Fisher sat on a great stone as motionless as on their
first meeting, and watched the gray and silver river eddying past under the
bushes. Then March said, abruptly, "Of course he knows the truth
now."
"Nobody knows the
truth but you and I," answered Fisher, with a certain softening in his
voice. "And I don’t think you and I will ever quarrel."
"What do you
mean?" asked March, in an altered accent. "What have you done about
it?"
Horne Fisher continued
to gaze steadily at the eddying stream. At last he said, "The police have
proved it was a motor accident."
"But you know it
was not."
"I told you that I
know too much," replied Fisher, with his eye on the river. "I know
that, and I know a great many other things. I know the atmosphere and the way
the whole thing works. I know this fellow has succeeded in making himself
something incurably commonplace and comic. I know you can’t get up a
persecution of old Toole or Little Tich. If I were to tell Hoggs or Halkett
that old Jink was an assassin, they would almost die of laughter before my
eyes. Oh, I don’t say their laughter’s quite innocent, though it’s genuine in
its way. They want old Jink, and they couldn’t do without him. I don’t say I’m
quite innocent. I like Hoggs; I don’t want him to be down and out; and he’d be
done for if Jink can’t pay for his coronet. They were devilish near the line at
the last election. But the only real objection to it is that it’s impossible.
Nobody would believe it; it’s not in the picture. The crooked weathercock would
always turn it into a joke."
"Don’t you think
this is infamous?" asked March, quietly.
"I think a good
many things," replied the other. "If you people ever happen to blow
the whole tangle of society to hell with dynamite, I don’t know that the human
race will be much the worse. But don’t be too hard on me merely because I know
what society is. That’s why I moon away my time over things like stinking
fish."
There was a pause as he
settled himself down again by the stream; and then he added:
"I told you before
I had to throw back the big fish."
This tale begins among
a tangle of tales round a name that is at once recent and legendary. The name
is that of Michael O’Neill, popularly called Prince Michael, partly because he
claimed descent from ancient Fenian princes, and partly because he was credited
with a plan to make himself prince president of Ireland, as the last Napoleon
did of France. He was undoubtedly a gentleman of honorable pedigree and of many
accomplishments, but two of his accomplishments emerged from all the rest. He
had a talent for appearing when he was not wanted and a talent for disappearing
when he was wanted, especially when he was wanted by the police. It may be
added that his disappearances were more dangerous than his appearances. In the
latter he seldom went beyond the sensational-- pasting up seditious placards,
tearing down official placards, making flamboyant speeches, or unfurling
forbidden flags. But in order to effect the former he would sometimes fight for
his freedom with startling energy, from which men were sometimes lucky to
escape with a broken head instead of a broken neck. His most famous feats of
escape, however, were due to dexterity and not to violence. On a cloudless
summer morning he had come down a country road white with dust, and, pausing
outside a farmhouse, had told the farmer’s daughter, with elegant indifference,
that the local police were in pursuit of him. The girl’s name was Bridget
Royce, a somber and even sullen type of beauty, and she looked at him darkly,
as if in doubt, and said, "Do you want me to hide you?" Upon which he
only laughed, leaped lightly over the stone wall, and strode toward the farm,
merely throwing over his shoulder the remark, "Thank you, I have generally
been quite capable of hiding myself." In which proceeding he acted with a
tragic ignorance of the nature of women; and there fell on his path in that
sunshine a shadow of doom.
While he disappeared
through the farmhouse the girl remained for a few moments looking up the road,
and two perspiring policemen came plowing up to the door where she stood.
Though still angry, she was still silent, and a quarter of an hour later the
officers had searched the house and were already inspecting the kitchen garden
and cornfield behind it. In the ugly reaction of her mood she might have been
tempted even to point out the fugitive, but for a small difficulty that she had
no more notion than the policemen had of where he could possibly have gone. The
kitchen garden was inclosed by a very low wall, and the cornfield beyond lay
aslant like a square patch on a great green hill on which he could still have
been seen even as a dot in the distance. Everything stood solid in its familiar
place; the apple tree was too small to support or hide a climber; the only shed
stood open and obviously empty; there was no sound save the droning of summer
flies and the occasional flutter of a bird unfamiliar enough to be surprised by
the scarecrow in the field; there was scarcely a shadow save a few blue lines that
fell from the thin tree; every detail was picked out by the brilliant day light
as if in a microscope. The girl described the scene later, with all the
passionate realism of her race, and, whether or no the policemen had a similar
eye for the picturesque, they had at least an eye for the facts of the case,
and were compelled to give up the chase and retire from the scene. Bridget
Royce remained as if in a trance, staring at the sunlit garden in which a man
had just vanished like a fairy. She was still in a sinister mood, and the
miracle took in her mind a character of unfriendliness and fear, as if the
fairy were decidedly a bad fairy. The sun upon the glittering garden depressed
her more than the darkness, but she continued to stare at it. Then the world
itself went half-witted and she screamed. The scarecrow moved in the sun light.
It had stood with its back to her in a battered old black hat and a tattered
garment, and with all its tatters flying, it strode away across the hill.
She did not analyze the
audacious trick by which the man had turned to his advantage the subtle effects
of the expected and the obvious; she was still under the cloud of more
individual complexities, and she noticed must of all that the vanishing
scarecrow did not even turn to look at the farm. And the fates that were
running so adverse to his fantastic career of freedom ruled that his next
adventure, though it had the same success in another quarter, should increase
the danger in this quarter. Among the many similar adventures related of him in
this manner it is also said that some days afterward another girl, named Mary
Cregan, found him concealed on the farm where she worked; and if the story is
true, she must also have had the shock of an uncanny experience, for when she
was busy at some lonely task in the yard she heard a voice speaking out of the
well, and found that the eccentric had managed to drop himself into the bucket
which was some little way below, the well only partly full of water. In this
case, however, he had to appeal to the woman to wind up the rope. And men say
it was when this news was told to the other woman that her soul walked over the
border line of treason.
Such, at least, were
the stories told of him in the countryside, and there were many more--as that
he had stood insolently in a splendid green dressing gown on the steps of a
great hotel, and then led the police a chase through a long suite of grand
apartments, and finally through his own bedroom on to a balcony that overhung
the river. The moment the pursuers stepped on to the balcony it broke under
them, and they dropped pell-mell into the eddying waters, while Michael, who
had thrown off his gown and dived, was able to swim away. It was said that he
had carefully cut away the props so that they would not support anything so
heavy as a policeman. But here again he was immediately fortunate, yet
ultimately unfortunate, for it is said that one of the men was drowned, leaving
a family feud which made a little rift in his popularity. These stories can now
be told in some detail, not because they are the most marvelous of his many
adventures, but because these alone were not covered with silence by the
loyalty of the peasantry. These alone found their way into official reports,
and it is these which three of the chief officials of the country were reading
and discussing when the more remarkable part of this story begins.
Night was far advanced
and the lights shone in the cottage that served for a temporary police station
near the coast. On one side of it were the last houses of the straggling
village, and on the other nothing but a waste moorland stretching away toward
the sea, the line of which was broken by no landmark except a solitary tower of
the prehistoric pattern still found in Ireland, standing up as slender as a
column, but pointed like a pyramid. At a wooden table in front of the window,
which normally looked out on this landscape, sat two men in plain clothes, but
with something of a military bearing, for indeed they were the two chiefs of
the detective service of that district. The senior of the two, both in age and
rank, was a sturdy man with a short white beard, and frosty eyebrows fixed in a
frown which suggested rather worry than severity.
His name was Morton,
and he was a Liverpool man long pickled in the Irish quarrels, and doing his
duty among them in a sour fashion not altogether unsympathetic. He had spoken a
few sentences to his companion, Nolan, a tall, dark man with a cadaverous
equine Irish face, when he seemed to remember something and touched a bell
which rang in another room. The subordinate he had summoned immediately
appeared with a sheaf of papers in his hand.
"Sit down,
Wilson," he said. "Those are the dispositions, I suppose."
"Yes,"
replied the third officer. "I think I’ve got all there is to be got out of
them, so I sent the people away."
"Did Mary Cregan
give evidence?" asked Morton, with a frown that looked a little heavier
than usual.
"No, but her
master did," answered the man called Wilson, who had flat, red hair and a
plain, pale face, not without sharpness. "I think he’s hanging round the
girl himself and is out against a rival. There’s always some reason of that
sort when we are told the truth about anything. And you bet the other girl told
right enough."
"Well, let’s hope
they’ll be some sort of use," remarked Nolan, in a somewhat hopeless
manner, gazing out into the darkness.
"Anything is to
the good," said Morton, "that lets us know anything about him."
"Do we know
anything about him?" asked the melancholy Irishman.
"We know one thing
about him," said Wilson, "and it’s the one thing that nobody ever
knew before. We know where be is."
"Are you
sure?" inquired Morton, looking at him sharply.
"Quite sure,"
replied his assistant. "At this very minute he is in that tower over there
by the shore. If you go near enough you’ll see the candle burning in the
window."
As he spoke the noise
of a horn sounded on the road outside, and a moment after they heard the
throbbing of a motor car brought to a standstill before the door. Morton
instantly sprang to his feet. tly sprang to his feet.
"Thank the Lord
that’s the car from Dublin," he said. "I can’t do anything without
special authority, not if he were sitting on the top of the tower and putting
out his tongue at us. But the chief can do what he thinks best."
He hurried out to the
entrance and was soon exchanging greetings with a big handsome man in a fur
coat, who brought into the dingy little station the indescribable glow of the
great cities and the luxuries of the great world.
For this was Sir Walter
Carey, an official of such eminence in Dublin Castle that nothing short of the
case of Prince Michael would have brought him on such a journey in the middle
of the night. But the case of Prince Michael, as it happened, was complicated
by legalism as well as lawlessness. On the last occasion he had escaped by a
forensic quibble and not, as usual, by a private escapade; and it was a question
whether at the moment he was amenable to the law or not. It might be necessary
to stretch a point, but a man like Sir Walter could probably stretch it as far
as he liked.
Whether he intended to
do so was a question to be considered. Despite the almost aggressive touch of
luxury in the fur coat, it soon became apparent that Sir Walter’s large leonine
head was for use as well as ornament, and he considered the matter soberly and
sanely enough. Five chairs were set round the plain deal table, for who should
Sir Walter bring with him but his young relative and secretary, Horne Fisher.
Sir Walter listened with grave attention, and his secretary with polite
boredom, to the string of episodes by which the police had traced the flying
rebel from the steps of the hotel to the solitary tower beside the sea. There
at least he was cornered between the moors and the breakers; and the scout sent
by Wilson reported him as writing under a solitary candle, perhaps composing
another of his tremendous proclamations. Indeed, it would have been typical of
him to choose it as the place in which finally to turn to bay. He had some
remote claim on it, as on a family castle; and those who knew him thought him
capable of imitating the primitive Irish chieftains who fell fighting against
the sea.
"I saw some
queer-looking people leaving as I came in," said Sir Walter Carey. "I
suppose they were your witnesses. But why do they turn up here at this time of
night?"
Morton smiled grimly.
"They come here by night because they would be dead men if they came here
by day. They are criminals committing a crime that is more horrible here than
theft or murder."
"What crime do you
mean?" asked the other, with some curiosity.
"They are helping
the law," said Morton.
There was a silence,
and Sir Walter considered the papers before him with an abstracted eye. At last
he spoke.
"Quite so; but
look here, if the local feeling is as lively as that there are a good many
points to consider. I believe the new Act will enable me to collar him now if I
think it best. But is it best? A serious rising would do us no good in
Parliament, and the government has enemies in England as well as Ireland. It
won’t do if I have done what looks a little like sharp practice, and then only
raised a revolution."
"It’s all the
other way," said the man called Wilson, rather quickly. "There won’t
be half so much of a revolution if you arrest him as there will if you leave
him loose for three days longer. But, anyhow, there can’t be anything nowadays
that the proper police can’t manage."
"Mr. Wilson is a
Londoner," said the Irish detective, with a smile.
"Yes, I’m a
cockney, all right," replied Wilson, "and I think I’m all the better
for that. Especially at this job, oddly enough."
Sir Walter seemed
slightly amused at the pertinacity of the third officer, and perhaps even more
amused at the slight accent with which he spoke, which rendered rather needless
his boast about his origin.
"Do you mean to
say," he asked, "that you know more about the business here because
you have come from London?"
"Sounds funny, I
know, but I do believe it," answered Wilson. "I believe these affairs
want fresh methods. But most of all I believe they want a fresh eye."
The superior officers
laughed, and the redhaired man went on with a slight touch of temper:
"Well, look at the
facts. See how the fellow got away every time, and you’ll understand what I
mean. Why was he able to stand in the place of the scarecrow, hidden by nothing
but an old hat? Because it was a village policeman who knew the scarecrow was
there, was expecting it, and therefore took no notice of it. Now I never expect
a scarecrow. I’ve never seen one in the street, and I stare at one when I see
it in the field. It’s a new thing to me and worth noticing. And it was just the
same when he hid in the well. You are ready to find a well in a place like
that; you look for a well, and so you don’t see it. I don’t look for it, and
therefore I do look at it."
"It is certainly
an idea," said Sir Walter, smiling, "but what about the balcony?
Balconies are occasionally seen in London."
"But not rivers
right under them, as if it was in Venice," replied Wilson.
"It is certainly a
new idea," repeated Sir Walter, with something like respect. He had all
the love of the luxurious classes for new ideas. But he also had a critical
faculty, and was inclined to think, after due reflection, that it was a true
idea as well.
Growing dawn had
already turned the window panes from black to gray when Sir Walter got abruptly
to his feet. The others rose also, taking this for a signal that the arrest was
to be undertaken. But their leader stood for a moment in deep thought, as if
conscious that he had come to a parting of the ways.
Suddenly the silence
was pierced by a long, wailing cry from the dark moors outside. The silence
that followed it seemed more startling than the shriek itself, and it lasted
until Nolan said, heavily:
" ’Tis the
banshee. Somebody is marked for the grave."
His long, large-featured
face was as pale as a moon, and it was easy to remember that he was the only
Irishman in the room.
"Well, I know that
banshee," said Wilson, cheerfully, "ignorant as you think I am of
these things. I talked to that banshee myself an hour ago, and I sent that
banshee up to the tower and told her to sing out like that if she could get a
glimpse of our friend writing his proclamation."
"Do you mean that
girl Bridget Royce?" asked Morton, drawing his frosty brows together.
"Has she turned king’s evidence to that extent?"
"Yes,"
answered Wilson. "I know very little of these local things, you tell me,
but I reckon an angry woman is much the same in all countries."
Nolan, however, seemed
still moody and unlike himself. "It’s an ugly noise and an ugly business
altogether," he said. "If it’s really the end of Prince Michael it
may well be the end of other things as well. When the spirit is on him he would
escape by a ladder of dead men, and wade through that sea if it were made of
blood."
"Is that the real
reason of your pious alarms?" asked Wilson, with a slight sneer.
The Irishman’s pale
face blackened with a new passion.
"I have faced as
many murderers in County Clare as you ever fought with in Clapham junction, Mr.
Cockney," he said.
"Hush, please,"
said Morton, sharply. "Wilson, you have no kind of right to imply doubt of
your superior’s conduct. I hope you will prove yourself as courageous and
trustworthy as he has always been."
The pale face of the
red-haired man seemed a shade paler, but he was silent and composed, and Sir
Walter went up to Nolan with marked courtesy, saying, "Shall we go outside
now, and get this business done?"
Dawn had lifted,
leaving a wide chasm of white between a great gray cloud and the great gray
moorland, beyond which the tower was outlined against the daybreak and the sea.
Something in its plain
and primitive shape vaguely suggested the dawn in the first days of the earth,
in some prehistoric time when even the colors were hardly created, when there
was only blank daylight between cloud and clay. These dead hues were relieved
only by one spot of gold-- the spark of the candle alight in the window of the
lonely tower, and burning on into the broadening daylight. As the group of
detectives, followed by a cordon of policemen, spread out into a crescent to
cut off all escape, the light in the tower flashed as if it were moved for a
moment, and then went out. They knew the man inside had realized the daylight
and blown out his candle.
"There are other
windows, aren’t there?" asked Morton, "and a door, of course,
somewhere round the corner? Only a round tower has no corners."
"Another example
of my small suggestion," observed Wilson, quietly. "That queer tower
was the first thing I saw when I came to these parts; and I can tell you a
little more about it--or, at any rate, the outside of it. There are four
windows altogether, one a little way from this one, but just out of sight.
Those are both on the ground floor, and so is the third on the other side,
making a sort of triangle. But the fourth is just above the third, and I
suppose it looks on an upper floor."
"It’s only a sort
of loft, reached by a ladder, said Nolan. "I’ve played in the place when I
was a child. It’s no more than an empty shell." And his sad face grew
sadder, thinking perhaps of the tragedy of his country and the part that he
played in it.
"The man must have
got a table and chair, at any rate," said Wilson, "but no doubt he
could have got those from some cottage. If I might make a suggestion, sir, I
think we ought to approach all the five entrances at once, so to speak. One of
us should go to the door and one to each window; Macbride here has a ladder for
the upper window."
Mr. Horne Fisher
languidly turned to his distinguished relative and spoke for the first time.
"I am rather a
convert to the cockney school of psychology," he said in an almost
inaudible voice.
The others seemed to
feel the same influence in different ways, for the group began to break up in
the manner indicated. Morton moved toward the window immediately in front of
them, where the hidden outlaw had just snuffed the candle; Nolan, a little
farther westward to the next window; while Wilson, followed by Macbride with
the ladder, went round to the two windows at the back. Sir Walter Carey himself,
followed by his secretary, began to walk round toward the only door, to demand
admittance in a more regular fashion.
"He will be armed,
of course," remarked Sir Walter, casually.
"By all
accounts," replied Horne Fisher, "he can do more with a candlestick
than most men with a pistol. But he is pretty sure to have the pistol,
too."
Even as he spoke the
question was answered with a tongue of thunder. Morton had just placed himself
in front of the nearest window, his broad shoulders. blocking the aperture. For
an instant it was lit from within as with red fire, followed by a thundering
throng of echoes. The square shoulders seemed to alter in shape, and the sturdy
figure collapsed among the tall, rank grasses at the foot of the tower. A puff
of smoke floated from the window like a little cloud. The two men behind rushed
to the spot and raised him, but he was dead.
Sir Walter straightened
himself and called out something that was lost in another noise of firing; it
was possible that the police were already avenging their comrade from the other
side. Fisher had already raced round to the next window, and a new cry of
astonishment from him brought his patron to the same spot. Nolan, the Irish
policeman, had also fallen, sprawling all his great length in the grass, and it
was red with his blood. He was still alive when they reached him, but there was
death on his face, and he was only able to make a final gesture telling them
that all was over; and, with a broken word and a heroic effort, motioning them
on to where his other comrades were besieging the back of the tower. Stunned by
these rapid and repeated shocks, the two men could only vaguely obey the
gesture, and, finding their way to the other windows at the back, they
discovered a scene equally startling, if less final and tragic. The other two
officers were not dead or mortally wounded, but Macbride lay with a broken leg
and his ladder on top of him, evidently thrown down from the top window of the
tower; while Wilson lay on his face, quite still as if stunned, with his red
head among the gray and silver of the sea holly. In him, however, the impotence
was but momentary, for he began to move and rise as the others came round the
tower.
"My God! it’s like
an explosion!" cried Sir Walter; and indeed it was the only word for this
unearthly energy, by which one man had been able to deal death or destruction
on three sides of the same small triangle at the same instant.
Wilson had already
scrambled to his feet and with splendid energy flew again at the window,
revolver in hand. He fired twice into the opening and then disappeared in his
own smoke; but the thud of his feet and the shock of a falling chair told them
that the intrepid Londoner had managed at last to leap into the room. Then
followed a curious silence; and Sir Walter, walking to the window through the
thinning smoke, looked into the hollow shell of the ancient tower. Except for
Wilson, staring around him, there was nobody there.
The inside of the tower
was a single empty room, with nothing but a plain wooden chair and a table on
which were pens, ink and paper, and the candlestick. Halfway up the high wall
there was a rude timber platform under the upper window, a small loft which was
more like a large shelf. It was reached only by a ladder, and it seemed to be
as bare as the bare walls. Wilson completed his survey of the place and then
went and stared at the things on the table. Then he silently pointed with his
lean forefinger at the open page of the large notebook. The writer had suddenly
stopped writing, even in the middle of a word.
"I said it was
like an explosion," said Sir Walter Carey at last. "And really the
man himself seems to have suddenly exploded. But he has blown himself up
somehow without touching the tower. He’s burst more like a bubble than a
bomb."
"He has touched
more valuable things than the tower," said Wilson, gloomily.
There was a long
silence, and then Sir Walter said, seriously: "Well, Mr. Wilson, I am not
a detective, and these unhappy happenings have left you in charge of that
branch of the business. We all lament the cause of this, but I should like to say
that I myself have the strongest confidence in your capacity for carrying on
the work. What do you think we should do next?"
Wilson seemed to rouse
himself from his depression and acknowledged the speaker’s words with a warmer
civility than he had hitherto shown to anybody. He called in a few of the
police to assist in routing out the interior, leaving the rest to spread
themselves in a search party outside.
"I think," he
said, "the first thing is to make quite sure about the inside of this
place, as it was hardly physically possible for him to have got outside. I
suppose poor Nolan would have brought in his banshee and said it was
supernaturally possible. But I’ve got no use for disembodied spirits when I’m
dealing with facts. And the facts before me are an empty tower with a ladder, a
chair, and a table."
"The
spiritualists," said Sir Walter, with a smile, "would say that
spirits could find a great deal of use for a table."
"I dare say they
could if the spirits were on the table--in a bottle," replied Wilson, with
a curl of his pale lip. "The people round here, when they’re all sodden up
with Irish whisky, may believe in such things. I think they want a little
education in this country."
Horne Fisher’s heavy
eyelids fluttered in a faint attempt to rise, as if he were tempted to a lazy
protest against the contemptuous tone of the investigator.
"The Irish believe
far too much in spirits to believe in spiritualism," he murmured.
"They know too much about ’em. If you want a simple and childlike faith in
any spirit that comes along you can get it in your favorite London."
"I don’t want to
get it anywhere," said Wilson, shortly. "I say I’m dealing with much
simpler things than your simple faith, with a table and a chair and a ladder.
Now what I want to say about them at the start is this. They are all three made
roughly enough of plain wood. But the table and the chair are fairly new and
comparatively clean. The ladder is covered with dust and there is a cobweb
under the top rung of it. That means that he borrowed the first two quite
recently from some cottage, as we supposed, but the ladder has been a long time
in this rotten old dustbin. Probably it was part of the original furniture, an
heirloom in this magnificent palace of the Irish kings."
Again Fisher looked at
him under his eyelids, but seemed too sleepy to speak, and Wilson went on with
his argument.
"Now it’s quite
clear that something very odd has just happened in this place. The chances are
ten to one, it seems to me, that it had something specially to do with this
place. Probably he came here because he could do it only here; it doesn’t seem
very inviting otherwise. But the man knew it of old; they say it belonged to
his family, so that altogether, I think, everything points to something in the construction
of the tower itself."
"Your reasoning
seems to me excellent," said Sir Walter, who was listening attentively.
"But what could it be?"
"You see now what
I mean about the ladder," went on the detective; "it’s the only old
piece of furniture here and the first thing that caught that cockney eye of
mine. But there is something else. That loft up there is a sort of lumber room
without any lumber. So far as I can see, it’s as empty as everything else; and,
as things are, I don’t see the use of the ladder leading to it. It seems to me,
as I can’t find anything unusual down here, that it might pay us to look up
there."
He got briskly off the
table on which he was sitting (for the only chair was allotted to Sir Walter)
and ran rapidly up the ladder to the platform above. He was soon followed by
the others, Mr. Fisher going last, however, with an appearance of considerable
nonchalance.
At this stage, however,
they were destined to disappointment; Wilson nosed in every corner like a
terrier and examined the roof almost in the posture of a fly, but half an hour
afterward they had to confess that they were still without a clew. Sir Walter’s
private secretary seemed more and more threatened with inappropriate slumber,
and, having been the last to climb up the ladder, seemed now to lack the energy
even to climb down again.
"Come along,
Fisher," called out Sir Walter from below, when the others had regained
the floor. "We must consider whether we’ll pull the whole place to pieces
to see what it’s made of."
"I’m coming in a
minute," said the voice from the ledge above their heads, a voice somewhat
suggestive of an articulate yawn.
"What are you
waiting for?" asked Sir Walter, impatiently. "Can you see anything
there?"
"Well, yes, in a
way," replied the voice, vaguely. "In fact, I see it quite plain
now."
"What is it?"
asked Wilson, sharply, from the table on which he sat kicking his heels
restlessly.
"Well, it’s a
man," said Horne Fisher.
Wilson bounded off the
table as if he had been kicked off it. "What do you mean?" he cried.
"How can you possibly see a man?"
"I can see him
through the window," replied the secretary, mildly. "I see him coming
across the moor. He’s making a bee line across the open country toward this
tower. He evidently means to pay us a visit. And, considering who it seems to
be, perhaps it would be more polite. if we were all at the door to receive
him." And in a leisurely manner the secretary came down the ladder.
"Who it seems to
be!" repeated Sir Walter in astonishment.
"Well, I think it’s
the man you call Prince Michael," observed Mr. Fisher, airily. "In
fact, I’m sure it is. I’ve seen the police portraits of him."
There was a dead
silence, and Sir Walter’s usually steady brain seemed to go round like a
windmill.
"But, hang it
all!" he said at last, "even supposing his own explosion could have
thrown him half a mile away, without passing through any of the windows, and
left him alive enough for a country walk-- even then, why the devil should he
walk in this direction? The murderer does not generally revisit the scene of
his crime so rapidly as all that."
"He doesn’t know
yet that it is the scene of his crime," answered Horne Fisher.
"What on earth do
you mean? You credit him with rather singular absence of mind."
"Well, the truth
is, it isn’t the scene of his crime," said Fisher, and went and looked out
of the window.
There was another
silence, and then Sir Walter said, quietly: "What sort of notion have you
really got in your head, Fisher? Have you developed a new theory about how this
fellow escaped out of the ring round him?"
"He never escaped
at all," answered the man at the window, without turning round. "He
never escaped out of the ring because he was never inside the ring. He was not
in this tower at all, at least not when we were surrounding it."
He turned and leaned
back against the window, but, in spite of his usual listless manner, they
almost fancied that the face in shadow was a little pale.
"I began to guess
something of the sort when we were some way from the tower," he said.
"Did you notice that sort of flash or flicker the candle gave before it
was extinguished? I was almost certain it was only the last leap the flame
gives when a candle burns itself out. And then I came into this room and I saw
that."
He pointed at the table
and Sir Walter caught his breath with a sort of curse at his own blindness. For
the candle in the candlestick had obviously burned itself away to nothing and
left him, mentally, at least, very completely in the dark.
"Then there is a
sort of mathematical question," went on Fisher, leaning back in his limp
way and looking up at the bare walls, as if tracing imaginary diagrams there.
"It’s not so easy for a man in the third angle to face the other two at
the same moment, especially if they are at the base of an isosceles. I am sorry
if it sounds like a lecture on geometry, but--"
"I’m afraid we
have no time for it," said Wilson, coldly. "If this man is really
coming back, I must give my orders at once."
"I think I’ll go
on with it, though," observed Fisher, staring at the roof with insolent
serenity.
"I must ask you,
Mr. Fisher, to let me conduct my inquiry on my own lines," said Wilson,
firmly. "I am the officer in charge now."
"Yes,"
remarked Horne Fisher, softly, but with an accent that somehow chilled the
hearer. "Yes. But why?"
Sir Walter was staring,
for he had never seen his rather lackadaisical young friend look like that
before. Fisher was looking at Wilson with lifted lids, and the eyes under them
seemed to have shed or shifted a film, as do the eyes of an eagle.
"Why are you the
officer in charge now?" he asked. "Why can you conduct the inquiry on
your own lines now? How did it come about, I wonder, that the elder officers
are not here to interfere with anything you do?"
Nobody spoke, and
nobody can say how soon anyone would have collected his wits to speak when a
noise came from without. It was the heavy and hollow sound of a blow upon the
door of the tower, and to their shaken spirits it sounded strangely like the hammer
of doom.
The wooden door of the
tower moved on its rusty hinges under the hand that struck it and Prince
Michael came into the room. Nobody had the smallest doubt about his identity.
His light clothes, though frayed with his adventures, were of fine and almost
foppish cut, and he wore a pointed beard, or imperial, perhaps as a further
reminiscence of Louis Napoleon; but he was a much taller and more graceful man
that his prototype. Before anyone could speak he had silenced everyone for an
instant with a slight but splendid gesture of hospitality.
"Gentlemen,"
he said, "this is a poor place now, but you are heartily welcome."
Wilson was the first to
recover, and he took a stride toward the newcomer.
"Michael O’Neill,
I arrest you in the king’s name for the murder of Francis Morton and James
Nolan. It is my duty to warn you--"
"No, no, Mr.
Wilson," cried Fisher, suddenly. "You shall not commit a third
murder."
Sir Walter Carey rose
from his chair, which fell over with a crash behind him. "What does all
this mean?" he called out in an authoritative manner.
"It means,"
said Fisher, "that this man, Hooker Wilson, as soon as he had put his head
in at that window, killed his two comrades who had put their heads in at the
other windows, by firing across the empty room. That is what it means. And if
you want to know, count how many times he is supposed to have fired and then
count the charges left in his revolver."
Wilson, who was still
sitting on the table, abruptly put a hand out for the weapon that lay beside
him. But the next movement was the most unexpected of all, for the prince
standing in the doorway passed suddenly from the dignity of a statue to the
swiftness of an acrobat and rent the revolver out of the detective’s hand.
"You dog!" he
cried. "So you are the type of English truth, as I am of Irish
tragedy--you who come to kill me, wading through the blood of your brethren. If
they had fallen in a feud on the hillside, it would be called murder, and yet
your sin might be forgiven you. But I, who am innocent, I was to be slain with
ceremony. There would belong speeches and patient judges listening to my vain
plea of innocence, noting down my despair and disregarding it. Yes, that is
what I call assassination. But killing may be no murder; there is one shot left
in this little gun, and I know where it should go."
Wilson turned quickly
on the table, and even as he turned he twisted in agony, for Michael shot him
through the body where he sat, so that he tumbled off the table like lumber.
The police rushed to
lift him; Sir Walter stood speechless; and then, with a strange and weary
gesture, Horne Fisher spoke.
"You are indeed a
type of the Irish tragedy," he said. "You were entirely in the right,
and you have put yourself in the wrong."
The prince’s face was
like marble for a space then there dawned in his eyes a light not unlike that
of despair. He laughed suddenly and flung the smoking pistol on the ground.
"I am indeed in
the wrong," he said. "I have committed a crime that may justly bring
a curse on me and my children."
Horne Fisher did not
seem entirely satisfied with this very sudden repentance; he kept his eyes on
the man and only said, in a low voice, "What crime do you mean?"
"I have helped
English justice," replied Prince Michael. "I have avenged your king’s
officers; I have done the work of his hangman. For that truly I deserve to be
hanged."
And he turned to the
police with a gesture that did not so much surrender to them, but rather
command them to arrest him.
This was the story that
Horne Fisher told to Harold March, the journalist, many years after, in a
little, but luxurious, restaurant near Picca dilly. He had invited March to
dinner some time after the affair he called "The Face in the Target,"
and the conversation had naturally turned on that mystery and afterward on
earlier memories of Fisher’s life and the way in which he was led to study such
problems as those of Prince Michael. Horne Fisher was fifteen years older; his
thin hair had faded to frontal baldness, and his long, thin hands dropped less
with affectation and more with fatigue. And he told the story of the Irish
adventure of his youth, because it recorded the first occasion on which he had
ever come in contact with crime, or discovered how darkly and how terribly
crime can be entangled with law.
"Hooker Wilson was
the first criminal I ever knew, and he was a policeman," explained Fisher,
twirling his wine glass. "And all my life has been a mixed-up business of
the sort. He was a man of very real talent, and perhaps genius, and well worth
studying, both as a detective and a criminal. His white face and red hair were
typical of him, for he was one of those who are cold and yet on fire for fame;
and he could control anger, but not ambition. He swallowed the snubs of his
superiors in that first quarrel, though he boiled with resentment; but when he
suddenly saw the two heads dark against the dawn and framed in the two windows,
he could not miss the chance, not only of revenge, but of the removal of the
two obstacles to his promotion. He was a dead shot and counted on silencing
both, though proof against him would have been hard in any case. But, as a
matter of fact, he had a narrow escape, in the case of Nolan, who lived just
long enough to say, ’Wilson’ and point. We thought he was summoning help for
his comrade, but he was really denouncing his murderer. After that it was easy
to throw down the ladder above him (for a man up a ladder cannot see clearly
what is below and behind) and to throw himself on the ground as another victim
of the catastrophe.
"But there was
mixed up with his murderous ambition a real belief, not only in his own
talents, but in his own theories. He did believe in what he called a fresh eye,
and he did want scope for fresh methods. There was something in his view, but
it failed where such things commonly fail, because the fresh eye cannot see the
unseen. It is true about the ladder and the scarecrow, but not about the life
and the soul; and he made a bad mistake about what a man like Michael would do
when he heard a woman scream. All Michael’s very vanity and vainglory made him
rush out at once; he would have walked into Dublin Castle for a lady’s glove.
Call it his pose or what you will, but he would have done it. What happened
when he met her is another story, and one we may never know, but from tales I’ve
heard since, they must have been reconciled. Wilson was wrong there; but there
was something, for all that, in his notion that the newcomer sees most, and
that the man on the spot may know too much to know anything. He was right about
some things. He was right about me."
"About you?"
asked Harold March in some wonder.
"I am the man who
knows too much to know anything, or, at any rate, to do anything," said
Horne Fisher. "I don’t mean especially about Ireland. I mean about
England. I mean about the whole way we are governed, and perhaps the only way
we can be governed. You asked me just now what became of the survivors of that
tragedy. Well, Wilson recovered and we managed to persuade him to retire. But
we had to pension that damnable murderer more magnificently than any hero who
ever fought for England. I managed to save Michael from the worst, but we had
to send that perfectly innocent man to penal servitude for a crime we know he
never committed, and it was only afterward that we could connive in a sneakish
way at his escape. And Sir Walter Carey is Prime Minister of this country,
which he would probably never have been if the truth had been told of such a
horrible scandal in his department. It might have done for us altogether in
Ireland; it would certainly have done for him. And he is my father’s old
friend, and has always smothered me with kindness. I am too tangled up with the
whole thing, you see, and I was certainly never born to set it right. You look
distressed, not to say shocked, and I’m not at all offended at it. Let us
change the subject by all means, if you like. What do you think of this
Burgundy? It’s rather a discovery of mine, like the restaurant itself."
And he proceeded to talk
learnedly and luxuriantly on all the wines of the world; on which subject,
also, some moralists would consider that he knew too much.
A large map of London
would be needed to display the wild and zigzag course of one day’s journey
undertaken by an uncle and his nephew; or, to speak more truly, of a nephew and
his uncle. For the nephew, a schoolboy on a holiday, was in theory the god in
the car, or in the cab, tram, tube, and so on, while his uncle was at most a
priest dancing before him and offering sacrifices. To put it more soberly, the
schoolboy had something of the stolid air of a young duke doing the grand tour,
while his elderly relative was reduced to the position of a courier, who
nevertheless had to pay for everything like a patron. The schoolboy was
officially known as Summers Minor, and in a more social manner as Stinks, the
only public tribute to his career as an amateur photographer and electrician.
The uncle was the Rev. Thomas Twyford, a lean and lively old gentleman with a
red, eager face and white hair. He was in the ordinary way a country clergyman,
but he was one of those who achieve the paradox of being famous in an obscure
way, because they are famous in an obscure world. In a small circle of ecclesiastical
archaeologists, who were the only people who could even understand one another’s
discoveries, he occupied a recognized and respectable place. And a critic might
have found even in that day’s journey at least as much of the uncle’s hobby as
of the nephew’s holiday.
His original purpose
had been wholly paternal and festive. But, like many other intelligent people,
he was not above the weakness of playing with a toy to amuse himself, on the
theory that it would amuse a child. His toys were crowns and miters and
croziers and swords of state; and he had lingered over them, telling himself
that the boy ought to see all the sights of London. And at the end of the day,
after a tremendous tea, he rather gave the game away by winding up with a visit
in which hardly any human boy could be conceived as taking an interest--an
underground chamber supposed to have been a chapel, recently excavated on the
north bank of the Thames, and containing literally nothing whatever but one old
silver coin. But the coin, to those who knew, was more solitary and splendid
than the Koh-i-noor. It was Roman, and was said to bear the head of St. Paul;
and round it raged the most vital controversies about the ancient British
Church. It could hardly be denied, however, that the controversies left Summers
Minor comparatively cold.
Indeed, the things that
interested Summers Minor, and the things that did not interest him, had
mystified and amused his uncle for several hours. He exhibited the English
schoolboy’s startling ignorance and startling knowledge--knowledge of some
special classification in which he can generally correct and confound his
elders. He considered himself entitled, at Hampton Court on a holiday, to
forget the very names of Cardinal Wolsey or William of Orange; but he could
hardly be dragged from some details about the arrangement of the electric bells
in the neighboring hotel. He was solidly dazed by Westminster Abbey, which is
not so unnatural since that church became the lumber room of the larger and
less successful statuary of the eighteenth century. But he had a magic and
minute knowledge of the Westminster omnibuses, and indeed of the whole omnibus
system of London, the colors and numbers of which he knew as a herald knows
heraldry. He would cry out against a momentary confusion between a light-green
Paddington and a dark-green Bayswater vehicle, as his uncle would at the
identification of a Greek ikon and a Roman image.
"Do you collect
omnibuses like stamps?" asked his uncle. "They must need a rather
large album. Or do you keep them in your locker?"
"I keep them in my
head," replied the nephew, with legitimate firmness.
"It does you
credit, I admit," replied the clergyman. "I suppose it were vain to
ask for what purpose you have learned that out of a thousand things. There
hardly seems to be a career in it, unless you could be permanently on the
pavement to prevent old ladies getting into the wrong bus. Well, we must get
out of this one, for this is our place. I want to show you what they call St.
Paul’s Penny."
"Is it like St.
Paul’s Cathedral?" asked the youth with resignation, as they alighted.
At the entrance their
eyes were arrested by a singular figure evidently hovering there with a similar
anxiety to enter. It was that of a dark, thin man in a long black robe rather
like a cassock; but the black cap on his head was of too strange a shape to be
a biretta. It suggested, rather, some archaic headdress of Persia or Babylon.
He had a curious black beard appearing only at the corners of his chin, and his
large eyes were oddly set in his face like the flat decorative eyes painted in
old Egyptian profiles. Before they had gathered more than a general impression
of him, he had dived into the doorway that was their own destination.
Nothing could be seen
above ground of the sunken sanctuary except a strong wooden hut, of the sort
recently run up for many military and official purposes, the wooden floor of
which was indeed a mere platform over the excavated cavity below. A soldier
stood as a sentry outside, and a superior soldier, an Anglo-Indian officer of
distinction, sat writing at the desk inside. Indeed, the sightseers soon found
that this particular sight was surrounded with the most extraordinary
precautions. I have compared the silver coin to the Koh-i-noor, and in one
sense it was even conventionally comparable, since by a historical accident it
was at one time almost counted among the Crown jewels, or at least the Crown
relics, until one of the royal princes publicly restored it to the shrine to
which it was supposed to belong. Other causes combined to concentrate official
vigilance upon it; there had been a scare about spies carrying explosives in
small objects, and one of those experimental orders which pass like waves over
bureaucracy had decreed first that all visitors should change their clothes for
a sort of official sackcloth, and then (when this method caused some murmurs)
that they should at least turn out their pockets. Colonel Morris, the officer
in charge, was a short, active man with a grim and leathery face, but a lively
and humorous eye-- a contradiction borne out by his conduct, for he at once
derided the safeguards and yet insisted on them.
"I don’t care a
button myself for Paul’s Penny, or such things," he admitted in answer to
some antiquarian openings from the clergyman who was slightly acquainted with
him, "but I wear the King’s coat, you know, and it’s a serious thing when
the King’s uncle leaves a thing here with his own hands under my charge. But as
for saints and relics and things, I fear I’m a bit of a Voltairian; what you
would call a skeptic."
"I’m not sure it’s
even skeptical to believe in the royal family and not in the ’Holy’
Family," replied Mr. Twyford. "But, of course, I can easily empty my
pockets, to show I don’t carry a bomb."
The little heap of the
parson’s possessions which he left on the table consisted chiefly of papers,
over and above a pipe and a tobacco pouch and some Roman and Saxon coins. The
rest were catalogues of old books, and pamphlets, like one entitled "The
Use of Sarum," one glance at which was sufficient both for the colonel and
the schoolboy. They could not see the use of Sarum at all. The contents of the
boy’s pockets naturally made a larger heap, and included marbles, a ball of
string, an electric torch, a magnet, a small catapult, and, of course, a large
pocketknife, almost to be described as a small tool box, a complex apparatus on
which he seemed disposed to linger, pointing out that it included a pair of
nippers, a tool for punching holes in wood, and, above all, an instrument for
taking stones out of a horse’s hoof. The comparative absence of any horse he
appeared to regard as irrelevant, as if it were a mere appendage easily
supplied. But when the turn came of the gentleman in the black gown, he did not
turn out his pockets, but merely spread out his hands.
"I have no
possessions," he said.
"I’m afraid I must
ask you to empty your pockets and make sure," observed the colonel,
gruffly.
"I have no
pockets," said the stranger.
Mr. Twyford was looking
at the long black gown with a learned eye.
"Are you a
monk?" he asked, in a puzzled fashion.
"I am a
magus," replied the stranger. "You have heard of the magi, perhaps? I
am a magician."
"Oh, I say!"
exclaimed Summers Minor, with prominent eyes.
"But I was once a
monk," went on the other. "I am what you would call an escaped monk.
Yes, I have escaped into eternity. But the monks held one truth at least, that
the highest life should be without possessions. I have no pocket money and no
pockets, and all the stars are my trinkets."
"They are out of
reach, anyhow," observed Colonel Morris, in a tone which suggested that it
was well for them. "I’ve known a good many magicians myself in
India--mango plant and all. But the Indian ones are all frauds, I’ll swear. In
fact, I had a good deal of fun showing them up. More fun than I have over this
dreary job, anyhow. But here comes Mr. Symon, who will show you over the old
cellar downstairs."
Mr. Symon, the official
guardian and guide, was a young man, prematurely gray, with a grave mouth which
contrasted curiously with a very small, dark mustache with waxed points, that
seemed somehow, separate from it, as if a black fly had settled on his face. He
spoke with the accent of Oxford and the permanent official, but in as dead a
fashion as the most indifferent hired guide. They descended a dark stone
staircase, at the floor of which Symon pressed a button and a door opened on a
dark room, or, rather, a room which had an instant before been dark. For almost
as the heavy iron door swung open an almost blinding blaze of electric lights
filled the whole interior. The fitful enthusiasm of Stinks at once caught fire,
and he eagerly asked if the lights and the door worked together.
"Yes, it’s all one
system," replied Symon. "It was all fitted up for the day His Royal
Highness deposited the thing here. You see, it’s locked up behind a glass case
exactly as he left it."
A glance showed that
the arrangements for guarding the treasure were indeed as strong as they were
simple. A single pane of glass cut off one corner of the room, in an iron
framework let into the rock walls and the wooden roof above; there was now no
possibility of reopening the case without elaborate labor, except by breaking
the glass, which would probably arouse the night watchman who was always within
a few feet of it, even if he had fallen asleep. A close examination would have
showed many more ingenious safeguards; but the eye of the Rev. Thomas Twyford,
at least, was already riveted on what interested him much more--the dull silver
disk which shone in the white light against a plain background of black velvet.
"St. Paul’s Penny,
said to commemorate the visit of St. Paul to Britain, was probably preserved in
this chapel until the eighth century," Symon was saying in his clear but
colorless voice. "In the ninth century it is supposed to have been carried
away by the barbarians, and it reappears, after the conversion of the northern
Goths, in the possession of the royal family of Gothland. His Royal Highness,
the Duke of Gothland, retained it always in his own private custody, and when
he decided to exhibit it to the public, placed it here with his own hand. It
was immediately sealed up in such a manner--"
Unluckily at this point
Summers Minor, whose attention had somewhat strayed from the religious wars of
the ninth century, caught sight of a short length of wire appearing in a broken
patch in the wall. He precipitated himself at it, calling out, "I say,
say, does that connect?"
It was evident that it
did connect, for no sooner had the boy given it a twitch than the whole room
went black, as if they had all been struck blind, and an instant afterward they
heard the dull crash of the closing door.
"Well, you’ve done
it now," said Symon, in his tranquil fashion. Then after a pause he added,
"I suppose they’ll miss us sooner or later, and no doubt they can get it
open; but it may take some little time."
There was a silence,
and then the unconquerable Stinks observed:
"Rotten that I had
to leave my electric torch."
"I think,"
said his uncle, with restraint, "that we are sufficiently convinced of
your interest in electricity."
Then after a pause he
remarked, more amiably: "I suppose if I regretted any of my own
impedimenta, it would be the pipe. Though, as a matter of fact, it’s not much
fun smoking in the dark. Everything seems different in the dark."
"Everything is
different in the dark," said a third voice, that of the man who called
himself a magician. It was a very musical voice, and rather in contrast with
his sinister and swarthy visage, which was now invisible. "Perhaps you don’t
know how terrible a truth that is. All you see are pictures made by the sun,
faces and furniture and flowers and trees. The things themselves may be quite
strange to you. Something else may be standing now where you saw a table or a
chair. The face of your friend may be quite different in the dark."
A short, indescribable
noise broke the stillness. Twyford started for a second, and then said,
sharply:
"Really, I don’t
think it’s a suitable occasion for trying to frighten a child."
"Who’s a
child?" cried the indignant Summers, with a voice that had a crow, but
also something of a crack in it. "And who’s a funk, either? Not me."
"I will be silent,
then," said the other voice out of the darkness. "But silence also
makes and unmakes."
The required silence
remained unbroken for a long time until at last the clergyman said to Symon in
a low voice:
"I suppose it’s
all right about air?"
"Oh, yes,"
replied the other aloud; "there’s a fireplace and a chimney in the office
just by the door."
A bound and the noise
of a falling chair told them that the irrepressible rising generation had once
more thrown itself across the room. They heard the ejaculation: "A
chimney! Why, I’ll be--" and the rest was lost in muffled, but exultant,
cries.
The uncle called
repeatedly and vainly, groped his way at last to the opening, and, peering up
it, caught a glimpse of a disk of daylight, which seemed to suggest that the
fugitive had vanished in safety. Making his way back to the group by the glass
case, he fell over the fallen chair and took a moment to collect himself again.
He had opened his mouth to speak to Symon, when he stopped, and suddenly found
himself blinking in the full shock of the white light, and looking over the
other man’s shoulder, he saw that the door was standing open.
"So they’ve got at
us at last," he observed to Symon.
The man in the black
robe was leaning against the wall some yards away, with a smile carved on his
face.
"Here comes
Colonel Morris," went on Twyford, still speaking to Symon. "One of us
will have to tell him how the light went out. Will you?"
But Symon still said
nothing. He was standing as still as a statue, and looking steadily at the
black velvet behind the glass screen. He was looking at the black velvet
because there was nothing else to look at. St. Paul’s Penny was gone.
Colonel Morris entered
the room with two new visitors; presumably two new sightseers delayed by the
accident. The foremost was a tall, fair, rather languid-looking man with a bald
brow and a high-bridged nose; his companion was a younger man with light, curly
hair and frank, and even innocent, eyes. Symon scarcely seemed to hear the
newcomers; it seemed almost as if he had not realized that the return of the
light revealed his brooding attitude. Then he started in a guilty fashion, and
when he saw the elder of the two strangers, his pale face seemed to turn a
shade paler.
"Why it’s Horne
Fisher!" and then after a pause he said in a low voice, "I’m in the
devil of a hole, Fisher."
"There does seem a
bit of a mystery to be cleared up," observed the gentleman so addressed.
"It will never be
cleared up," said the pale Symon. "If anybody could clear it up, you
could. But nobody could."
"I rather think I
could," said another voice from outside the group, and they turned in
surprise to realize that the man in the black robe had spoken again.
"You!" said
the colonel, sharply. "And how do you propose to play the detective?"
"I do not propose
to play the detective," answered the other, in a clear voice like a bell.
"I propose to play the magician. One of the magicians you show up in
India, Colonel."
No one spoke for a
moment, and then Horne Fisher surprised everybody by saying, "Well, let’s
go upstairs, and this gentleman can have a try."
He stopped Symon, who
had an automatic finger on the button, saying: "No, leave all the lights
on. It’s a sort of safeguard."
"The thing can’t
be taken away now," said Symon, bitterly.
"It can be put
back," replied Fisher.
Twyford had already run
upstairs for news of his vanishing nephew, and he received news of him in a way
that at once puzzled and reassured him. On the floor above lay one of those
large paper darts which boys throw at each other when the schoolmaster is out
of the room. It had evidently been thrown in at the window, and on being
unfolded displayed a scrawl of bad handwriting which ran: "Dear Uncle; I
am all right. Meet you at the hotel later on," and then the signature.
Insensibly comforted by
this, the clergyman found his thoughts reverting voluntarily to his favorite
relic, which came a good second in his sympathies to his favorite nephew, and
before he knew where he was he found himself encircled by the group discussing
its loss, and more or less carried away on the current of their excitement. But
an undercurrent of query continued to run in his mind, as to what had really
happened to the boy, and what was the boy’s exact definition of being all
right.
Meanwhile Horne Fisher
had considerably puzzled everybody with his new tone and attitude. He had
talked to the colonel about the military and mechanical arrangements, and
displayed a remarkable knowledge both of the details of discipline and the
technicalities of electricity. He had talked to the clergyman, and shown an
equally surprising knowledge of the religious and historical interests involved
in the relic. He had talked to the man who called himself a magician, and not
only surprised but scandalized the company by an equally sympathetic
familiarity with the most fantastic forms of Oriental occultism and psychic
experiment. And in this last and least respectable line of inquiry he was
evidently prepared to go farthest; he openly encouraged the magician, and was
plainly prepared to follow the wildest ways of investigation in which that
magus might lead him.
"How would you begin
now?" he inquired, with an anxious politeness that reduced the colonel to
a congestion of rage.
"It is all a
question of a force; of establishing communications for a force," replied
that adept, affably, ignoring some military mutterings about the police force.
"It is what you in the West used to call animal magnetism, but it is much
more than that. I had better not say how much more. As to setting about it, the
usual method is to throw some susceptible person into a trance, which serves as
a sort of bridge or cord of communication, by which the force beyond can give
him, as it were, an electric shock, and awaken his higher senses. It opens the
sleeping eye of the mind."
"I’m
suspectible," said Fisher, either with simplicity or with a baffling
irony. "Why not open my mind’s eye for me? My friend Harold March here
will tell you I sometimes see things, even in the dark."
"Nobody sees
anything except in the dark," said the magician.
Heavy clouds of sunset
were closing round the wooden hut, enormous clouds, of which only the corners*
could be seen in the little window, like purple horns and tails, almost as if
some huge monsters were prowling round the place. But the purple was already
deepening to dark gray; it would soon be night.
"Do not light the
lamp," said the magus with quiet authority, arresting a movement in that
direction. "I told you before that things happen only in the dark."
How such a topsy-turvy
scene ever came to be tolerated in the colonel’s office, of all places, was
afterward a puzzle in the memory of many, including the colonel. They recalled
it like a sort of nightmare, like something they could not control. Perhaps
there was really a magnetism about the mesmerist; perhaps there was even more
magnetism about the man mesmerized. Anyhow, the man was being mesmerized, for
Horne Fisher had collapsed into a chair with his long limbs loose and sprawling
and his eyes staring at vacancy; and the other man was mesmerizing him, making
sweeping movements with his darkly draped arms as if with black wings. The
colonel had passed the point of explosion, and he dimly realized that eccentric
aristocrats are allowed their fling. He comforted himself with the knowledge
that he had already sent for the police, who would break up any such
masquerade, and with lighting a cigar, the red end of which, in the gathering
darkness, glowed with protest.
"Yes, I see
pockets," the man in the trance was saying. "I see many pockets, but
they are all empty. No; I see one pocket that is not empty."
There was a faint stir
in the stillness, and the magician said, "Can you see what is in the
pocket?"
"Yes,"
answered the other; "there are two bright things. I think they are two
bits of steel. One of the pieces of steel is bent or crooked."
"Have they been
used in the removal of the relic from downstairs?"
"Yes."
There was another pause
and the inquirer added, "Do you see anything of the relic itself?"
"I see something
shining on the floor, like the shadow or the ghost of it. It is over there in
the corner beyond the desk."
There was a movement of
men turning and then a sudden stillness, as of their stiffening, for over in
the corner on the wooden floor there was really a round spot of pale light. It
was the only spot of light in the room. The cigar had gone out.
"It points the
way," came the voice of the oracle. "The spirits are pointing the way
to penitence, and urging the thief to restitution. I can see nothing
more." His voice trailed off into a silence that lasted solidly for many
minutes, like the long silence below when the theft had been committed. Then it
was broken by the ring of metal on the floor, and the sound of something
spinning and falling like a tossed halfpenny.
"Light the
lamp!" cried Fisher in a loud and even jovial voice, leaping to his feet
with far less languor than usual. "I must be going now, but I should like
to see it before I go. Why, I came on purpose to see it."
The lamp was lit, and
he did see it, for St. Paul’s Penny was lying on the floor at his feet.
"Oh, as for
that," explained Fisher, when he was entertaining March and Twyford at
lunch about a month later, "I merely wanted to play with the magician at
his own game."
"I thought you
meant to catch him in his own trap," said Twyford. "I can’t make head
or tail of anything yet, but to my mind he was always the suspect. I don’t
think he was necessarily a thief in the vulgar sense. The police always seem to
think that silver is stolen for the sake of silver, but a thing like that might
well be stolen out of some religious mania. A runaway monk turned mystic might
well want it for some mystical purpose."
"No," replied
Fisher, "the runaway monk is not a thief. At any rate he is not the thief.
And he’s not altogether a liar, either. He said one true thing at least that
night."
"And what was
that?" inquired March.
"He said it was
all magnetism. As a matter of fact, it was done by means of a magnet."
Then, seeing they still looked puzzled, he added, "It was that toy magnet
belonging to your nephew, Mr. Twyford."
"But I don’t
understand," objected March. "If it was done with the schoolboy’s
magnet, I suppose it was done by the schoolboy."
"Well,"
replied Fisher, reflectively, "it rather depends which schoolboy."
"What on earth do
you mean?"
"The soul of a
schoolboy is a curious thing," Fisher continued, in a meditative manner.
"It can survive a great many things besides climbing out of a chimney. A
man can grow gray in great campaigns, and still have the soul of a schoolboy. A
man can return with a great reputation from India and be put in charge of a
great public treasure, and still have the soul of a schoolboy, waiting to be
awakened by an accident. And it is ten times more so when to the schoolboy you
add the skeptic, who is generally a sort of stunted schoolboy. You said just
now that things might be done by religious mania. Have you ever heard of
irreligious mania? I assure you it exists very violently, especially in men who
like showing up magicians in India. But here the skeptic had the temptation of
showing up a much more tremendous sham nearer home."
A light came into
Harold March’s eyes as he suddenly saw, as if afar off, the wider implication
of the suggestion. But Twyford was still wrestling with one problem at a time.
"Do you really
mean," he said, "that Colonel Morris took the relic?"
"He was the only
person who could use the magnet," replied Fisher. "In fact, your
obliging nephew left him a number of things he could use. He had a ball of
string, and an instrument for making a hole in the wooden floor--I made a
little play with that hole in the floor in my trance, by the way; with the
lights left on below, it shone like a new shilling." Twyford suddenly
bounded on his chair. "But in that case," he cried, in a new and
altered voice, "why then of course-- You said a piece of steel--?"
"I said there were
two pieces of steel," said Fisher. "The bent piece of steel was the
boy’s magnet. The other was the relic in the glass case."
"But that is
silver," answered the archaeologist, in a voice now almost unrecognizable.
"Oh," replied
Fisher, soothingly, "I dare say it was painted with silver a little."
There was a heavy
silence, and at last Harold March said, "But where is the real
relic?"
"Where it has been
for five years," replied Horne Fisher, "in the possession of a mad
millionaire named Vandam, in Nebraska. There was a playful little photograph
about him in a society paper the other day, mentioning his delusion, and saying
he was always being taken in about relics."
Harold March frowned at
the tablecloth; then, after an interval, he said: "I think I understand
your notion of how the thing was actually done; according to that, Morris just
made a hole and fished it up with a magnet at the end of a string. Such a
monkey trick looks like mere madness, but I suppose he was mad, partly with the
boredom of watching over what he felt was a fraud, though he couldn’t prove it.
Then came a chance to prove it, to himself at least, and he had what he called ’fun’
with it. Yes, I think I see a lot of details now. But it’s just the whole thing
that knocks me. How did it all come to be like that?"
Fisher was looking at
him with level lids and an immovable manner.
"Every precaution
was taken," he said. "The Duke carried the relic on his own person,
and locked it up in the case with his own hands."
March was silent; but
Twyford stammered. "I don’t understand you. You give me the creeps. Why
don’t you speak plainer?"
"If I spoke
plainer you would understand me less," said Horne Fisher.
"All the same I
should try," said March, still without lifting his head.
"Oh, very
well," replied Fisher, with a sigh; "the plain truth is, of course,
that it’s a bad business. Everybody knows it’s a bad business who knows
anything about it. But it’s always happening, and in one way one can hardly
blame them. They get stuck on to a foreign princess that’s as stiff as a Dutch
doll, and they have their fling. In this case it was a pretty big fling."
The face of the Rev.
Thomas Twyford certainly suggested that he was a little out of his depth in the
seas of truth, but as the other went on speaking vaguely the old gentleman’s
features sharpened and set.
"If it were some
decent morganatic affair I wouldn’t say; but he must have been a fool to throw
away thousands on a woman like that. At the end it was sheer blackmail; but it’s
something that the old ass didn’t get it out of the taxpayers. He could only
get it out of the Yank, and there you are."
The Rev. Thomas Twyford
had risen to his feet.
"Well, I’m glad my
nephew had nothing to do with it," he said. "And if that’s what the
world is like, I hope he will never have anything to, do with it."
"I hope not,"
answered Horne Fisher. "No one knows so well as I do that one can have far
too much to do with it."
For Summers Minor had
indeed nothing to do with it; and it is part of his higher significance that he
has really nothing to do with the story, or with any such stories. The boy went
like a bullet through the tangle of this tale of crooked politics and crazy mockery
and came out on the other side, pursuing his own unspoiled purposes. From the
top of the chimney he climbed he had caught sight of a new omnibus, whose color
and name he had never known, as a naturalist might see a new bird or a botanist
a new flower. And he had been sufficiently enraptured in rushing after it, and
riding away upon that fairy ship.
In an oasis, or green
island, in the red and yellow seas of sand that stretch beyond Europe toward
the sunrise, there can be found a rather fantastic contrast, which is none the
less typical of such ai place, since international treaties have made it an
outpost of the British occupation. The site is famous among archaeologists for
something that is hardly a monument, but merely a hole in the ground. But it is
a round shaft, like that of a well, and probably a part of some great
irrigation works of remote and disputed date, perhaps more ancient than
anything in that ancient land. There is a green fringe of palm and prickly pear
round the black mouth of the well; but nothing of the upper masonry remains
except two bulky and battered stones standing like the pillars of a gateway of
nowhere, in which some of the more transcendental archaeologists, in certain
moods at moonrise or sunset, think they can trace the faint lines of figures or
features of more than Babylonian monstrosity; while the more rationalistic
archaeologists, in the more rational hours of daylight, see nothing but two
shapeless rocks. It may have been noticed, however, that all Englishmen are not
archaeologists. Many of those assembled in such a place for official and
military purposes have hobbies other than archaeology. And it is a solemn fact
that the English in this Eastern exile have contrived to make a small golf links
out of the green scrub and sand; with a comfortable clubhouse at one end of it
and this primeval monument at the other. They did not actually use this archaic
abyss as a bunker, because it was by tradition unfathomable, and even for
practical purposes unfathomed. Any sporting projectile sent into it might be
counted most literally as a lost ball. But they often sauntered round it in
their interludes of talking and smoking cigarettes, and one of them had just
come down from the clubhouse to find another gazing somewhat moodily into the
well.
Both the Englishmen
wore light clothes and white pith helmets and puggrees, but there, for the most
part, their resemblance ended. And they both almost simultaneously said the
same word, but they said it on two totally different notes of the voice.
"Have you heard
the news?" asked the man from the club. "Splendid."
"Splendid,"
replied the man by the well. But the first man pronounced the word as a young
man might say it about a woman, and the second as an old man might say it about
the weather, not without sincerity, but certainly without fervor.
And in this the tone of
the two men was sufficiently typical of them. The first, who was a certain
Captain Boyle, was of a bold and boyish type, dark, and with a sort of native
heat in his face that did not belong to the atmosphere of the East, but rather
to the ardors and ambitions of the West. The other was an older man and
certainly an older resident, a civilian official--Horne Fisher; and his
drooping eyelids and drooping light mustache expressed all the paradox of the
Englishman in the East. He was much too hot to be anything but cool.
Neither of them thought
it necessary to mention what it was that was splendid. That would indeed have
been superfluous conversation about something that everybody knew. The striking
victory over a menacing combination of Turks and Arabs in the north, won by
troops under the command of Lord Hastings, the veteran of so many striking
victories, was already spread by the newspapers all over the Empire, let alone
to this small garrison so near to the battlefield.
"Now, no other
nation in the world could have done a thing like that," cried Captain
Boyle, emphatically.
Horne Fisher was still
looking silently into the well; a moment later he answered: "We certainly
have the art of unmaking mistakes. That’s where the poor old Prussians went
wrong. They could only make mistakes and stick to them. There is really a
certain talent in unmaking a mistake."
"What do you
mean," asked Boyle, "what mistakes?"
"Well, everybody
knows it looked like biting off more than he could chew," replied Horne
Fisher. It was a peculiarity of Mr. Fisher that he always said that everybody
knew things which about one person in two million was ever allowed to hear of.
"And it was certainly jolly lucky that Travers turned up so well in the
nick of time. Odd how often the right thing’s been done for us by the second in
command, even when a great man was first in command. Like Colborne at
Waterloo."
"It ought to add a
whole province to the Empire," observed the other.
"Well, I suppose
the Zimmernes would have insisted on it as far as the canal," observed
Fisher, thoughtfully, "though everybody knows adding provinces doesn’t
always pay much nowadays."
Captain Boyle frowned
in a slightly puzzled fashion. Being cloudily conscious of never having heard
of the Zimmernes in his life, he could only remark, stolidly:
"Well, one can’t
be a Little Englander."
Horne Fisher smiled,
and he had a pleasant smile.
"Every man out
here is a Little Englander," he said. "He wishes he were back in
Little England."
"I don’t know what
you’re talking about, I’m afraid," said the younger man, rather
suspiciously. "One would think you didn’t really admire Hastings
or--or--anything."
"I admire him no
end," replied Fisher. "He’s by far the best man for this post; he
understands the Moslems and can do anything with them. That’s why I’m all
against pushing Travers against him, merely because of this last affair."
"I really don’t
understand what you’re driving at," said the other, frankly.
"Perhaps it isn’t
worth understanding," answered Fisher, lightly, "and, anyhow, we
needn’t talk politics. Do you know the Arab legend about that well?"
"I’m afraid I don’t
know much about Arab legends," said Boyle, rather stiffly.
"That’s rather a
mistake," replied Fisher, "especially from your point of view. Lord
Hastings himself is an Arab legend. That is perhaps the very greatest thing he
really is. If his reputation went it would weaken us all over Asia and Africa.
Well, the story about that hole in the ground, that goes down nobody knows
where, has always fascinated me, rather. It’s Mohammedan in form now, but I
shouldn’t wonder if the tale is a long way older than Mohammed. It’s all about
somebody they call the Sultan Aladdin, not our friend of the lamp, of course,
but rather like him in having to do with genii or giants or something of that
sort. They say he commanded the giants to build him a sort of pagoda, rising
higher and higher above all the stars. The Utmost for the Highest, as the
people said when they built the Tower of Babel. But the builders of the Tower
of Babel were quite modest and domestic people, like mice, compared with old
Aladdin. They only wanted a tower that would reach heaven-- a mere trifle. He
wanted a tower that would pass heaven and rise above it, and go on rising for
ever and ever. And Allah cast him down to earth with a thunderbolt, which sank
into the earth, boring a hole deeper and deeper, till it made a well that was without
a bottom as the tower was to have been without a top. And down that inverted
tower of darkness the soul of the proud Sultan is falling forever and
ever."
"What a queer chap
you are," said Boyle. "You talk as if a fellow could believe those
fables."
"Perhaps I believe
the moral and not the fable," answered Fisher. "But here comes Lady
Hastings. You know her, I think."
The clubhouse on the
golf links was used, of course, for many other purposes besides that of golf.
It was the only social center of the garrison beside the strictly military
headquarters; it had a billiard room and a bar, and even an excellent reference
library for those officers who were so perverse as to take their profession
seriously. Among these was the great general himself, whose head of silver and
face of bronze, like that of a brazen eagle, were often to be found bent over
the charts and folios of the library. The great Lord Hastings believed in
science and study, as in other severe ideals of life, and had given much
paternal advice on the point to young Boyle, whose appearances in that place of
research were rather more intermittent. It was from one of these snatches of
study that the young man had just come out through the glass doors of the
library on to the golf links. But, above all, the club was so appointed as to
serve the social conveniences of ladies at least as much as gentlemen, and Lady
Hastings was able to play the queen in such a society almost as much as in her
own ballroom. She was eminently calculated and, as some said, eminently
inclined to play such a part. She was much younger than her husband, an
attractive and sometimes dangerously attractive lady; and Mr. Horne Fisher
looked after her a little sardonically as she swept away with the young
soldier. Then his rather dreary eye strayed to the green and prickly growths
round the well, growths of that curious cactus formation in which one thick
leaf grows directly out of the other without stalk or twig. It gave his
fanciful mind a sinister feeling of a blind growth without shape or purpose. A
flower or shrub in the West grows to the blossom which is its crown, and is
content. But this was as if hands could grow out of hands or legs grow out of
legs in a nightmare. "Always adding a province to the Empire," he
said, with a smile, and then added, more sadly, "but I doubt if I was
right, after all!"
A strong but genial
voice broke in on his meditations and he looked up and smiled, seeing the face
of an old friend. The voice was, indeed, rather more genial than the face,
which was at the first glance decidedly grim. It was a typically legal face,
with angular jaws and heavy, grizzled eyebrows; and it belonged to an eminently
legal character, though he was now attached in a semimilitary capacity to the
police of that wild district. Cuthbert Grayne was perhaps more of a
criminologist than either a lawyer or a policeman, but in his more barbarous
surroundings he had proved successful in turning himself into a practical
combination of all three. The discovery of a whole series of strange Oriental
crimes stood to his credit. But as few people were acquainted with, or
attracted to, such a hobby or branch of knowledge, his intellectual life was
somewhat solitary. Among the few exceptions was Horne Fisher, who had a curious
capacity for talking to almost anybody about almost anything.
"Studying botany,
or is it archaeology?" inquired Grayne. "I shall never come to the
end of your interests, Fisher. I should say that what you don’t know isn’t
worth knowing."
"You are
wrong," replied Fisher, with a very unusual abruptness ’and even
bitterness. "It’s what I do know that isn’t worth knowing. All the seamy
side of things, all the secret reasons and rotten motives and bribery arid
blackmail they call politics. I needn’t be so proud of having been down all
these sewers that I should brag about it to the little boys in the
street."
"What do you mean?
What’s the matter with you?" asked his friend. "I never knew you
taken like this before."
"I’m ashamed of
myself," replied Fisher. "I’ve just been throwing cold water on the
enthusiasms of a boy."
"Even that
explanation is hardly exhaustive," observed the criminal expert.
"Damned newspaper
nonsense the enthusiasms were, of course," continued Fisher, "but I
ought to know that at that age illusions can be ideals. And they’re better than
the reality, anyhow. But there is one very ugly responsibility about jolting a
young man out of the rut of the most rotten ideal."
"And what may that
be?" inquired his friend.
"It’s very apt to
set him off with the same energy in a much worse direction," answered
Fisher; "a pretty endless sort of direction, a bottomless pit as deep as
the bottomless well."
Fisher did not see his
friend until a fortnight later, when he found himself in the garden at the back
of the clubhouse on the opposite side from the links, a garden heavily colored
and scented with sweet semitropical plants in the glow of a desert sunset. Two
other men were with him, the third being the now celebrated second in command,
familiar to everybody as Tom Travers, a lean, dark man, who looked older than
his years, with a furrow in his brow and something morose about the very shape
of his black mustache. They had just been served with black coffee by the Arab
now officiating as the temporary servant of the club, though he was a figure
already familiar, and even famous, as the old servant of the general. He went
by the name of Said, and was notable among other Semites for that unnatural
length of his yellow face and height of his narrow forehead which is sometimes
seen among them, and gave an irrational impression of something sinister, in
spite of his agreeable smile.
"I never feel as
if I could quite trust that fellow," said Grayne, when the man had gone
away. "It’s very unjust, I take it, for he was certainly devoted to
Hastings, and saved his life, they say. But Arabs are often like that, loyal to
one man. I can’t help feeling he might cut anybody else’s throat, and even do
it treacherously."
"Well," said
Travers, with a rather sour smile, "so long as he leaves Hastings alone
the world won’t mind much."
There was a rather
embarrassing silence, full of memories of the great battle, and then Horne
Fisher said, quietly:
"The newspapers
aren’t the world, Tom. Don’t you worry about them. Everybody in your world
knows the truth well enough."
"I think we’d
better not talk about the general just now," remarked Grayne, "for he’s
just coming out of the club."
"He’s not coming
here," said Fisher. "He’s only seeing his wife to the car."
As he spoke, indeed,
the lady came out on the steps of the club, followed by her husband, who then
went swiftly in front of her to open the garden gate. As he did so she turned
back and spoke for a moment to a solitary man still sitting in a cane chair in
the shadow of the doorway, the only man left in the deserted club save for the
three that lingered in the garden. Fisher peered for a moment into the shadow,
and saw that it was Captain Boyle.
The next moment, rather
to their surprise, the general reappeared and, remounting the steps, spoke a
word or two to Boyle in his turn. Then he signaled to Said, who hurried up with
two cups of coffee, and the two men re-entered the club, each carrying his cup
in his hand. The next moment a gleam of white light in the growing darkness showed
that the electric lamps had been turned on in the library beyond.
"Coffee and
scientific researches," said Travers, grimly. "All the luxuries of
learning and theoretical research. Well, I must be going, for I have my work to
do as well." And he got up rather stiffly, saluted his companions, and
strode away into the dusk.
"I only hope Boyle
is sticking to scientific researches," said Horne Fisher. "I’m not
very comfortable about him myself. But let’s talk about something else."
They talked about something
else longer than they probably imagined, until the tropical night had come and
a splendid moon painted the whole scene with silver; but before it was bright
enough to see by Fisher had already noted that the lights in the library had
been abruptly extinguished. He waited for the two men to come out by the garden
entrance, but nobody came.
"They must have
gone for a stroll on the links," he said.
"Very
possibly," replied Grayne. "It’s going to be a beautiful night."
A moment or two after
he had spoken they heard a voice hailing them out of the shadow of the
clubhouse, and were astonished to perceive Travers hurrying toward them,
calling out as he came:
"I shall want your
help, you fellows," he cried. "There’s something pretty bad out on
the links."
They found themselves
plunging through the club smoking room and the library beyond, in complete
darkness, mental as well as material. But Horne Fisher, in spite of his
affectation of indifference, was a person of a curious and almost
transcendental sensibility to atmospheres, and he already felt the presence of
something more than an accident. He collided with a piece of furniture in the
library, and almost shuddered with the shock, for the thing moved as he could
never have fancied a piece of furniture moving. It seemed to move like a living
thing, yielding and yet striking back. The next moment Grayne had turned on the
lights, and he saw he had only stumbled against one of the revolving bookstands
that had swung round and struck him; but his involuntary recoil had revealed to
him his own subconscious sense of something mysterious and monstrous. There
were several of these revolving bookcases standing here and there about the
library; on one of them stood the two cups of coffee, and on another a large
open book. It was Budge’s book on Egyptian hieroglyphics, with colored plates
of strange birds and gods, and even as he rushed past, he was conscious of
something odd about the fact that this, and not any work of military science,
should be open in that place at that moment. He was even conscious of the gap
in the well-lined bookshelf from which it had been taken, and it seemed almost
to gape at him in an ugly fashion, like a gap in the teeth of some sinister
face.
A run brought them in a
few minutes to the other side of the ground in front of the bottomless well,
and a few yards from it, in a moonlight almost as broad as daylight, they saw
what they had come to see.
The great Lord Hastings
lay prone on his face, in a posture in which there was a touch of something
strange and stiff, with one elbow erect above his body, the arm being doubled,
and his big, bony hand clutching the rank and ragged grass. A few feet away was
Boyle, almost as motionless, but supported on his hands and knees, and staring
at the body. It might have been no more than shock and accident; but there was
something ungainly and unnatural about the quadrupedal posture and the gaping
face. It was as if his reason had fled from him. Behind, there was nothing but
the clear blue southern sky, and the beginning of the desert, except for the
two great broken stones in front of the well. And it was in such a light and
atmosphere that men could fancy they traced in them enormous and evil faces,
looking down.
Horne Fisher stooped
and touched the strong hand that was still clutching the grass, and it was as
cold as a stone. He knelt by the body and was busy for a moment applying other
tests; then he rose again, and said, with a sort of confident despair:
"Lord Hastings is
dead."
There was a stony
silence, and then Travers remarked, gruffly: "This is your department,
Grayne; I will leave you to question Captain Boyle. I can make no sense of what
he says."
Boyle had pulled
himself together and risen to his feet, but his face still wore an awful
expression, making it like a new mask or the face of another man.
"I was looking at
the well," he said, "and when I turned he had fallen down."
Grayne’s face was very
dark. "As you say, this is my affair," he said. "I must first ask
you to help me carry him to the library and let me examine things
thoroughly."
When they had deposited
the body in the library, Grayne turned to Fisher and said, in a voice that had
recovered its fullness and confidence, "I am going to lock myself in and
make a thorough examination first. I look to you to keep in touch with the
others and make a preliminary examination of Boyle. I will talk to him later.
And just telephone to headquarters for a policeman, and let him come here at
once and stand by till I want him."
Without more words the
great criminal investigator went into the lighted library, shutting the door
behind him, and Fisher, without replying, turned and began to talk quietly to
Travers. "It is curious," he said, "that the thing should happen
just in front of that place."
"It would
certainly be very curious," replied Travers, "if the place played any
part in it."
"I think,"
replied Fisher, "that the part it didn’t play is more curious still."
And with these
apparently meaningless words he turned to the shaken Boyle and, taking his arm,
began to walk him up and down in the moonlight, talking in low tones.
Dawn had begun to break
abrupt and white when Cuthbert Grayne turned out the lights in the library and
came out on to the links. Fisher was lounging about alone, in his listless
fashion; but the police messenger for whom he had sent was standing at
attention in the background.
"I sent Boyle off
with Travers," observed Fisher, carelessly; "he’ll look after him,
and he’d better have some sleep, anyhow."
"Did you get
anything out of him?" asked Grayne. "Did he tell you what he and
Hastings were doing?"
"Yes,"
answered Fisher, "he gave me a pretty clear account, after all. He said
that after Lady Hastings went off in the car the general asked him to take
coffee with him in the library and look up a point about local antiquities. He
himself was beginning to look for Budge’s book in one of the revolving
bookstands when the general found it in one of the bookshelves on the wall.
After looking at some of the plates they went out, it would seem, rather
abruptly, on to the links, and walked toward the old well; and while Boyle was
looking into it he heard a thud behind him, and turned round to find the
general lying as we found him. He himself dropped on his knees to examine the
body, and then was paralyzed with a sort of terror and could not come nearer to
it or touch it. But I think very little of that; people caught in a real shock
of surprise are sometimes found in the queerest postures."
Grayne wore a grim
smile of attention, and said, after a short silence:
"Well, he hasn’t
told you many lies. It’s really a creditably clear and consistent account of
what happened, with everything of importance left out."
"Have you
discovered anything in there?" asked Fisher.
"I have discovered
everything," answered Grayne.
Fisher maintained a
somewhat gloomy silence, as the other resumed his explanation in quiet and
assured tones.
"You were quite
right, Fisher, when you said that young fellow was in danger of going down dark
ways toward the pit. Whether or no, as you fancied, the jolt you gave to his
view of the general had anything to do with it, he has not been treating the
general well for some time. It’s an unpleasant business, and I don’t want to
dwell on it; but it’s pretty plain that his wife was not treating him well,
either. I don’t know how far it went, but it went as far as concealment,
anyhow; for when Lady Hastings spoke to Boyle it was to tell him she had hidden
a note in the Budge book in the library. The general overheard, or came somehow
to know, and he went straight to the book and found it. He confronted Boyle
with it, and they had a scene, of course. And Boyle was confronted with
something else; he was confronted with an awful alternative, in which the life
of one old man meant ruin and his death meant triumph and even happiness."
"Well,"
observed Fisher, at last, "I don’t blame him for not telling you the woman’s
part of the story. But how do you know about the letter?"
"I found it on the
general’s body," answered Grayne, "but I found worse things than
that. The body had stiffened in the way rather peculiar to poisons of a certain
Asiatic sort. Then I examined the coffee cups, and I knew enough chemistry to
find poison in the dregs of one of them. Now, the General went straight to the
bookcase, leaving his cup of coffee on the bookstand in the middle of the room.
While his back was turned, and Boyle was pretending to examine the bookstand,
he was left alone with the coffee cup. The poison takes about ten minutes to
act, and ten minutes’ walk would bring them to the bottomless well."
"Yes,"
remarked Fisher, "and what about the bottomless well?"
"What has the
bottomless well got to do with it?" asked his friend.
"It has nothing to
do with it," replied Fisher. "That is what I find utterly confounding
and incredible."
"And why should
that particular hole in the ground have anything to do with it?"
"It is a
particular hole in your case," said Fisher. "But I won’t insist on that
just now. By the way, there is another thing I ought to tell you. I said I sent
Boyle away in charge of Travers. It would be just as true to say I sent Travers
in charge of Boyle."
"You don’t mean to
say you suspect Tom Travers?" cried the other. her.
"He was a deal
bitterer against the general than Boyle ever was," observed Horne Fisher,
with a curious indifference.
"Man, you’re not
saying what you mean," cried Grayne. "I tell you I found the poison
in one of the coffee cups."
"There was always
Said, of course," added Fisher, "either for hatred or hire. We agreed
he was capable of almost anything."
"And we agreed he
was incapable of hurting his master," retorted Grayne.
"Well, well,"
said Fisher, amiably, "I dare say you are right; but I should just like to
have a look at the library and the coffee cups."
He passed inside, while
Grayne turned to the policeman in attendance and handed him a scribbled note,
to be telegraphed from headquarters. The man saluted and hurried off; and
Grayne, following his friend into the library, found him beside the bookstand
in the middle of the room, on which were the empty cups.
"This is where
Boyle looked for Budge, or pretended to look for him, according to your
account," he said.
As Fisher spoke he bent
down in a half-crouching attitude, to look at the volumes in the low, revolving
shelf, for the whole bookstand was not much higher than an ordinary table. The
next moment he sprang up as if he had been stung.
"Oh, my God!"
he cried.
Very few people, if
any, had ever seen Mr. Horne Fisher behave as he behaved just then. He flashed
a glance at the door, saw that the open window was nearer, went out of it with
a flying leap, as if over a hurdle, and went racing across the turf, in the
track of the disappearing policeman. Grayne, who stood staring after him, soon
saw his tall, loose figure, returning, restored to all its normal limpness and
air of leisure. He was fanning himself slowly with a piece of paper, the
telegram he had so violently intercepted.
"Lucky I stopped
that," he observed. "We must keep this affair as quiet as death.
Hastings must die of apoplexy or heart disease."
"What on earth is
the trouble?" demanded the other investigator.
"The trouble
is," said Fisher, "that in a few days we should have had a very
agreeable alternative--of hanging an innocent man or knocking the British
Empire to hell."
"Do you mean to
say," asked Grayne, "that this infernal crime is not to be
punished?"
Fisher looked at him
steadily.
"It is already
punished," he said.
After a moment’s pause
he went on. "You reconstructed the crime with admirable skill, old chap,
and nearly all you said was true. Two men with two coffee cups did go into the
library and did put their cups on the bookstand and did go together to the
well, and one of them was a murderer and had put poison in the other’s cup. But
it was not done while Boyle was looking at the revolving bookcase. He did look
at it, though, searching for the Budge book with the note in it, but I fancy
that Hastings had already moved it to the shelves on the wall. It was part of
that grim game that he should find it first.
"Now, how does a
man search a revolving bookcase? He does not generally hop all round it in a
squatting attitude, like a frog. He simply gives it a touch and makes it
revolve."
He was frowning at the
floor as he spoke, and there was a light under his heavy lids that was not
often seen there. The mysticism that was buried deep under all the cynicism of
his experience was awake and moving in the depths. His voice took unexpected
turns and inflections, almost as if two men were speaking.
"That was what
Boyle did; he barely touched the thing, and it went round as elasily as the
world goes round. Yes, very much as the world goes round, for the hand that
turned it was not his. God, who turns the wheel of all the stars, touched that
wheel and brought it full circle, that His dreadful justice might return."
"I am
beginning," said Grayne, slowly, "to have some hazy and horrible idea
of what you mean."
"It is very
simple," said Fisher, "when Boyle straightened himself from his
stooping posture, something had happened which he had not noticed, which his
enemy had not noticed, which nobody had noticed. The two coffee cups had
exactly changed places."
The rocky face of
Grayne seemed to have sustained a shock in silence; not a line of it altered,
but his voice when it came was unexpectedly weakened.
"I see what you
mean," he said, "and, as you say, the less said about it the better.
It was not the lover who tried to get rid of the husband, but--the other thing.
And a tale like that about a man like that would ruin us here. Had you any
guess of this at the start?"
"The bottomless
well, as I told you," answered Fisher, quietly; "that was what
stumped me from the start. Not because it had anything to do with it, because
it had nothing to do with it."
He paused a moment, as
if choosing an approach, and then went on: "When a man knows his enemy
will be dead in ten minutes, and takes him to the edge of an unfathomable pit,
he means to throw his body into it. What else should he do? A born fool would
have the sense to do it, and Boyle is not a born fool. Well, why did not Boyle
do it? The more I thought of it the more I suspected there was some mistake in
the murder, so to speak. Somebody had taken somebody there to throw him in, and
yet he was not thrown in. I had already an ugly, unformed idea of some
substitution or reversal of parts; then I stooped to turn the bookstand myself,
by accident, and I instantly knew everything, for I saw the two cups revolve
once more, like moons in the sky."
After a pause, Cuthbert
Grayne said, "And what are we to say to the newspapers?"
"My friend, Harold
March, is coming along from Cairo to-day," said Fisher. "He is a very
brilliant and successful journalist. But for all that he’s a thoroughly
honorable man, so you must not tell him the truth."
Half an hour later
Fisher was again walking to and fro in front of the clubhouse, with Captain
Boyle, the latter by this time with a very buffeted and bewildered air; perhaps
a sadder and a wiser man.
"What about me,
then?" he was saying. "Am I cleared? Am I not going to be
cleared?"
"I believe and
hope," answered Fisher, "that you are not going to be suspected. But
you are certainly not going to be cleared. There must be no suspicion against
him, and therefore no suspicion against you. Any suspicion against him, let
alone such a story against him, would knock us endways from Malta to Mandalay.
He was a hero as well as a holy terror among the Moslems. Indeed, you might
almost call him a Moslem hero in the English service. Of course he got on with
them partly because of his own little dose of Eastern blood; he got it from his
mother, the dancer from Damascus; everybody knows that."
"Oh,"
repeated Boyle, mechanically, staring at him with round eyes, "everybody
knows that."
"I dare say there
was a touch of it in his jealousy and ferocious vengeance," went on
Fisher. "But, for all that, the crime would ruin us among the Arabs, all
the more because it was something like a crime against hospitality. It’s been
hateful for you and it’s pretty horrid for me. But there are some things that
damned well can’t be done, and while I’m alive that’s one of them."
"What do you
mean?" asked Boyle, glancing at him curiously. "Why should you, of
all people, be so passionate about it?"
Horne Fisher looked at
the young man with a baffling expression.
"I suppose,"
he said, "it’s because I’m a Little Englander."
"I can never make
out what you mean by that sort of thing," answered Boyle, doubtfully.
"Do you think
England is so little as all that?" said Fisher, with a warmth in his cold
voice, "that it can’t hold a man across a few thousand miles. You lectured
me with a lot of ideal patriotism, my young friend; but it’s practical
patriotism now for you and me, and with no lies to help it. You talked as if
everything always went right with us all over the world, in a triumphant
crescendo culminating in Hastings. I tell you everything has gone wrong with us
here, except Hastings. He was the one name we had left to conjure with, and
that mustn’t go as well, no, by God! It’s bad enough that a gang of infernal
Jews should plant us here, where there’s no earthly English interest to serve,
and all hell beating up against us, simply because Nosey Zimmern has lent money
to half the Cabinet. It’s bad enough that an old pawnbroker from Bagdad should
make us fight his battles; we can’t fight with our right hand cut off. Our one
score was Hastings and his victory, which was really somebody else’s victory.
Tom Travers has to suffer, and so have you."
Then, after a moment’s
silence, he pointed toward the bottomless well and said, in a quieter tone:
"I told you that I
didn’t believe in the philosophy of the Tower of Aladdin. I don’t believe in
the Empire growing until it reaches the sky; I don’t believe in the Union Jack
going up and up eternally like the Tower. But if you think I am going to let
the Union Jack go down and down eternally, like the bottomless well, down into
the blackness of the bottomless pit, down in defeat and derision, amid the
jeers of the very Jews who have sucked us dry--no I won’t, and that’s flat; not
if the Chancellor were blackmailed by twenty millionaires with their gutter
rags, not if the Prime Minister married twenty Yankee Jewesses, not if
Woodville and Carstairs had shares in twenty swindling mines. If the thing is
really tottering, God help it, it mustn’t be we who tip it over."
Boyle was regarding him
with a bewilderment that was almost fear, and had even a touch of distaste.
"Somehow," he
said, "there seems to be something rather horrid about the things you
know."
"There is,"
replied Horne Fisher. "I am not at all pleased with my small stock of
knowledge and reflection. But as it is partly responsible for your not being
hanged, I don’t know that you need complain of it."
And, as if a little
ashamed of his first boast, he turned and strolled away toward the bottomless
well.
A thing can sometimes
be too extraordinary to be remembered. If it is clean out of the course of
things, and has apparently no causes and no consequences, subsequent events do
not recall it, and it remains only a subconscious thing, to be stirred by some
accident long after. It drifts apart like a forgotten dream; and it was in the
hour of many dreams, at daybreak and very soon after the end of dark, that such
a strange sight was given to a man sculling a boat down a river in the West
country. The man was awake; indeed, he considered himself rather wide awake,
being the political journalist, Harold March, on his way to interview various
political celebrities in their country seats. But the thing he saw was so
inconsequent that it might have been imaginary. It simply slipped past his mind
and was lost in later and utterly different events; nor did he even recover the
memory till he had long afterward discovered the meaning.
Pale mists of morning
lay on the fields and the rushes along one margin of the river; along the other
side ran a wall of tawny brick almost overhanging the water. He had shipped his
oars and was drifting for a moment with the stream, when he turned his head and
saw that the monotony of the long brick wall was broken by a bridge; rather an
elegant eighteenth-century sort of bridge with little columns of white stone
turning gray. There had been floods and the river still stood very high, with
dwarfish trees waist deep in it, and rather a narrow arc of white dawn gleamed
under the curve of the bridge.
As his own boat went
under the dark archway he saw another boat coming toward him, rowed by a man as
solitary as himself. His posture prevented much being seen of him, but as he
neared the bridge he stood up in the boat and turned round. He was already so
close to the dark entry, however, that his whole figure was black against the
morning light, and March could see nothing of his face except the end of two
long whiskers or mustaches that gave something sinister to the silhouette, like
horns in the wrong place. Even these details March would never have noticed but
for what happened in the same instant. As the man came under the low bridge he
made a leap at it and hung, with his legs dangling, letting the boat float away
from under him. March had a momentary vision of two black kicking legs; then of
one black kicking leg; and then of nothing except the eddying stream and the
long perspective of the wall. But whenever he thought of it again, long
afterward, when he understood the story in which it figured, it was always
fixed in that one fantastic shape--as if those wild legs were a grotesque
graven ornament of the bridge itself, in the manner of a gargoyle. At the
moment he merely passed, staring, down the stream. He could see no flying
figure on the bridge, so it must have already fled; but he was half conscious
of some faint significance in the fact that among the trees round the
bridgehead opposite the wall he saw a lamp-post; and, beside the lamp-post, the
broad blue back of an unconscious policeman.
Even before reaching
the shrine of his political pilgrimage he had many other things to think of
besides the odd incident of the bridge; for the management of a boat by a
solitary man was not always easy even on such a solitary stream. And indeed it
was only by an unforeseen accident that he was solitary. The boat had been
purchased and the whole expedition planned in conjunction with a friend, who
had at the last moment been forced to alter all his arrangements. Harold March
was to have traveled with his friend Horne Fisher on that inland voyage to
Willowood Place, where the Prime Minister was a guest at the moment. More and
more people were hearing of Harold March, for his striking political articles
were opening to him the doors of larger and larger salons; but he had never met
the Prime Minister yet. Scarcely anybody among the general public had ever
heard of Horne Fisher; but he had known the Prime Minister all his life. For
these reasons, had the two taken the projected journey together, March might
have been slightly disposed to hasten it and Fisher vaguely content to lengthen
it out. For Fisher was one of those people who are born knowing the Prime
Minister. The knowledge seemed to have no very exhilarant effect, and in his
case bore some resemblance to being born tired. But he was distinctly annoyed
to receive, just as he was doing a little light packing of fishing tackle and
cigars for the journey, a telegram from Willowood asking him to come down at
once by train, as the Prime Minister had to leave that night. Fisher knew that
his friend the journalist could not possibly start till the next day, and he
liked his friend the journalist, and had looked forward to a few days on the
river. He did not particularly like or dislike the Prime Minister, but he
intensely disliked the alternative of a few hours in the train. Nevertheless,
he accepted Prime Ministers as he accepted railway trains--as part of a system
which he, at least, was not the revolutionist sent on earth to destroy. So he
telephoned to March, asking him, with many apologetic curses and faint damns,
to take the boat down the river as arranged, that they might meet at Willowood
by the time settled; then he went outside and hailed a taxicab to take him to
the railway station. There he paused at the bookstall to add to his light luggage
a number of cheap murder stories, which he read with great pleasure, and
without any premonition that he was about to walk into as strange a story in
real life.
A little before sunset
he arrived, with his light suitcase in hand, before the gate of the long
riverside gardens of Willowood Place, one of the smaller seats of Sir Isaac
Hook, the master of much shipping and many newspapers. He entered by the gate
giving on the road, at the opposite side to the river, but there was a mixed
quality in all that watery landscape which perpetually reminded a traveler that
the river was near. White gleams of water would shine suddenly like swords or
spears in the green thickets. And even in the garden itself, divided into
courts and curtained with hedges and high garden trees, there hung everywhere
in the air the music of water. The first of the green courts which he entered
appeared to be a somewhat neglected croquet lawn, in which was a solitary young
man playing croquet against himself. Yet he was not an enthusiast for the game,
or even for the garden; and his sallow but well-featured face looked rather
sullen than otherwise. He was only one of those young men who cannot support
the burden of consciousness unless they are doing something, and whose
conceptions of doing something are limited to a game of some kind. He was dark
and well. dressed in a light holiday fashion, and Fisher recognized him at once
as a young man named James Bullen, called, for some unknown reason, Bunker. He
was the nephew of Sir Isaac; but, what was much more important at the moment,
he was also the private secretary of the Prime Minister.
"Hullo,
Bunker!" observed Horne Fisher. "You’re the sort of man I wanted to
see. Has your chief come down yet?"
"He’s only staying
for dinner," replied Bullen, with his eye on the yellow ball. "He’s
got a great speech to-morrow at Birmingham and he’s going straight through
to-night. He’s motoring himself there; driving the car, I mean. It’s the one
thing he’s really proud of."
"You mean you’re
staying here with your uncle, like a good boy?" replied Fisher. "But
what will the Chief do at Birmingham without the epigrams whispered to him by
his brilliant secretary?"
"Don’t you start
ragging me," said the young man called Bunker. "I’m only too glad not
to go trailing after him. He doesn’t know a thing about maps or money or hotels
or anything, and I have to dance about like a courier. As for my uncle, as I’m
supposed to come into the estate, it’s only decent to be here sometimes."
"Very
proper," replied the other. "Well, I shall see you later on,"
and, crossing the lawn, he passed out through a gap in the hedge.
He was walking across
the lawn toward the landing stage on the river, and still felt all around him,
under the dome of golden evening, an Old World savor and reverberation in that
riverhaunted garden. The next square of turf which he crossed seemed at first
sight quite deserted, till he saw in the twilight of trees in one corner of it
a hammock and in the hammock a man, reading a newspaper and swinging one leg
over the edge of the net.
Him also he hailed by
name, and the man slipped to the ground and strolled forward. It seemed fated
that he should feel something of the past in the accidents of that place, for
the figure might well have been an early-Victorian ghost revisiting the ghosts
of the croquet hoops and mallets. It was the figure of an elderly man with long
whiskers that looked almost fantastic, and a quaint and careful cut of collar
and cravat. Having been a fashionable dandy forty years ago, he had managed to
preserve the dandyism while ignoring the fashions. A white top-hat lay beside
the Morning Post in the hammock behind him. This was the Duke of Westmoreland,
the relic of a family really some centuries old; and the antiquity was not
heraldry but history. Nobody knew better than Fisher how rare such noblemen are
in fact, and how numerous in fiction. But whether the duke owed the general
respect he enjoyed to the genuineness of his pedigree or to the fact that he
owned a vast amount of very valuable property was a point about which Mr.
Fisher’s opinion might have been more interesting to discover.
"You were looking
so comfortable," said Fisher, "that I thought you must be one of the
servants. I’m looking for somebody to take this bag of mine; I haven’t brought
a man down, as I came away in a hurry."
"Nor have I, for
that matter," replied the duke, with some pride. "I never do. If
there’s one animal alive I loathe it’s a valet. I learned to dress myself at an
early age and was supposed to do it decently. I may be in my second childhood,
but I’ve not go so far as being dressed like a child."
"The Prime
Minister hasn’t brought a valet; he’s brought a secretary instead,"
observed Fisher. "Devilish inferior job. Didn’t I hear that Harker was
down here?"
"He’s over there
on the landing stage," replied the duke, indifferently, and resumed the
study of the Morning Post.
Fisher made his way
beyond the last green wall of the garden on to a sort of towing path looking on
the river and a wooden island opposite. There, indeed, he saw a lean, dark
figure with a stoop almost like that of a vulture, a posture well known in the
law courts as that of Sir John Harker, the Attorney-General. His face was lined
with headwork, for alone among the three idlers in the garden he was a man who
had made his own way; and round his bald brow and hollow temples clung dull red
hair, quite flat, like plates of copper.
"I haven’t seen my
host yet," said Horne Fisher, in a slightly more serious tone than he had
used to the others, "but I suppose I shall meet him at dinner."
"You can see him
now; but you can’t meet him," answered Harker.
He nodded his head
toward one end of the island opposite, and, looking steadily in the same
direction, the other guest could see the dome of a bald head and the top of a
fishing rod, both equally motionless, rising out of the tall undergrowth
against the background of the stream beyond. The fisherman seemed to be seated
against the stump of a tree and facing toward the other bank, so that his face
could not be seen, but the shape of his head was unmistakable.
"He doesn’t like
to be disturbed when he’s fishing," continued Harker. "It’s a sort of
fad of his to eat nothing but fish, and he’s very proud of catching his own. Of
course he’s all for simplicity, like so many of these millionaires. He likes to
come in saying he’s worked for his daily bread like a laborer."
"Does he explain
how he blows all the glass and stuffs all the upholstery," asked Fisher,
"and makes all the silver forks, and grows all the grapes and peaches, and
designs all the patterns on the carpets? I’ve always heard he was a busy
man."
"I don’t think he
mentioned it," answered the lawyer. "What is the meaning of this
social satire?"
"Well, I am a
trifle tired," said Fisher, "of the Simple Life and the Strenuous
Life as lived by our little set. We’re all really dependent in nearly
everything, and we all make a fuss about being independent in something. The
Prime Minister prides himself on doing without a chauffeur, but he can’t do
without a factotum and Jack-of-all-trades; and poor old Bunker has to play the
part of a universal genius, which God knows he was never meant for. The duke
prides himself on doing without a valet, but, for all that, he must give a lot
of people an infernal lot of trouble to collect such extraordinary old clothes
as he wears. He must have them looked up in the British Museum or excavated out
of the tombs. That white hat alone must require a sort of expedition fitted out
to find it, like the North Pole. And here we have old Hook pretending to
produce his own fish when he couldn’t produce his own fish knives or fish forks
to eat it with. He may be simple about simple things like food, but you bet he’s
luxurious about luxurious things, especially little things. I don’t include
you; you’ve worked too hard to enjoy playing at work."
"I sometimes
think," said Harker, "that you conceal a horrid secret of being
useful sometimes. Haven’t you come down here to see Number One before he goes on
to Birmingham?"
Horne Fisher answered,
in a lower voice: "Yes; and I hope to be lucky enough to catch him before
dinner. He’s got to see Sir Isaac about something just afterward."
"Hullo!"
exclaimed Harker. "Sir Isaac’s finished his fishing. I know he prides
himself on getting up at sunrise and going in at sunset."
The old man on the
island had indeed risen to his feet, facing round and showing a bush of gray
beard with rather small, sunken features, but fierce eyebrows and keen,
choleric eyes. Carefully carrying his fishing tackle, he was already making his
way back to the mainland across a bridge of flat stepping-stones a little way
down the shallow stream; then he veered round, coming toward his guests and
civilly saluting them. There were several fish in his basket and he was in a
good temper.
"Yes," he
said, acknowledging Fisher’s polite expression of surprise, "I get up
before anybody else in the house, I think. The early bird catches the
worm."
"Unfortunately,"
said Harker, "it is the early fish that catches the worm."
"But the early man
catches the fish," replied the old man, gruffly.
"But from what I
hear, Sir Isaac, you are the late man, too," interposed Fisher. "You
must do with very little sleep."
"I never had much
time for sleeping," answered Hook, "and I shall have to be the late
man to-night, anyhow. The Prime Minister wants to have a talk, he tells me,
and, all things considered, I think we’d better be dressing for dinner."
Dinner passed off that
evening without a word of politics and little enough but ceremonial trifles.
The Prime Minister, Lord Merivale, who was a long, slim man with curly gray
hair, was gravely complimentary to his host about his success as a fisherman and
the skill and patience he displayed; the conversation flowed like the shallow
stream through the stepping-stones.
"It wants patience
to wait for them, no doubt," said Sir Isaac, "and skill to play them,
but I’m generally pretty lucky at it."
"Does a big fish
ever break the line and get away?" inquired the politician, with
respectful interest.
"Not the sort of
line I use," answered Hook, with satisfaction. "I rather specialize
in tackle, as a matter of fact. If he were strong enough to do that, he’d be strong
enough to pull me into the river."
"A great loss to
the community," said the Prime Minister, bowing.
Fisher had listened to
all these futilities with inward impatience, waiting for his own opportunity,
and when the host rose he sprang to his feet with an alertness he rarely
showed. He managed to catch Lord Merivale before Sir Isaac bore him off for the
final interview. He had only a few words to say, but he wanted to get them
said.
He said, in a low voice
as he opened the door for the Premier, "I have seen Montmirail; he says
that unless we protest immediately on behalf of Denmark, Sweden will certainly
seize the ports."
Lord Merivale nodded.
"I’m just going to hear what Hook has to say about it," he said.
"I imagine,"
said Fisher, with a faint smile, "that there is very little doubt what he
will say about it."
Merivale did not
answer, but lounged gracefully toward the library, whither his host had already
preceded him. The rest drifted toward the billiard room, Fisher merely
remarking to the lawyer: "They won’t be long. We know they’re practically
in agreement."
"Hook entirely
supports the Prime Minister," assented Harker.
"Or the Prime
Minister entirely supports Hook," said Horne Fisher, and began idly to
knock the balls about on the billiard table.
Horne Fisher came down
next morning in a late and leisurely fashion, as was his reprehensible habit;
he had evidently no appetite for catching worms. But the other guests seemed to
have felt a similar indifference, and they helped themselves to breakfast from
the sideboard at intervals during the hours verging upon lunch. So that it was
not many hours later when the first sensation of that strange day came upon
them. It came in the form of a young man with light hair and a candid
expression, who came sculling down the river and disembarked at the landing
stage. It was, in fact, no other than Mr. Harold March, whose journey had begun
far away up the river in the earliest hours of that day. He arrived late in the
afternoon, having stopped for tea in a large riverside town, and he had a pink
evening paper sticking out of his pocket. He fell on the riverside garden like
a quiet and well-behaved thunderbolt, but he was a thunderbolt without knowing
it.
The first exchange of
salutations and introductions was commonplace enough, and consisted, indeed, of
the inevitable repetition of excuses for the eccentric seclusion of the host.
He had gone fishing again, of course, and must not be disturbed till the
appointed hour, though he sat within a stone’s throw of where they stood.
"You see it’s his
only hobby," observed Harker, apologetically, "and, after all, it’s
his own house; and he’s very hospitable in other ways."
"I’m rather
afraid," said Fisher, in a lower voice, "that it’s becoming more of a
mania than a hobby. I know how it is when a man of that age begins to collect
things, if it’s only collecting those rotten little river fish. You remember
Talbot’s uncle with his toothpicks, and poor old Buzzy and the waste of cigar
ashes. Hook has done a lot of big things in his time--the great deal in the
Swedish timber trade and the Peace Conference at Chicago-- but I doubt whether
he cares now for any of those big things as he cares for those little
fish."
"Oh, come,
come," protested the Attorney-General. "You’ll make Mr. March think
he has come to call on a lunatic. Believe me, Hook only does it for fun, like
any other sport, only he’s of the kind that takes his fun sadly. But I bet if
there were big news about timber or shipping, he would drop his fun and his
fish all right."
"Well, I
wonder," said Horne Fisher, looking sleepily at the island in the river.
"By the way, is
there any news of anything?" asked Harker of Harold March. "I see you’ve
got an evening paper; one of those enterprising evening papers that come out in
the morning."
"The beginning of
Lord Merivale’s Birmingham speech," replied March, handing him the paper.
"It’s only a paragraph, but it seems to me rather good."
Harker took the paper,
flapped and refolded it, and looked at the "Stop Press" news. It was,
as March had said, only a paragraph. But it was a paragraph that had a peculiar
effect on Sir John Harker. His lowering brows lifted with a flicker and his
eyes blinked, and for a moment his leathery jaw was loosened. He looked in some
odd fashion like a very old man. Then, hardening his voice and handing the
paper to Fisher without a tremor, he simply said:
"Well, here’s a
chance for the bet. You’ve got your big news to disturb the old man’s
fishing."
Horne Fisher was
looking at the paper, and over his more languid and less expressive features a
change also seemed to pass. Even that little paragraph had two or three large
headlines, and his eye encountered, "Sensational Warning to Sweden,"
and, "We Shall Protest."
"What the
devil--" he said, and his words softened first to a whisper and then a
whistle.
"We must tell old
Hook at once, or he’ll never forgive us," said Harker. "He’ll
probably want to see Number One instantly, though it may be too late now. I’m
going across to him at once. I bet I’ll make him forget his fish, anyhow."
And, turning his back, he made his way hurriedly along the riverside to the
causeway of flat stones.
March was staring at
Fisher, in amazement at the effect his pink paper had produced.
"What does it all
mean?" he cried. "I always supposed we should protest in defense of
the Danish ports, for their sakes and our own. What is all this botheration
about Sir Isaac and the rest of you? Do you think it bad news?"
"Bad news!"
repeated Fisher, with a sort of soft emphasis beyond expression.
"Is it as bad as
all that?" asked his friend, at last.
"As bad as all
that?" repeated Fisher. "Why of course it’s as good as it can be. It’s
great news. It’s glorious news! That’s where the devil of it comes in, to knock
us all silly. It’s admirable. It’s inestimable. It is also quite
incredible."
He gazed again at the
gray and green colors of the island and the river, and his rather dreary eye
traveled slowly round to the hedges and the lawns.
"I felt this
garden was a sort of dream," he said, "and I suppose I must be
dreaming. But there is grass growing and water moving; and something impossible
has happened."
Even as he spoke the
dark figure with a stoop like a vulture appeared in the gap of the hedge just
above him.
"You have won your
bet," said Harker, in a harsh and almost croaking voice. "The old
fool cares for nothing but fishing. He cursed me and told me he would talk no
politics."
"I thought it
might be so," said Fisher, modestly. "What are you going to do
next?"
"I shall use the
old idiot’s telephone, anyhow," replied the lawyer. "I must find out
exactly what has happened. I’ve got to speak for the Government myself
to-morrow." And he hurried away toward the house.
In the silence that followed,
a very bewildeing silence so far as March was concerned, they saw the quaint
figure of the Duke of Westmoreland, with his white hat and whiskers,
approaching them across the garden. Fisher instantly stepped toward him with
the pink paper in his hand, and, with a few words, pointed out the apocalyptic
paragraph. The duke, who had been walking slowly, stood quite still, and for
some seconds he looked like a tailor’s dummy standing and staring outside some
antiquated shop. Then March heard his voice, and it was high and almost
hysterical:
"But he must see
it; he must be made to understand. It cannot have been put to him
properly." Then, with a certain recovery of fullness and even pomposity in
the voice, "I shall go and tell him myself."
Among the queer
incidents of that afternoon, March always remembered something almost comical
about the clear picture of the old gentleman in his wonderful white hat
carefully stepping from stone to stone across the river, like a figure crossing
the traffic in Piccadilly. Then he disappeared behind the trees of the island,
and March and Fisher turned to meet the Attorney-General, who was coming out of
the house with a visage of grim assurance.
"Everybody is
saying," he said, "that the Prime Minister has made the greatest
speech of his life. Peroration and loud and prolonged cheers. Corrupt
financiers and heroic peasants. We will not desert Denmark again."
Fisher nodded and
turned away toward the towing path, where he saw the duke returning with a
rather dazed expression. In answer to question, he said, in a husky and
confidential voice:
"I really think
our poor friend cannot be himself. He refused to listen; he--ah--suggested that
I might frighten the fish."
A keen ear might have
detected a murmur from Mr. Fisher on the subject of a white hat, but Sir John
Harker struck it more decisively:
"Fisher was quite
right. I didn’t believe it myself, but it’s quite clear that the old fellow is
fixed on this fishing notion by now. If the house caught fire behind him he
would hardly move till sunset."
Fisher had continued
his stroll toward the higher embanked ground of the towing path, and he now
swept a long and searching gaze, not toward the island, but toward the distant
wooded heights that were the walls of the valley. An evening sky as clear as
that of the previous day was settling down all over the dim landscape, but
toward the west it was now red rather than gold; there was scarcely any sound
but the monotonous music of the river. Then came the sound of a half-stifled exclamation
from Horne Fisher, and Harold March looked up at him in wonder.
"You spoke of bad
news," said Fisher. "Well, there is really bad news now. I am afraid
this is a bad business."
"What bad news do
you mean?" asked his friend, conscious of something strange and sinister
in his voice.
"The sun has
set," answered Fisher.
He went on with the air
of one conscious of having said something fatal. "We must get somebody to
go across whom he will really listen to. He may be mad, but there’s method in
his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It’s what drives men
mad, being methodical. And he never goes on sitting there after sunset, with
the whole place getting dark. Where’s his nephew? I believe he’s really fond of
his nephew."
"Look!" cried
March, abruptly. "Why, he’s been across already. There he is coming
back."
And, looking up the
river once more, they saw, dark against the sunset reflections, the figure of
James Bullen stepping hastily and rather clumsily from stone to stone. Once he
slipped on a stone with a slight splash. When he rejoined the group on the bank
his olive face was unnaturally pale.
The other four men had
already gathered on the same spot and almost simultaneously were calling out to
him, "What does he say now?"
"Nothing. He
says--nothing."
Fisher looked at the
young man steadily for a moment; then he started from his immobility. and,
making a motion to March to follow him, himself strode down to the river
crossing. In a few moments they were on the little beaten track that ran round
the wooded island, to the other side of it where the fisherman sat. Then they
stood and looked at him, without a word.
Sir Isaac Hook was
still sitting propped up against the stump of the tree, and that for the best
of reasons. A length of his own infallible fishing line was twisted and
tightened twice round his throat and then twice round the wooden prop behind
him. The leading investigator ran forward and touched the fisherman’s hand, and
it was as cold as a fish.
"The sun has
set," said Horne Fisher, in the same terrible tones, "and he will
never see it rise again."
Ten minutes afterward
the five men, shaken by such a shock, were again together in the garden,
looking at one another with white but watchful faces. The lawyer seemed the
most alert of the group; he was articulate if somewhat abrupt.
"We must leave the
body as it is and telephone for the police," he said. "I think my own
authority will stretch to examining the servants and the poor fellow’s papers,
to see if there is anything that concerns them. Of course, none of you
gentlemen must leave this place."
Perhaps there was
something in his rapid and rigorous legality that suggested the closing of a
net or trap. Anyhow, young Bullen suddenly broke down, or perhaps blew up, for
his voice was like an explosion in the silent garden.
"I never touched
him," he cried. "I swear I had nothing to do with it!"
"Who said you
had?" demanded Harker, with a hard eye. "Why do you cry out before
you’re hurt?"
"Because you all
look at me like that," cried the young man, angrily. "Do you think I
don’t know you’re always talking about my damned debts and expectations?"
Rather to March’s
surprise, Fisher had drawn away from this first collision, leading the duke
with him to another part of the garden. When he was out of earshot of the
others he said, with a curious simplicity of manner:
"Westmoreland, I
am going straight to the point."
"Well?" said
the other, staring at him stolidly.
"You have a motive
for killing him," said Fisher.
The duke continued to
stare, but he seemed unable to speak.
"I hope you had a
motive for killing him," continued Fisher, mildly. "You see, it’s
rather a curious situation. If you have a motive for murdering, you probably
didn’t murder. But if you hadn’t any motive, why, then perhaps, you did."
"What on earth are
you talking about?" demanded the duke, violently.
"It’s quite
simple," said Fisher. "When you went across he was either alive or
dead. If he was alive, it might be you who killed him, or why should you have
held your tongue about his death? But if he was dead, and you had a reason for
killing him, you might have held your tongue for fear of being accused."
Then after a silence he added, abstractedly: "Cyprus is a beautiful place,
I believe. Romantic scenery and romantic people. Very intoxicating for a young
man."
The duke suddenly
clenched his hands and said, thickly, "Well, I had a motive."
"Then you’re all
right," said Fisher, holding out his hand with an air of huge relief.
"I was pretty sure you wouldn’t really do it; you had a fright when you
saw it done, as was only natural. Like a bad dream come true, wasn’t it?"
While this curious
conversation was passing, Harker had gone into the house, disregarding the
demonstrations of the sulky nephew, and came back presently with a new air of
animation and a sheaf of papers in his hand.
"I’ve telephoned
for the police," he said, stopping to speak to Fisher, "but I think I’ve
done most of their work for them. I believe I’ve found out the truth. There’s a
paper here--" He stopped, for Fisher was looking at him with a singular
expression; and it was Fisher who spoke next:
"Are there any
papers that are not there, I wonder? I mean that are not there now?" After
a pause he added: "Let us have the cards on the table. When you went
through his papers in such a hurry, Harker, weren’t you looking for something
to-- to make sure it shouldn’t be found?"
Harker did not turn a
red hair on his hard head, but he looked at the other out of the corners of his
eyes.
"And I
suppose," went on Fisher, smoothly, "that is why you, too, told us
lies about having found Hook alive. You knew there was something to show that
you might have killed him, and you didn’t dare tell us he was killed. But, believe
me, it’s much better to be honest now."
Harker’s haggard face
suddenly lit up as if with infernal flames.
"Honest," he
cried, "it’s not so damned fine of you fellows to be honest. You’re all
born with silver spoons in your mouths, and then you swagger about with
everlasting virtue because you haven’t got other people’s spoons in your
pockets. But I was born in a Pimlico lodging house and I had to make my spoon,
and there’d be plenty to say I only spoiled a horn or an honest man. And if a
struggling man staggers a bit over the line in his youth, in the lower parts of
the law which are pretty dingy, anyhow, there’s always some old vampire to hang
on to him all his life for it."
"Guatemalan
Golcondas, wasn’t it?" said Fisher, sympathetically.
Harker suddenly
shuddered. Then he said, "I believe you must know everything, like God
Almighty."
"I know too
much," said Horne Fisher, "and all the wrong things."
The other three men
were drawing nearer to them, but before they came too near, Harker said, in a voice
that had recovered all its firmness:
"Yes, I did
destroy a paper, but I really did find a paper, too; and I believe that it
clears us all."
"Very well,"
said Fisher, in a louder and more cheerful tone; "let us all have the
benefit of it."
"On the very top
of Sir Isaac’s papers," explained Harker, "there was a threatening
letter from a man named Hugo. It threatens to kill our unfortunate friend very
much in the way that he was actually killed. It is a wild letter, full of
taunts; you can see it for yourselves; but it makes a particular point of poor
Hook’s habit of fishing from the island. Above all, the man professes to be
writing from a boat. And, since we alone went across to him," and he
smiled in a rather ugly fashion, "the crime must have been committed by a
man passing in a boat."
"Why, dear
me!" cried the duke, with something almost amounting to animation.
"Why, I remember the man called Hugo quite well! He was a sort of body
servant and bodyguard of Sir Isaac. You see, Sir Isaac was in some fear of
assault. He was--he was not very popular with several people. Hugo was
discharged after some row or other; but I remember him well. He was a great big
Hungarian fellow with great mustaches that stood out on each side of his
face."
A door opened in the
darkness of Harold March’s memory, or, rather, oblivion, and showed a shining
landscape, like that of a lost dream. It was rather a waterscape than a
landscape, a thing of flooded meadows and low trees and the dark archway of a
bridge. And for one instant he saw again the man with mustaches like dark horns
leap up on to the bridge and disappear.
"Good
heavens!" he cried. "Why, I met the murderer this morning!"
Horne Fisher and Harold
March had their day on the river, after all, for the little group broke up when
the police arrived. They declared that the coincidence of March’s evidence had
cleared the whole company, and clinched the case against the flying Hugo.
Whether that Hungarian fugitive would ever be caught appeared to Horne Fisher
to be highly doubtful; nor can it be pretended that he displayed any very
demoniac detective energy in the matter as he leaned back in the boat cushions,
smoking, and watching the swaying reeds slide past.
"It was a very
good notion to hop up on to the bridge," he said. "An empty boat
means very little; he hasn’t been seen to land on either bank, and he’s walked
off the bridge without walking on to it, so to speak. He’s got twenty-four
hours’ start; his mustaches will disappear, and then he will disappear. I think
there is every hope of his escape."
"Hope?"
repeated March, and stopped sculling for an instant.
"Yes, hope,"
repeated the other. "To begin with, I’m not going to be exactly consumed
with Corsican revenge because somebody has killed Hook. Perhaps you may guess
by this time what Hook was. A damned blood-sucking blackmailer was that simple,
strenuous, self-made captain of industry. He had secrets against nearly
everybody; one against poor old Westmoreland about an early marriage in Cyprus
that might have put the duchess in a queer position; and one against Harker
about some flutter with his client’s money when he was a young solicitor. That’s
why they went to pieces when they found him murdered, of course. They felt as
if they’d done it in a dream. But I admit I have another reason for not wanting
our Hungarian friend actually hanged for the murder."
"And what is
that?" asked his friend.
"Only that he didn’t
commit the murder," answered Fisher.
Harold March laid down
the oars and let the boat drift for a moment.
"Do you know, I
was half expecting something like that," he said. "It was quite
irrational, but it was hanging about in the atmosphere, like thunder in the
air."
"On the contrary,
it’s finding Hugo guilty that’s irrational," replied Fisher. "Don’t
you see that they’re condemning him for the very reason for which they acquit
everybody else? Harker and Westmoreland were silent because they found him
murdered, and knew there were papers that made them look like the murderers.
Well, so did Hugo find him murdered, and so did Hugo know there was a paper
that would make him look like the murderer. He had written it himself the day
before."
"But in that
case," said March, frowning, "at what sort of unearthly hour in the
morning was the murder really committed? It was barely daylight when I met him
at the bridge, and that’s some way above the island."
"The answer is
very simple," replied Fisher. "The crime was not committed in the
morning. The crime was not committed on the island."
March stared at the
shining water without replying, but Fisher resumed like one who had been asked
a question:
"Every intelligent
murder involves taking advantage of some one uncommon feature in a common
situation. The feature here was the fancy of old Hook for being the first man
up every morning, his fixed routine as an angler, and his annoyance at being
disturbed. The murderer strangled him in his own house after dinner on the
night before, carried his corpse, with all his fishing tackle, across the
stream in the dead of night, tied him to the tree, and left him there under the
stars. It was a dead man who sat fishing there all day. Then the murderer went
back to the house, or, rather, to the garage, and went off in his motor car.
The murderer drove his own motor car."
Fisher glanced at his
friend’s face and went on. "You look horrified, and the thing is horrible.
But other things are horrible, too. If some obscure man had been hag-ridden by
a blackmailer and had his family life ruined, you wouldn’t think the murder of
his persecutor the most inexcusable of murders. Is it any worse when a whole
great nation is set free as well as a family? By this warning to Sweden we
shall probably prevent war and not precipitate it, and save many thousand lives
rather more valuable than the life of that viper. Oh, I’m not talking sophistry
or seriously justifying the thing, but the slavery that held him and his
country was a thousand times less justifiable. If I’d really been sharp I
should have guessed it from his smooth, deadly smiling at dinner that night. Do
you remember that silly talk about how old Isaac could always play his fish? In
a pretty hellish sense he was a fisher of men."
Harold March took the
oars and began to row again.
"I remember,"
he said, "and about how a big fish might break the line and get
away."
Two men, the one an
architect and the other an archaeologist, met on the steps of the great house
at Prior’s Park; and their host, Lord Bulmer, in his breezy way, thought it
natural to introduce them. It must be confessed that he was hazy as well as
breezy, and had no very clear connection in his mind, beyond the sense that an
architect and an archaeologist begin with the same series of letters. The world
must remain in a reverent doubt as to whether he would, on the same principles,
have presented a diplomatist to a dipsomaniac or a ratiocinator to a rat
catcher. He was a big, fair, bull-necked young man, abounding in outward
gestures, unconsciously flapping his gloves and flourishing his stick.
"You two ought to
have something to talk about," he said, cheerfully. "Old buildings
and all that sort of thing; this is rather an old building, by the way, though
I say it who shouldn’t. I must ask you to excuse me a moment; I’ve got to go
and see about the cards for this Christmas romp my sister’s arranging. We hope
to see you all there, of course. Juliet wants it to be a fancy-dress
affair--abbots and crusaders and all that. My ancestors, I suppose, after
all."
"I trust the abbot
was not an ancestor," said the archaeological gentleman, with a smile.
"Only a sort of
great-uncle, I imagine," answered the other, laughing; then his rather
rambling eye rolled round the ordered landscape in front of the house; an
artificial sheet of water ornamented with an antiquated nymph in the center and
surrounded by a park of tall trees now gray and black and frosty, for it was in
the depth of a severe winter.
"It’s getting
jolly cold," his lordship continued. "My sister hopes we shall have
some skating as well as dancing."
"If the crusaders
come in full armor," said the other, "you must be careful not to
drown your ancestors."
"Oh, there’s no
fear of that," answered Bulmer; "this precious lake of ours is not
two feet deep anywhere." And with one of his flourishing gestures he stuck
his stick into the water to demonstrate its shallowness. They could see the
short end bent in the water, so that he seemed for a moment to lean his large
weight on a breaking staff.
"The worst you can
expect is to see an abbot sit down rather suddenly," he added, turning
away. "Well, au revoir; I’ll let you know about it later."
The archaeologist and
the architect were left on the great stone steps smiling at each other; but
whatever their common interests, they presented a considerable personal
contrast, and the fanciful might even have found some contradiction in each
considered individually. The former, a Mr. James Haddow, came from a drowsy den
in the Inns of Court, full of leather and parchment, for the law was his
profession and history only his hobby; he was indeed, among other things, the
solicitor and agent of the Prior’s Park estate. But he himself was far from
drowsy and seemed remarkably wide awake, with shrewd and prominent blue eyes,
and red hair brushed as neatly as his very neat costume. The latter, whose name
was Leonard Crane, came straight from a crude and almost cockney office of
builders and house agents in the neighboring suburb, sunning itself at the end
of a new row of jerry-built houses with plans in very bright colors and notices
in very large letters. But a serious observer, at a second glance, might have seen
in his eyes something of that shining sleep that is called vision; and his
yellow hair, while not affectedly long, was unaffectedly untidy. It was a
manifest if melancholy truth that the architect was an artist. But the artistic
temperament was far from explaining him; there was something else about him
that was not definable, but which some even felt to be dangerous. Despite his
dreaminess, he would sometimes surprise his friends with arts and even sports
apart from his ordinary life, like memories of some previous existence. On this
occasion, nevertheless, he hastened to disclaim any authority on the other man’s
hobby.
"I mustn’t appear
on false pretences," he said, with a smile. "I hardly even know what
an archaeologist is, except that a rather rusty remnant of Greek suggests that
he is a man who studies old things."
"Yes,"
replied Haddow, grimly. "An archaeologist is a man who studies old things
and finds they are new."
Crane looked at him
steadily for a moment and then smiled again.
"Dare one suggest,"
he said, "that some of the things we have been talking about are among the
old things that turn out not to be old?"
His companion also was
silent for a moment, and the smile on his rugged face was fainter as he
replied, quietly:
"The wall round the
park is really old. The one gate in it is Gothic, and I cannot find any trace
of destruction or restoration. But the house and the estate generally--well the
romantic ideas read into these things are often rather recent romances, things
almost like fashionable novels. For instance, the very name of this place,
Prior’s Park, makes everybody think of it as a moonlit mediaeval abbey; I dare
say the spiritualists by this time have discovered the ghost of a monk there.
But, according to the only authoritative study of the matter I can find, the
place was simply called Prior’s as any rural place is called Podger’s. It was
the house of a Mr. Prior, a farmhouse, probably, that stood here at some time
or other and was a local landmark. Oh, there are a great many examples of the
same thing, here and everywhere else. This suburb of ours used to be a village,
and because some of the people slurred the name and pronounced it Holliwell,
many a minor poet indulged in fancies about a Holy Well, with spells and
fairies and all the rest of it, filling the suburban drawing-rooms with the
Celtic twilight. Whereas anyone acquainted with the facts knows that ’Hollinwall’
simply means ’the hole in the wall,’ and probably referred to some quite
trivial accident. That’s what I mean when I say that we don’t so much find old
things as we find new ones."
Crane seemed to have
grown somewhat inattentive to the little lecture on antiquities and novelties,
and the cause of his restlessness was soon apparent, and indeed approaching.
Lord Bulmer’s sister, Juliet Bray, was coming slowly across the lawn,
accompanied by one gentleman and followed by two others. The young architect
was in the illogical condition of mind in which he preferred three to one.
The man walking with
the lady was no other than the eminent Prince Borodino, who was at least as
famous as a distinguished diplomatist ought to be, in the interests of what is
called secret diplomacy. He had been paying a round of visits at various
English country houses, and exactly what he was doing for diplomacy at Prior’s
Park was as much a secret as any diplomatist could desire. The obvious thing to
say of his appearance was that he would have been extremely handsome if he had
not been entirely bald. But, indeed, that would itself be a rather bald way of
putting it. Fantastic as it sounds, it would fit the case better to say that
people would have been surprised to see hair growing on him; as surprised as if
they had found hair growing on the bust of a Roman emperor. His tall figure was
buttoned up in a tight-waisted fashion that rather accentuated his potential
bulk, and he wore a red flower in his buttonhole. Of the two men walking behind
one was also bald, but in a more partial and also a more premature fashion, for
his drooping mustache was still yellow, and if his eyes were somewhat heavy it
was with languor and not with age. It was Horne Fisher, and he was talking as
easily and idly about everything as he always did. His always did. His
companion was a more striking, and even more companion was a more striking, and
even more sinister, figure, and he had the added importance of being Lord
Bulmer’s oldest and most intimate friend. He was generally known with a severe
simplicity as Mr. Brain; but it was understood that he had been a judge and
police official in India, and that he had enemies, who had represented his
measures against crime as themselves almost criminal. He was a brown skeleton
of a man with dark, deep, sunken eyes and a black mustache that hid the meaning
of his mouth. Though he had the look of one wasted by some tropical disease,
his movements were much more alert than those of his lounging companion.
"It’s all
settled," announced the lady, with great animation, when they came within
hailing distance. "You’ve all got to put on masquerade things and very
likely skates as well, though the prince says they don’t go with it; but we don’t
care about that. It’s freezing already, and we don’t often get such a chance in
England."
"Even in India we
don’t exactly skate all the year round," observed Mr. Brain.
"And even Italy is
not primarily associated with ice," said the Italian.
"Italy is
primarily associated with ices," remarked Mr. Horne Fisher. "I mean
with ice cream men. Most people in this country imagine that Italy is entirely populated
with ice cream men and organ grinders. There certainly are a lot of them;
perhaps they’re an invading army in disguise."
"How do you know
they are not the secret emissaries of our diplomacy?" asked the prince,
with a slightly scornful smile. "An army of organ grinders might pick up
hints, and their monkeys might pick up all sort of things."
"The organs are
organized in fact," said the flippant Mr. Fisher. "Well, I’ve known
it pretty cold before now in Italy and even in India, up on the Himalayan
slopes. The ice on our own little round pond will be quite cozy by
comparison."
Juliet Bray was an
attractive lady with dark hair and eyebrows and dancing eyes, and there was a
geniality and even generosity in her rather imperious ways. In most matters she
could command her brother, though that nobleman, like many other men of vague
ideas, was not without a touch of the bully when he was at bay. She could
certainly command her guests, even to the extent of decking out the most
respectable and reluctant of them with her mediaeval masquerade. And it really
seemed as if she could command the elements also, like a witch. For the weather
steadily hardened and sharpened; that night the ice of the lake, glimmering in
the moonlight, was like a marble floor, and they had begun to dance and skate
on it before it was dark.
Prior’s Park, or, more
properly, the surrounding district of Holinwall, was a country seat that had
become a suburb; having once had only a dependent village at its doors, it now
found outside all its doors the signals of the expansion of London. Mr. Haddow,
who was engaged in historical researches both in the library and the locality,
could find little assistance in the latter. He had already realized, from the
documents, that Prior’s Park had originally been something like Prior’s Farm,
named after some local figure, but the new social conditions were all against
his tracing the story by its traditions. Had any of the real rustics remained,
he would probably have found some lingering legend of Mr. Prior, however remote
he might be. But the new nomadic population of clerks and artisans, constantly
shifting their homes from one suburb to another, or their children from one
school to another, could have no corporate continuity. They had all that forgetfulness
of history that goes everywhere with the extension of education.
Nevertheless, when he
came out of the library next morning and saw the wintry trees standing round
the frozen pond like a black forest, he felt he might well have been far in the
depths of the country. The old wall running round the park kept that inclosure
itself still entirely rural and romantic, and one could easily imagine that the
depths of that dark forest faded away indefinitely into distant vales and
hills. The gray and black and silver of the wintry wood were all the more
severe or somber as a contrast to the colored carnival groups that already
stood on and around the frozen pool. For the house party had already flung
themselves impatiently into fancy dress, and the lawyer, with his neat black
suit and red hair, was the only modern figure among them.
"Aren’t you going
to dress up?" asked Juliet, indignantly shaking at him a horned and
towering blue headdress of the fourteenth century which framed her face very
becomingly, fantastic as it was. "Everybody here has to be in the Middle
Ages. Even Mr. Brain has put on a sort of brown dressing gown and says he’s a
monk; and Mr. Fisher got hold of some old potato sacks in the kitchen and sewed
them together; he’s supposed to be a monk, too. As to the prince, he’s
perfectly glorious, in great crimson robes as a cardinal. He looks as if he
could poison everybody. You simply must be something."
"I will be
something later in the day," he replied. "At present I am nothing but
an antiquary and an attorney. I have to see your brother presently, about some
legal business and also some local investigations he asked me to make. I must
look a little like a steward when I give an account of my stewardship."
"Oh, but my
brother has dressed up!" cried the girl. "Very much so. No end, if I
may say so. Why he’s bearing down on you now in all his glory."
The noble lord was
indeed marching toward them in a magnificent sixteenth-century costume of
purple and gold, with a gold-hilted sword and a plumed cap, and manners to
match. Indeed, there was something more than his usual expansiveness of bodily
action in his appearance at that moment. It almost seemed, so to speak, that
the plumes on his hat had gone to his head. He flapped his great, gold-lined cloak
like the wings of a fairy king in a pantomime; he even drew his sword with a
flourish and waved it about as he did his walking stick. In the light of after
events there seemed to be something monstrous and ominous about that
exuberance, something of the spirit that is called fey. At the time it merely
crossed a few people’s minds that he might possibly be drunk.
As he strode toward his
sister the first figure he passed was that of Leonard Crane, clad in Lincoln
green, with the horn and baldrick and sword appropriate to Robin Hood; for he
was standing nearest to the lady, where, indeed, he might have been found
during a disproportionate part of the time. He had displayed one of his buried
talents in the matter of skating, and now that the skating was over seemed
disposed to prolong the partnership. The boisterous Bulmer playfully made a
pass at him with his drawn sword, going forward with the lunge in the proper
fencing fashion, and making a somewhat too familiar Shakespearean quotation
about a rodent and a Venetian coin.
Probably in Crane also
there was a subdued excitement just then; anyhow, in one flash he had drawn his
own sword and parried; and then suddenly, to the surprise of everyone, Bulmer’s
weapon seemed to spring out of his hand into the air and rolled away on the
ringing ice.
"Well, I
never!" said the lady, as if with justifiable indignation. "You never
told me you could fence, too."
Bulmer put up his sword
with an air rather bewildered than annoyed, which increased the impression of
something irresponsible in his mood at the moment; then he turned rather
abruptly to his lawyer, saying:
"We can settle up
about the estate after dinner; I’ve missed nearly all the skating as it is, and
I doubt if the ice will hold till to-morrow night. I think I shall get up early
and have a spin by myself."
"You won’t be
disturbed with my company," said Horne Fisher, in his weary fashion.
"If I have to begin the day with ice, in the American fashion, I prefer it
in smaller quantities. But no early hours for me in December. The early bird
catches the cold."
"Oh, I sha’n’t die
of catching a cold," answered Bulmer, and laughed.
A considerable group of
the skating party had consisted of the guests staying at the house, and the
rest had tailed off in twos and threes some time before most of the guests
began to retire for the night. Neighbors, always invited to Prior’s Park on
such occasions, went back to their own houses in motors or on foot; the legal
and archeoological gentleman had returned to the Inns of Court by a late train,
to get a paper called for during his consultation with his client; and most of
the other guests were drifting and lingering at various stages on their way up
to bed. Horne Fisher, as if to deprive himself of any excuse for his refusal of
early rising, had been the first to retire to his room; but, sleepy as he
looked, he could not sleep. He had picked up from a table the book of
antiquarian topography, in which Haddow had found his first hints about the
origin of the local name, and, being a man with a quiet and quaint capacity for
being interested in anything, he began to read it steadily, making notes now and
then of details on which his previous reading left him with a certain doubt
about his present conclusions. His room was the one nearest to the lake in the
center of the woods, and was therefore the quietest, and none of the last
echoes of the evening’s festivity could reach him. He had followed carefully
the argument which established the derivation from Mr. Prior’s farm and the
hole in the wall, and disposed of any fashionable fancy about monks and magic
wells, when he began to be conscious of a noise audible in the frozen silence
of the night. It was not a particularly loud noise, but it seemed to consist of
a series of thuds or heavy blows, such as might be struck on a wooden door by a
man seeking to enter. They were followed by something like a faint creak or
crack, as if the obstacle had either been opened or had given way. He opened
his own bedroom door and listened, but as he heard talk and laughter all over
the lower floors, he had no reason to fear that a summons would be neglected or
the house left without protection. He went to his open window, looking out over
the frozen pond and the moonlit statue in the middle of their circle of
darkling woods, and listened again. But silence had returned to that silent
place, and, after straining his ears for a considerable time, he could hear
nothing but the solitary hoot of a distant departing train. Then he reminded
himself how many nameless noises can be heard by the wakeful during the most
ordinary night, and shrugging his shoulders, went wearily to bed.
He awoke suddenly and
sat up in bed with his ears filled, as with thunder, with the throbbing echoes
of a rending cry. He remained rigid for a moment, and then sprang out of bed,
throwing on the loose gown of sacking he had worn all day. He went first to the
window, which was open, but covered with a thick curtain, so that his room was
still completely dark; but when he tossed the curtain aside and put his head
out, he saw that a gray and silver daybreak had already appeared behind the
black woods that surrounded the little lake, and that was all that he did see.
Though the sound had certainly come in through the open window from this
direction, the whole scene was still and empty under the morning light as under
the moonlight. Then the long, rather lackadaisical hand he had laid on a window
sill gripped it tighter, as if to master a tremor, and his peering blue eyes
grew bleak with fear. It may seem that his emotion was exaggerated and
needless, considering the effort of common sense by which he had conquered his
nervousness about the noise on the previous night. But that had been a very
different sort of noise. It might have been made by half a hundred things, from
the chopping of wood to the breaking of bottles. There was only one thing in
nature from which could come the sound that echoed through the dark house at
daybreak. It was the awful articulate voice of man; and it was something worse,
for he knew what man.
He knew also that it
had been a shout for help. It seemed to him that he had heard the very word;
but the word, short as it was, had been swallowed up, as if the man had been
stifled or snatched away even as he spoke. Only the mocking reverberations of
it remained even in his memory, but he had no doubt of the original voice. He
had no doubt that the great bull’s voice of Francis Bray, Baron Bulmer, had
been heard for the last time between the darkness and the lifting dawn.
How long he stood there
he never knew, but he was startled into life by the first living thing that he
saw stirring in that half-frozen landscape. Along the path beside the lake, and
immediately under his window, a figure was walking slowly and softly, but with
great composure--a stately figure in robes of a splendid scarlet; it was the
Italian prince, still in his cardinal’s costume. Most of the company had indeed
lived in their costumes for the last day or two, and Fisher himself had assumed
his frock of sacking as a convenient dressing gown; but there seemed,
nevertheless, something unusually finished and formal, in the way of an early
bird, about this magnificent red cockatoo. It was as if the early bird had been
up all night.
"What is the
matter?" he called, sharply, leaning out of the window, and the Italian
turned up his great yellow face like a mask of brass.
"We had better
discuss it downstairs," said Prince Borodino.
Fisher ran downstairs,
and encountered the great, red-robed figure entering the doorway and blocking
the entrance with his bulk.
"Did you hear that
cry?" demanded Fisher.
"I heard a noise
and I came out," answered the diplomatist, and his face was too dark in
the shadow for its expression to be read.
"It was Bulmer’s
voice," insisted Fisher. "I’ll swear it was Bulmer’s voice."
"Did you know him
well?" asked the other.
The question seemed
irrelevant, though it was not illogical, and Fisher could only answer in a,
random fashion that he knew Lord Bulmer only slightly.
"Nobody seems to
have known him well," continued the Italian, in level tones. "Nobody
except that man Brain. Brain is rather older than Bulmer, but I fancy they
shared a good many secrets."
Fisher moved abruptly,
as if waking from a momentary trance, and said, in a new and more vigorous
voice, "But look here, hadn’t we better get outside and see if anything
has happened."
"The ice seems to
be thawing," said the other, almost with indifference.
When they emerged from
the house, dark stains and stars in the gray field of ice did indeed indicate
that the frost was breaking up, as their host had prophesied the day before,
and the very memory of yesterday brought back the mystery of to-day.
"He knew there
would be a thaw," observed the prince. "He went out skating quite
early on purpose. Did he call out because he landed in the water, do you
think?"
Fisher looked puzzled.
"Bulmer was the last man to bellow like that because he got his boots wet.
And that’s all he could do here; the water would hardly come up to the calf of
a man of his size. You can see the flat weeds on the floor of the lake, as if
it were through a thin pane of glass. No, if Bulmer had only broken the ice he
wouldn’t have said much at the moment, though possibly a good deal afterward.
We should have found him stamping and damning up and down this path, and
calling for clean boots."
"Let us hope we
shall find him as happily employed," remarked the diplomatist. "In
that case the voice must have come out of the wood."
"I’ll swear it
didn’t come out of the house," said Fisher; and the two disappeared
together into the twilight of wintry trees.
The plantation stood
dark against the fiery colors of sunrise, a black fringe having that feathery
appearance which makes trees when they are bare the very reverse of rugged.
Hours and hours afterward, when the same dense, but delicate, margin was dark
against the greenish colors opposite the sunset, the search thus begun at
sunrise had not come to an end. By successive stages, and to slowly gathering
groups of the company, it became apparent that the most extraordinary of all
gaps had appeared in the party; the guests could find no trace of their host
anywhere. The servants reported that his bed had been slept in and his skates
and his fancy costume were gone, as if he had risen early for the purpose he
had himself avowed. But from the top of the house to the bottom, from the walls
round the park to the pond in the center, there was no trace of Lord Bulmer,
dead or alive. Horne Fisher realized that a chilling premonition had already
prevented him from expecting to find the man alive. But his bald brow was
wrinkled over an entirely new and unnatural problem, in not finding the man at
all.
He considered the
possibility of Bulmer having gone off of his own accord, for some reason; but
after fully weighing it he finally dismissed it. It was inconsistent with the
unmistakable voice heard at daybreak, and with many other practical obstacles.
There was only one gateway in the ancient and lofty wall round the small park;
the lodge keeper kept it locked till late in the morning, and the lodge keeper
had seen no one pass. Fisher was fairly sure that he had before him a
mathematical problem in an inclosed space. His instinct had been from the first
so attuned to the tragedy that it would have been almost a relief to him to
find the corpse. He would have been grieved, but not horrified, to come on the nobleman’s
body dangling from one of his own trees as from a gibbet, or floating in his
own pool like a pallid weed. What horrified him was to find nothing.
He soon become
conscious that he was not alone even in his most individual and isolated
experiments. He often found a figure following him like his shadow, in silent
and almost secret clearings in the plantation or outlying nooks and corners of
the old wall. The dark-mustached mouth was as mute as the deep eyes were
mobile, darting incessantly hither and thither, but it was clear that Brain of
the Indian police had taken up the trail like an old hunter after a tiger.
Seeing that he was the only personal friend of the vanished man, this seemed
natural enough, and Fisher resolved to deal frankly with him.
"This silence is
rather a social strain," he said. "May I break the ice by talking
about the weather?--which, by the way, has already broken the ice. I know that
breaking the ice might be a rather melancholy metaphor in this case."
"I don’t think
so," replied Brain, shortly. "I don’t fancy the ice had much to do
with it. I don’t see how it could."
"What would you
propose doing?" asked Fisher.
"Well, we’ve sent
for the authorities, of course, but I hope to find something out before they
come," replied the Anglo-Indian. "I can’t say I have much hope from
police methods in this country. Too much red tape, habeas corpus and that sort
of thing. What we want is to see that nobody bolts; the nearest we could get to
it would be to collect the company and count them, so to speak. Nobody’s left
lately, except that lawyer who was poking about for antiquities."
"Oh, he’s out of
it; he left last night," answered the other. "Eight hours after
Bulmer’s chauffeur saw his lawyer off by the train I heard Bulmer’s own voice
as plain as I hear yours now."
"I suppose you don’t
believe in spirits?" said the man from India. After a pause he added:
"There’s somebody else I should like to find, before we go after a fellow
with an alibi in the Inner Temple. What’s become of that fellow in green-- the
architect dressed up as a forester? I haven’t seem him about."
Mr. Brain managed to
secure his assembly of all the distracted company before the arrival of the
police. But when he first began to coment once more on the young architect’s
delay in putting in an appearance, he found himself in the presence of a minor
mystery, and a psychological development of an entirely unexpected kind.
Juliet Bray had
confronted the catastrophe of her brother’s disappearance with a somber
stoicism in which there was, perhaps, more paralysis than pain; but when the
other question came to the surface she was both agitated and angry.
"We don’t want to
jump to any conclusions about anybody," Brain was saying in his staccato
style. "But we should like to know a little more about Mr. Crane. Nobody
seems to know much about him, or where he comes from. And it seems a sort of
coincidence that yesterday he actually crossed swords with poor Bulmer, and
could have stuck him, too, since he showed himself the better swordsman. Of
course, that may be an accident and couldn’t possibly be called a case against
anybody; but then we haven’t the means to make a real case against anybody.
Till the police come we are only a pack of very amateur sleuthhounds."
"And I think you’re
a pack of snobs," said Juliet. "Because Mr. Crane is a genius who’s
made his own way, you try to suggest he’s a murderer without daring to say so.
Because he wore a toy sword and happened to know how to use it, you want us to
believe he used it like a bloodthirsty maniac for no reason in the world. And
because he could have hit my brother and didn’t, you deduce that he did. That’s
the sort of way you argue. And as for his having disappeared, you’re wrong in
that as you are in everything else, for here he comes."
And, indeed, the green
figure of the fictitious Robin Hood slowly detached itself from the gray
background of the trees, and came toward them as she spoke.
He approached the group
slowly, but with composure; but he was decidedly pale, and the eyes of Brain
and Fisher had already taken in one detail of the green-clad figure more
clearly than all the rest. The horn still swung from his baldrick, but the
sword was gone.
Rather to the surprise
of the company, Brain did not follow up the question thus suggested; but, while
retaining an air of leading the inquiry, had also an appearance of changing the
subject.
"Now we’re all
assembled," he observed, quietly, "there is a question I want to ask
to begin with. Did anybody here actually see Lord Bulmer this morning?"
Leonard Crane turned
his pale face round the circle of faces till he came to Juliet’s; then he
compressed his lips a little and said:
"Yes, I saw
him."
"Was he alive and
well?" asked Brain, quickly. "How was he dressed?"
"He appeared exceedingly
well," replied Crane, with a curious intonation. "He was dressed as
he was yesterday, in that purple costume copied from the portrait of his
ancestor in the sixteenth century. He had his skates in his hand."
"And his sword at
his side, I suppose," added the questioner. "Where is your own sword,
Mr. Crane?"
"I threw it
away."
In the singular silence
that ensued, the train of thought in many minds became involuntarily a series
of colored pictures.
They had grown used to
their fanciful garments looking more gay and gorgeous against the dark gray and
streaky silver of the forest, so that the moving figures glowed like
stained-glass saints walking. The effect had been more fitting because so many
of them had idly parodied pontifical or monastic dress. But the most arresting
attitude that remained in their memories had been anything but merely monastic;
that of the moment when the figure in bright green and the other in vivid
violet had for a moment made a silver cross of their crossing swords. Even when
it was a jest it had been something of a drama; and it was a strange and
sinister thought that in the gray daybreak the same figures in the same posture
might have been repeated as a tragedy.
"Did you quarrel
with him?" asked Brain, suddenly.
"Yes,"
replied the immovable man in green. "Or he quarreled with me."
"Why did he
quarrel with you?" asked the investigator; and Leonard Crane made no
reply.
Horne Fisher, curiously
enough, had only given half his attention to this crucial cross-examination. His
heavy-lidded eyes had languidly followed the figure of Prince Borodino, who at
this stage had strolled away toward the fringe of the wood; and, after a pause,
as of meditation, had disappeared into the darkness of the trees.
He was recalled from
his irrelevance by the voice of Juliet Bray, which rang out with an altogether
new note of decision:
"If that is the
difficulty, it had best be cleared up. I am engaged to Mr. Crane, and when we
told my brother he did not approve of it; that is all."
Neither Brain nor
Fisher exhibited any surprise, but the former added, quietly:
"Except, I
suppose, that he and your brother went off into the wood to discuss it, where
Mr. Crane mislaid his sword, not to mention his companion."
"And may I
ask," inquired Crane, with a certain flicker of mockery passing over his
pallid features, "what I am supposed to have done with either of them? Let
us adopt the cheerful thesis that I am a murderer; it has yet to be shown that
I am a magician. If I ran your unfortunate friend through the body, what did I
do with the body? Did I have it carried away by seven flying dragons, or was it
merely a trifling matter of turning it into a milk-white hind?"
"It is no occasion
for sneering," said the Anglo-Indian judge, with abrupt authority.
"It doesn’t make it look better for you that you can joke about the
loss."
Fisher’s dreamy, and
even dreary, eye was still on the edge of the wood behind, and he became
conscious of masses of dark red, like a stormy sunset cloud, glowing through
the gray network of the thin trees, and the prince in his cardinal’s robes
reemerged on to the pathway. Brain had had half a notion that the prince might
have gone to look for the lost rapier. But when he reappeared he was carrying
in his hand, not a sword, but an ax.
The incongruity between
the masquerade and the mystery had created a curious psychological atmosphere.
At first they had all felt horribly ashamed at being caught in the foolish
disguises of a festival, by an event that had only too much the character of a
funeral. Many of them would have already gone back and dressed in clothes that
were more funereal or at least more formal. But somehow at the moment this
seemed like a second masquerade, more artificial and frivolous than the first.
And as they reconciled themselves to their ridiculous trappings, a curious
sensation had come over some of them, notably over the more sensitive, like
Crane and Fisher and Juliet, but in some degree over everybody except the
practical Mr. Brain. It was almost as if they were the ghosts of their own
ancestors haunting that dark wood and dismal lake, and playing some old part
that they only half remembered. The movements of those colored figures seemed
to mean something that had been settled long before, like a silent heraldry.
Acts, attitudes, external objects, were accepted as an allegory even without
the key; and they knew when a crisis had come, when they did not know what it
was. And somehow they knew subconsciously that the whole tale had taken a new
and terrible turn, when they saw the prince stand in the gap of the gaunt
trees, in his robes of angry crimson and with his lowering face of bronze,
bearing in his hand a new shape of death. They could not have named a reason,
but the two swords seemed indeed to have become toy swords and the whole tale
of them broken and tossed away like a toy. Borodino looked like the Old World
headsman, clad in terrible red, and carrying the ax for the execution of the
criminal. And the criminal was not Crane.
Mr. Brain of the Indian
police was glaring at the new object, and it was a moment or two before he
spoke, harshly and almost hoarsely.
"What are you
doing with that?" he asked. "Seems to be a woodman’s chopper."
"A natural
association of ideas," observed Horne Fisher. "If you meet a cat in a
wood you think it’s a wildcat, though it may have just strolled from the
drawing-room sofa. As a matter of fact, I happen to know that is not the
woodman’s chopper. It’s the kitchen chopper, or meat ax, or something like
that, that somebody has thrown away in the wood. I saw it in the kitchen myself
when I was getting the potato sacks with which I reconstructed a mediaeval
hermit."
"All the same, it
is not without interest," remarked the prince, holding out the instrument
to Fisher, who took it and examined it carefully. "A butcher’s cleaver
that has done butcher’s work."
"It was certainly
the instrument of the crime," assented Fisher, in a low voice.
Brain was staring at
the dull blue gleam of the ax head with fierce and fascinated eyes. "I don’t
understand you," he said. "There is no--there are no marks on
it."
"It has shed no
blood," answered Fisher, "but for all that it has committed a crime.
This is as near as the criminal came to the crime when he committed it."
"What do you
mean?"
"He was not there
when he did it," explained Fisher. "It’s a poor sort of murderer who
can’t murder people when he isn’t there."
"You seem to be
talking merely for the sake of mystification," said Brain. "If you
have any practical advice to give you might as well make it intelligible."
"The only
practical advice I can suggest," said Fisher, thoughtfully, "is a
little research into local topography and nomenclature. They say there used to
be a Mr. Prior, who had a farm in this neighborhood. I think some details about
the domestic life of the late Mr. Prior would throw a light on this terrible
business."
"And you have
nothing more immediate than your topography to offer," said Brain, with a
sneer, "to help me avenge my friend?"
"Well," said
Fisher, "I should find out the truth about the Hole in the Wall."
That night, at the
close of a stormy twilight and under a strong west wind that followed the
breaking of the frost, Leonard Crane was wending his way in a wild rotatory
walk round and round the high, continuous wall that inclosed the little wood.
He was driven by a desperate idea of solving for himself the riddle that had
clouded his reputation and already even threatened his liberty. The police
authorities, now in charge of the inquiry, had not arrested him, but he knew
well enough that if he tried to move far afield he would be instantly arrested.
Horne Fisher’s fragmentary hints, though he had refused to expand them as yet,
had stirred the artistic temperament of the architect to a sort of wild
analysis, and he was resolved to read the hieroglyph upside down and every way
until it made sense. If it was something connected with a hole in the wall he
would find the hole in the wall; but, as a matter of fact, he was unable to
find the faintest crack in the wall. His professional knowledge told him that
the masonry was all of one workmanship and one date, and, except for the
regular entrance, which threw no light on the mystery, he found nothing
suggesting any sort of hiding place or means of escape. Walking a narrow path
between the winding wall and the wild eastward bend and sweep of the gray and
feathery trees, seeing shifting gleams of a lost sunset winking almost like
lightning as the clouds of tempest scudded across the sky and mingling with the
first faint blue light from a slowly strengthened moon behind him, he began to
feel his head going round as his heels were going round and round the blind
recurrent barrier. He had thoughts on the border of thought; fancies about a
fourth dimension which was itself a hole to hide anything, of seeing everything
from a new angle out of a new window in the senses; or of some mystical light
and transparency, like the new rays of chemistry, in which he could see Bulmer’s
body, horrible and glaring, floating in a lurid halo over the woods and the
wall. He was haunted also with the hint, which somehow seemed to be equally
horrifying, that it all had something to do with Mr. Prior. There seemed even
to be something creepy in the fact that he was always respectfully referred to
as Mr. Prior, and that it was in the domestic life of the dead farmer that he
had been bidden to seek the seed of these dreadful things. As a matter of fact,
he had found that no local inquiries had revealed anything at all about the
Prior family.
The moonlight had
broadened and brightened, the wind had driven off the clouds and itself died
fitfully away, when he came round again to the artificial lake in front of the
house. For some reason it looked a very artificial lake; indeed, the whole
scene was like a classical landscape with a touch of Watteau; the Palladian
facade of the house pale in the moon, and the same silver touching the very
pagan and naked marble nymph in the middle of the pond. Rather to his surprise,
he found another figure there beside the statue, sitting almost equally
motionless; and the same silver pencil traced the wrinkled brow and patient
face of Horne Fisher, still dressed as a hermit and apparently practicing something
of the solitude of a hermit. Nevertheless, he looked up at Leonard Crane and
smiled, almost as if he had expected him.
"Look here,"
said Crane, planting himself in front of him, "can you tell me anything
about this business?"
"I shall soon have
to tell everybody everything about it," replied Fisher, "but I’ve no
objection to telling you something first. But, to begin with, will you tell me
something? What really happened when you met Bulmer this morning? You did throw
away your sword, but you didn’t kill him."
"I didn’t kill him
because I threw away my sword," said the other. "I did it on
purpose--or I’m not sure what might have happened."
After a pause he went
on, quietly: "The late Lord Bulmer was a very breezy gentleman, extremely
breezy. He was very genial with his inferiors, and would have his lawyer and
his architect staying in his house for all sorts of holidays and amusements.
But there was another side to him, which they found out when they tried to be
his equals. When I told him that his sister and I were engaged, something
happened which I simply can’t and won’t describe. It seemed to me like some
monstrous upheaval of madness. But I suppose the truth is painfully simple.
There is such a thing as the coarseness of a gentleman. And it is the most
horrible thing in humanity."
"I know,"
said Fisher. "The Renaissance nobles of the Tudor time were like
that."
"It is odd that
you should say that," Crane went on. "For while we were talking there
came on me a curious feeling that we were repeating some scene of the past, and
that I was really some outlaw, found in the woods like Robin Hood, and that he
had really stepped in all his plumes and purple out of the picture frame of the
ancestral portrait. Anyhow, he was the man in possession, and he neither feared
God nor regarded man. I defied him, of course, and walked away. I might really
have killed him if I had not walked away."
"Yes," said
Fisher, nodding, "his ancestor was in possession and he was in possession,
and this is the end of the story. It all fits in."
"Fits in with
what?" cried his companion, with sudden impatience. "I can’t make
head or tail of it. You tell me to look for the secret in the hole in the wall,
but I can’t find any hole in the wall."
"There isn’t
any," said Fisher. "That’s the secret." After reflecting a
moment, he added: "Unless you call it a hole in the wall of the world.
Look here; I’ll tell you if you like, but I’m afraid it involves an
introduction. You’ve got to understand one of the tricks of the modern mind, a
tendency that most people obey without noticing it. In the village or suburb
outside there’s an inn with the sign of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose
I went about telling everybody that this was only a corruption of King George
and the Dragoon. Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry, from a
vague feeling that it’s probable because it’s prosaic. It turns something
romantic and legendary into something recent and ordinary. And that somehow
makes it sound rational, though it is unsupported by reason. Of course some
people would have the sense to remember having seen St. George in old Italian
pictures and French romances, but a good many wouldn’t think about it at all.
They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern intelligence
won’t accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without
authority. That’s exactly what has happened here.
"When some critic
or other chose to say that Prior’s Park was not a priory, but was named after
some quite modern man named Prior, nobody really tested the theory at all. It
never occurred to anybody repeating the story to ask if there WAS any Mr.
Prior, if anybody had ever seen him or heard of him. As a matter of fact, it
was a priory, and shared the fate of most priories--that is, the Tudor
gentleman with the plumes simply stole it by brute force and turned it into his
own private house; he did worse things, as you shall hear. But the point here
is that this is how the trick works, and the trick works in the same way in the
other part of the tale. The name of this district is printed Holinwall in all
the best maps produced by the scholars; and they allude lightly, not without a
smile, to the fact that it was pronounced Holiwell by the most ignorant and
old-fashioned of the poor. But it is spelled wrong and pronounced right."
"Do you mean to
say," asked Crane, quickly, "that there really was a well?"
"There is a
well," said Fisher, "and the truth lies at the bottom of it."
As he spoke he
stretched out his hand and pointed toward the sheet of water in front of him.
"The well is under
that water somewhere," he said, "and this is not the first tragedy
connected with it. The founder of this house did something which his fellow
ruffians very seldom did; something that had to be hushed up even in the
anarchy of the pillage of the monasteries. The well was connected with the
miracles of some saint, and the last prior that guarded it was something like a
saint himself; certainly he was something very like a martyr. He defied the new
owner and dared him to pollute the place, till the noble, in a fury, stabbed
him and flung his body into the well, whither, after four hundred years, it has
been followed by an heir of the usurper, clad in the same purple and walking
the world with the same pride."
"But how did it
happen," demanded Crane, "that for the first time Bulmer fell in at
that particular spot?"
"Because the ice
was only loosened at that particular spot, by the only man who knew it,"
answered Horne Fisher. "It was cracked deliberately, with the kitchen
chopper, at that special place; and I myself heard the hammering and did not
understand it. The place had been covered with an artificial lake, if only
because the whole truth had to be covered with an artificial legend. But don’t
you see that it is exactly what those pagan nobles would have done, to
desecrate it with a sort of heathen goddess, as the Roman Emperor built a temple
to Venus on the Holy Sepulchre. But the truth could still be traced out, by any
scholarly man determined to trace it. And this man was determined to trace
it."
"What man?"
asked the other, with a shadow of the answer in his mind.
"The only man who has
an alibi," replied Fisher. "James Haddow, the antiquarian lawyer,
left the night before the fatality, but he left that black star of death on the
ice. He left abruptly, having previously proposed to stay; probably, I think,
after an ugly scene with Bulmer, at their legal interview. As you know
yourself, Bulmer could make a man feel pretty murderous, and I rather fancy the
lawyer had himself irregularities to confess, and was in danger of exposure by
his client. But it’s my reading of human nature that a man will cheat in his
trade, but not in his hobby. Haddow may have been a dishonest lawyer, but he
couldn’t help being an honest antiquary. When he got on the track of the truth
about the Holy Well he had to follow it up; he was not to be bamboozled with newspaper
anecdotes about Mr. Prior and a hole in the wall; he found out everything, even
to the exact location of the well, and he was rewarded, if being a successful
assassin can be regarded as a reward."
"And how did you
get on the track of all this hidden history?" asked the young architect.
A cloud came across the
brow of Horne Fisher. "I knew only too much about it already," he
said, "and, after all, it’s shameful for me to be speaking lightly of poor
Bulmer, who has paid his penalty; but the rest of us haven’t. I dare say every
cigar I smoke and every liqueur I drink comes directly or indirectly from the
harrying of the holy places and the persecution of the poor. After all, it
needs very little poking about in the past to find that hole in the wall, that
great breach in the defenses of English history. It lies just under the surface
of a thin sheet of sham information and instruction, just as the black and
blood-stained well lies just under that floor of shallow water and flat weeds.
Oh, the ice is thin, but it bears; it is strong enough to support us when we
dress up as monks and dance on it, in mockery of the dear, quaint old Middle
Ages. They told me I must put on fancy dress; so I did put on fancy dress,
according to my own taste and fancy. I put on the only costume I think fit for
a man who has inherited the position of a gentleman, and yet has not entirely
lost the feelings of one."
In answer to a look of
inquiry, he rose with a sweeping and downward gesture.
"Sackcloth,"
he said; "and I would wear the ashes as well if they would stay on my bald
head."
Harold March and the
few who cultivated the friendship of Horne Fisher, especially if they saw
something of him in his own social setting, were conscious of a certain
solitude in his very sociability. They seemed to be always meeting his
relations and never meeting his family. Perhaps it would be truer to say that
they saw much of his family and nothing of his home. His cousins and
connections ramified like a labyrinth all over the governing class of Great
Britain, and he seemed to be on good, or at least on good-humored, terms with
most of them. For Horne Fisher was remarkable for a curious impersonal
information and interest touching all sorts of topics, so that one could
sometimes fancy that his culture, like his colorless, fair mustache and pale,
drooping features, had the neutral nature of a chameleon. Anyhow, he could
always get on with viceroys and Cabinet Ministers and all the great men
responsible for great departments, and talk to each of them on his own subject,
on the branch of study with which he was most seriously concerned. Thus he
could converse with the Minister for War about silkworms, with the Minister of
Education about detective stories, with the Minister of Labor about Limoges
enamel, and with the Minister of Missions and Moral Progress (if that be his
correct title) about the pantomime boys of the last four decades. And as the
first was his first cousin, the second his second cousin, the third his brother-in-law,
and the fourth his uncle by marriage, this conversational versatility certainly
served in one sense to create a happy family. But March never seemed to get a
glimpse of that domestic interior to which men of the middle classes are
accustomed in their friendships, and which is indeed the foundation of
friendship and love and everything else in any sane and stable society. He
wondered whether Horne Fisher was both an orphan and an only child.
It was, therefore, with
something like a start that he found that Fisher had a brother, much more
prosperous and powerful than himself, though hardly, March thought, so
entertaining. Sir Henry Harland Fisher, with half the alphabet after his name,
was something at the Foreign Office far more tremendous than the Foreign
Secretary. Apparently, it ran in the family, after all; for it seemed there was
another brother, Ashton Fisher, in India, rather more tremendous than the
Viceroy. Sir Henry Fisher was a heavier, but handsomer edition of his brother,
with a brow equally bald, but much more smooth. He was very courteous, but a
shade patronizing, not only to March, but even, as March fancied, to Horne
Fisher as well. The latter gentleman, who had many intuitions about the
half-formed thoughts of others, glanced at the topic himself as they came away
from the great house in Berkeley Square.
"Why, don’t you
know," he observed quietly, "that I am the fool of the family?"
"It must be a
clever family," said Harold March, with a smile.
"Very gracefully
expressed," replied Fisher; "that is the best of having a literary
training. Well, perhaps it is an exaggeration to say I am the fool of the
family. It’s enough to say I am the failure of the family."
"It seems queer to
me that you should fail especially," remarked the journalist. "As
they say in the examinations, what did you fail in?"
"Politics,"
replied his friend. "I stood for Parliament when I was quite a young man
and got in by an enormous majority, with loud cheers and chairing round the
town. Since then, of course, I’ve been rather under a cloud."
"I’m afraid I don’t
quite understand the ’of course,’" answered March, laughing.
"That part of it
isn’t worth understanding," said Fisher. "But as a matter of fact,
old chap, the other part of it was rather odd and interesting. Quite a
detective story in its way, as well as the first lesson I had in what modern
politics are made of. If you like, I’ll tell you all about it." And the
following, recast in a less allusive and conversational manner, is the story
that he told.
Nobody privileged of
late years to meet Sir Henry Harland Fisher would believe that he had ever been
called Harry. But, indeed, he had been boyish enough when a boy, and that
serenity which shone on him through life, and which now took the form of gravity,
had once taken the form of gayety. His friends would have said that he was all
the more ripe in his maturity for having been young in his youth. His enemies
would have said that he was still light minded, but no longer light hearted.
But in any case, the whole of the story Horne Fisher had to tell arose out of
the accident which had made young Harry Fisher private secretary to Lord
Saltoun. Hence his later connection with the Foreign Office, which had, indeed,
come to him as a sort of legacy from his lordship when that great man was the
power behind the throne. This is not the place to say much about Saltoun,
little as was known of him and much as there was worth knowing. England has had
at least three or four such secret statesmen. An aristocratic polity produces
every now and then an aristocrat who is also an accident, a man of intellectual
independence and insight, a Napoleon born in the purple. His vast work was
mostly invisible, and very little could be got out of him in private life
except a crusty and rather cynical sense of humor. But it was certainly the
accident of his presence at a family dinner of the Fishers, and the unexpected
opinion he expressed, which turned what might have been a dinner-table joke
into a sort of small sensational novel.
Save for Lord Saltoun,
it was a family party of Fishers, for the only other distinguished stranger had
just departed after dinner, leaving the rest to their coffee and cigars. This
had been a figure of some interest--a young Cambridge man named Eric Hughes who
was the rising hope of the party of Reform, to which the Fisher family, along
with their friend Saltoun, had long been at least formally attached. The
personality of Hughes was substantially summed up in the fact that he talked
eloquently and earnestly through the whole dinner, but left immediately after
to be in time for an appointment. All his actions had something at once
ambitious and conscientious; he drank no wine, but was slightly intoxicated
with words. And his face and phrases were on the front page of all the
newspapers just then, because he was contesting the safe seat of Sir Francis
Verner in the great by-election in the west. Everybody was talking about the
powerful speech against squirarchy which he had just delivered; even in the
Fisher circle everybody talked about it except Horne Fisher himself who sat in
a corner, lowering over the fire.
"We jolly well
have to thank him for putting some new life into the old party," Ashton
Fisher was saying. "This campaign against the old squires just hits the
degree of democracy there is in this county. This act for extending county
council control is practically his bill; so you may say he’s in the government
even before he’s in the House."
"One’s easier than
the other," said Harry, carelessly. "I bet the squire’s a bigger pot
than the county council in that county. Verner is pretty well rooted; all these
rural places are what you call reactionary. Damning aristocrats won’t alter
it."
"He damns them
rather well," observed Ashton. "We never had a better meeting than
the one in Barkington, which generally goes Constitutional. And when he said, ’Sir
Francis may boast of blue blood; let us show we have red blood,’ and went on to
talk about manhood and liberty, the room simply rose at him."
"Speaks very well,"
said Lord Saltoun, gruffly, making his only contribution to the conversation so
far.
Then the almost equally
silent Horne Fisher suddenly spoke, without, taking his brooding eyes off the
fire.
"What I can’t
understand," he said, "is why nobody is ever slanged for the real
reason."
"Hullo!"
remarked Harry, humorously, "you beginning to take notice?"
"Well, take
Verner," continued Horne Fisher. "If we want to attack Verner, why
not attack him? Why compliment him on being a romantic reactionary aristocrat?
Who is Verner? Where does he come from? His name sounds old, but I never heard
of it before, as the man said of the Crucifixion. Why talk about his blue
blood? His blood may be gamboge yellow with green spots, for all anybody knows.
All we know is that the old squire, Hawker, somehow ran through his money (and
his second wife’s, I suppose, for she was rich enough), and sold the estate to
a man named Verner. What did he make his money in? Oil? Army contracts?"
"I don’t
know," said Saltoun, looking at him thoughtfully.
"First thing I
ever knew you didn’t know," cried the exuberant Harry.
"And there’s more,
besides," went on Horne Fisher, who seemed to have suddenly found his
tongue. "If we want country people to vote for us, why don’t we get
somebody with some notion about the country? We don’t talk to people in
Threadneedle Street about nothing but turnips and pigsties. Why do we talk to
people in Somerset about nothing but slums and socialism? Why don’t we give the
squire’s land to the squire’s tenants, instead of dragging in the county
council?"
"Three acres and a
cow," cried Harry, emitting what the Parliamentary reports call an
ironical cheer.
"Yes,"
replied his brother, stubbornly. "Don’t you think agricultural laborers
would rather have three acres and a cow than three acres of printed forms and a
committee? Why doesn’t somebody start a yeoman party in politics, appealing to
the old traditions of the small landowner? And why don’t they attack men like
Verner for what they are, which is something about as old and traditional as an
American oil trust?"
"You’d better lead
the yeoman party yourself," laughed Harry. "Don’t you think it would
be a joke, Lord Saltoun, to see my brother and his merry men, with their bows
and bills, marching down to Somerset all in Lincoln green instead of Lincoln
and Bennet hats?"
"No,"
answered Old Saltoun, "I don’t think it would be a joke. I think it would
be an exceedingly serious and sensible idea."
"Well, I’m
jiggered!" cried Harry Fisher, staring at him. "I said just now it
was the first fact you didn’t know, and I should say this is the first joke you
didn’t see."
"I’ve seen a good
many things in my time," said the old man, in his rather sour fashion.
"I’ve told a good many lies in my time, too, and perhaps I’ve got rather
sick of them. But there are lies and lies, for all that. Gentlemen used to lie
just as schoolboys lie, because they hung together and partly to help one
another out. But I’m damned if I can see why we should lie for these
cosmopolitan cads who only help themselves. They’re not backing us up any more;
they’re simply crowding us out. If a man like your brother likes to go into
Parliament as a yeoman or a gentleman or a Jacobite or an Ancient Briton, I
should say it would be a jolly good thing."
In the rather startled
silence that followed Horne Fisher sprang to his feet and all his dreary manner
dropped off him.
"I’m ready to do
it to-morrow," he cried. "I suppose none of you fellows would back me
up."
Then Harry Fisher
showed the finer side of his impetuosity. He made a sudden movement as if to
shake hands.
"You’re a
sport," he said, "and I’ll back you up, if nobody else will. But we
can all back you up, can’t we? I see what Lord Saltoun means, and, of course,
he’s right. He’s always right."
"So I will go down
to Somerset," said Horne Fisher.
"Yes, it is on the
way to Westminster," said Lord Saltoun, with a smile.
And so it happened that
Horne Fisher arrived some days later at the little station of a rather remote
market town in the west, accompanied by a light suitcase and a lively brother.
It must not be supposed, however, that the brother’s cheerful tone consisted
entirely of chaff. He supported the new candidate with hope as well as
hilarity; and at the back of his boisterous partnership there was an increasing
sympathy and encouragement. Harry Fisher had always had an affection for his
more quiet and eccentric brother, and was now coming more and more to have a
respect for him. As the campaign proceeded the respect increased to ardent
admiration. For Harry was still young, and could feel the sort of enthusiasm
for his captain in electioneering that a schoolboy can feel for his captain in
cricket.
Nor was the admiration
undeserved. As the new three-cornered contest developed it became apparent to
others besides his devoted kinsman that there was more in Horne Fisher than had
ever met the eye. It was clear that his outbreak by the family fireside had
been but the culmination of a long course of brooding and studying on the
question. The talent he retained through life for studying his subject, and
even somebodys else’s subject, had long been concentrated on this idea of
championing a new peasantry against a new plutocracy. He spoke to a crowd with
eloquence and replied to an individual with humor, two political arts that
seemed to come to him naturally. He certainly knew much more about rural
problems than either Hughes, the Reform candidate, or Verner, the
Constitutional candidate. And he probed those problems with a human curiosity,
and went below the surface in a way that neither of them dreamed of doing. He
soon became the voice of popular feelings that are never found in the popular
press. New angles of criticism, arguments that had never before been uttered by
an educated voice, tests and comparisons that had been made only in dialect by
men drinking in the little local public houses, crafts half forgotten that had
come down by sign of hand and tongue from remote ages when their fathers were
free all this created a curious and double excitement. It startled the well
informed by being a new and fantastic idea they had never encountered. It
startled the ignorant by being an old and familiar idea they never thought to
have seen revived. Men saw things in a new light, and knew not even whether it
was the sunset or the dawn.
Practical grievances
were there to make the movement formidable. As Fisher went to and fro among the
cottages and country inns, it was borne in on him without difficulty that Sir
Francis Verner was a very bad landlord. Nor was the story of his acquisition of
the land any more ancient and dignified than he had supposed; the story was
well known in the county and in most respects was obvious enough. Hawker, the
old squire, had been a loose, unsatisfactory sort of person, had been on bad
terms with his first wife (who died, as some said, of neglect), and had then
married a flashy South American Jewess with a fortune. But he must have worked
his way through this fortune also with marvelous rapidity, for he had been
compelled to sell the estate to Verner and had gone to live in South America,
possibly on his wife’s estates. But Fisher noticed that the laxity of the old
squire was far less hated than the efficiency of the new squire. Verner’s
history seemed to be full of smart bargains and financial flutters that left
other people short of money and temper. But though he heard a great deal about
Verner, there was one thing that continually eluded him; something that nobody
knew, that even Saltoun had not known. He could not find out how Verner had
originally made his money.
"He must have kept
it specially dark," said Horne Fisher to himself. "It must be
something he’s really ashamed of. Hang it all! what IS a man ashamed of
nowadays?"
And as he pondered on
the possibilities they grew darker and more distorted in his mind; he thought
vaguely of things remote and repulsive, strange forms of slavery or sorcery,
and then of ugly things yet more unnatural but nearer home. The figure of
Verner seemed to be blackened and transfigured in his imagination, and to stand
against varied backgrounds and strange skies.
As he strode up a
village street, brooding thus, his eyes encountered a complete contrast in the
face of his other rival, the Reform candidate. Eric Hughes, with his blown
blond hair and eager undergraduate face, was just getting into his motor car
and saying a few final words to his agent, a sturdy, grizzled man named Gryce.
Eric Hughes waved his hand in a friendly fashion; but Gryce eyed him with some
hostility. Eric Hughes was a young man with genuine political enthusiasms,, but
he knew that political opponents are people with whom one may have to dine any
day. But Mr. Gryce was a grim little local Radical, a champion of the chapel,
and one of those happy people whose work is also their hobby. He turned his
back as the motor car drove away, and walked briskly up the sunlit high street
of the little town, whistling, with political papers sticking out of his
pocket.
Fisher looked pensively
after the resolute figure for a moment, and then, as if by an impulse, began to
follow it. Through the busy market place, amid the baskets and barrows of
market day, under the painted wooden sign of the Green Dragon, up a dark side
entry, under an arch, and through a tangle of crooked cobbled streets the two
threaded their way, the square, strutting figure in front and the lean,
lounging figure behind him, like his shadow in the sunshine. At length they
came to a brown brick house with a brass plate, on which was Mr. Gryce’s name,
and that individual turned and beheld his pursuer with a stare.
"Could I have a
word with you, sir?" asked Horne Fisher, politely. The agent stared still
more, but assented civilly, and led the other into an office littered with
leaflets and hung all round with highly colored posters which linked the name
of Hughes with all the higher interests of humanity.
"Mr. Horne Fisher,
I believe," said Mr. Gryce. "Much honored by the call, of course. Can’t
pretend to congratulate you on entering the contest, I’m afraid; you won’t
expect that. Here we’ve been keeping the old flag flying for freedom and
reform, and you come in and break the battle line."
For Mr. Elijah Gryce
abounded in military metaphors and in denunciations of militarism. He was a
square-jawed, blunt-featured man with a pugnacious cock of the eyebrow. He had
been pickled in the politics of that countryside from boyhood, he knew
everybody’s secrets, and electioneering was the romance of his life.
"I suppose you
think I’m devoured with ambition," said Horne Fisher, in his rather
listless voice, "aiming at a dictatorship and all that. Well, I think I
can clear myself of the charge of mere selfish ambition. I only want certain
things done. I don’t want to do them. I very seldom want to do anything. And I’ve
come here to say that I’m quite willing to retire from the contest if you can
convince me that we really want to do the same thing."
The agent of the Reform
party looked at him with an odd and slightly puzzled expression, and before he
could reply, Fisher went on in the same level tones:
"You’d hardly
believe it, but I keep a conscience concealed about me; and I am in doubt about
several things. For instance, we both want to turn Verner out of Parliament,
but what weapon are we to use? I’ve heard a lot of gossip against him, but is
it right to act on mere gossip? Just as I want to be fair to you, so I want to
be fair to him. If some of the things I’ve heard are true he ought to be turned
out of Parliament and every other club in London. But I don’t want to turn him
out of Parliament if they aren’t true."
At this point the light
of battle sprang into Mr. Gryce’s eyes and he became voluble, not to say
violent. He, at any rate, had no doubt that the stories were true; he could
testify, to his own knowledge, that they were true. Verner was not only a hard
landlord, but a mean landlord, a robber as well as a rackrenter; any gentleman
would be justified in hounding him out. He had cheated old Wilkins out of his
freehold by a trick fit for a pickpocket; he had driven old Mother Biddle to
the workhouse; he had stretched the law against Long Adam, the poacher, till
all the magistrates were ashamed of him.
"So if you’ll
serve under the old banner," concluded Mr. Gryce, more genially, "and
turn out a swindling tyrant like that, I’m sure you’ll never regret it."
"And if that is
the truth," said Horne Fisher, "are you going to tell it?"
"What do you mean?
Tell the truth?" demanded Gryce.
"I mean you are
going to tell the truth as you have just told it," replied Fisher.
"You are going to placard this town with the wickedness done to old
Wilkins. You are going to fill the newspapers with the infamous story of Mrs.
Biddle. You are going to denounce Verner from a public platform, naming him for
what he did and naming the poacher he did it to. And you’re going to find out
by what trade this man made the money with which he bought the estate; and when
you know the truth, as I said before, of course you are going to tell it. Upon
those terms I come under the old flag, as you call it, and haul down my little
pennon."
The agent was eying him
with a curious expression, surly but not entirely unsympathetic.
"Well," he said, slowly, "you have to do these things in a
regular way, you know, or people don’t understand. I’ve had a lot of
experience, and I’m afraid what you say wouldn’t do. People understand slanging
squires in a general way, but those personalities aren’t considered fair play.
Looks like hitting below the belt."
"Old Wilkins hasn’t
got a belt, I suppose," replied Horne Fisher. "Verner can hit him
anyhow, and nobody must say a word. It’s evidently very important to have a
belt. But apparently you have to be rather high up in society to have one. Possibly,"
he added, thoughtfully--"possibly the explanation of the phrase ’a belted
earl,’ the meaning of which has always escaped me."
"I mean those
personalities won’t do," returned Gryce, frowning at the table.
"And Mother Biddle
and Long Adam, the poacher, are not personalities," said Fisher, "and
suppose we mustn’t ask how Verner made all the money that enabled him to
become--a personality."
Gryce was still looking
at him under lowering brows, but the singular light in his eyes had brightened.
At last he said, in another and much quieter voice:
"Look here, sir. I
like you, if you don’t mind my saying so. I think you are really on the side of
the people and I’m sure you’re a brave man. A lot braver than you know,
perhaps. We daren’t touch what you propose with a barge pole; and so far from
wanting you in the old party, we’d rather you ran your own risk by yourself.
But because I like you and respect your pluck, I’ll do you a good turn before
we part. I don’t want you to waste time barking up the wrong tree. You talk
about how the new squire got the money to buy, and the ruin of the old squire,
and all the rest of it. Well, I’ll give you a hint about that, a hint about
something precious few people know."
"I am very
grateful," said Fisher, gravely. "What is it?"
"It’s in two
words," said the other. "The new squire was quite poor when he
bought. The old squire was quite rich when he sold."
Horne Fisher looked at
him thoughtfully as he turned away abruptly and busied himself with the papers
on his desk. Then Fisher uttered a short phrase of thanks and farewell, and
went out into the street, still very thoughtful.
His reflection seemed
to end in resolution, and, falling into a more rapid stride, he passed out of
the little town along a road leading toward the gate of the great park, the
country seat of Sir Francis Verner. A glitter of sunlight made the early winter
more like a late autumn, and the dark woods were touched here and there with
red and golden leaves, like the last rays of a lost sunset. From a higher part
of the road he had seen the long, classical facade of the great house with its
many windows, almost immediately beneath him, but when the road ran down under
the wall of the estate, topped with towering trees behind, he realized that it
was half a mile round to the lodge gates, After walking for a few minutes along
the lane, however, he came to a place where the wall had cracked and was in
process of repair. As it was, there was a great gap in the gray masonry that
looked at first as black as a cavern and only showed at a second glance the
twilight of the twinkling trees. There was something fascinating about that
unexpected gate, like the opening of a fairy tale.
Horne Fisher had in him
something of the aristocrat, which is very near to the anarchist. It was
characteristic of him that he turned into this dark and irregular entry as
casually as into his own front door, merely thinking that it would be a short
cut to the house. He made his way through the dim wood for some distance and
with some difficulty, until there began to shine through the trees a level
light, in lines of silver, which he did not at first understand. The next
moment he had come out into the daylight at the top of a steep bank, at the
bottom of which a path ran round the rim of a large ornamental lake. The sheet
of water which he had seen shimmering through the trees was of considerable
extent, but was walled in on every side with woods which were not only dark,
but decidedly dismal. At one end of the path was a classical statue of some
nameless nymph, and at the other end it was flanked by two classical urns; but
the marble was weather-stained and streaked with green and gray. A hundred
other signs, smaller but more significant, told him that he had come on some
outlying corner of the grounds neglected and seldom visited. In the middle of
the lake was what appeared to be an island, and on the island what appeared to
be meant for a classical temple, not open like a temple of the winds, but with
a blank wall between its Doric pillars. We may say it only seemed like an
island, because a second glance revealed a low causeway of flat stones running
up to it from the shore and turning it into a peninsula. And certainly it only
seemed like a temple, for nobody knew better than Horne Fisher that no god had
ever dwelt in that shrine.
"That’s what makes
all this classical landscape gardening so desolate," he said to himself.
"More desolate than Stonehenge or the Pyramids. We don’t believe in
Egyptian mythology, but the Egyptians did; and I suppose even the Druids
believed in Druidism. But the eighteenth-century gentleman who built these
temples didn’t believe in Venus or Mercury any more than we do; that’s why the
reflection of those pale pillars in the lake is truly only the shadow of a shade.
They were men of the age of Reason; they, who filled their gardens with these
stone nymphs, had less hope than any men in all history of really meeting a
nymph in the forest."
His monologue stopped
aruptly with a sharp noise like a thundercrack that rolled in dreary echoes
round the dismal mere. He knew at once what it was--somebody had fired off a
gun. But as to the meaning of it he was momentarily staggered, and strange
thoughts thronged into his mind. The next moment he laughed; for he saw lying a
little way along the path below him the dead bird that the shot had brought
down.
At the same moment,
however, he saw something else, which interested him more. A ring of dense
trees ran round the back of the island temple, framing the facade of it in dark
foliage, and he could have sworn he saw a stir as of something moving among the
leaves. The next moment his suspicion was confirmed, for a rather ragged figure
came from under the shadow of the temple and began to move along the causeway
that led to the bank. Even at that distance the figure was conspicuous by its
great height and Fisher could see that the man carried a gun under his arm.
There came back into his memory at once the name Long Adam, the poacher.
With a rapid sense of
strategy he sometimes showed, Fisher sprang from the bank and raced round the
lake to the head of the little pier of stones. If once a man reached the
mainland he could easily vanish into the woods. But when Fisher began to
advance along the stones toward the island, the man was cornered in a blind
alley and could only back toward the temple. Putting his broad shoulders
against it, he stood as if at bay; he was a comparatively young man, with fine
lines in his lean face and figure and a mop of ragged red hair. The look in his
eyes might well have been disquieting to anyone left alone with him on an
island in the middle of a lake.
"Good
morning," said Horne Fisher, pleasantly. "I thought at first you were
a murderer. But it seems unlikely, somehow, that the partridge rushed between
us and died for love of me, like the heroines in the romances; so I suppose you
are a poacher."
"I suppose you
would call me a poacher," answered the man; and his voice was something of
a surprise coming from such a scarecrow; it had that hard fastidiousness to be
found in those who have made a fight for their own refinement among rough
surroundings. "I consider I have a perfect right to shoot game in this
place. But I am well aware that people of your sort take me for a thief, and I
suppose you will try to land me in jail."
"There are
preliminary difficulties," replied Fisher. "To begin with, the
mistake is flattering, but I am not a gamekeeper. Still less am I three
gamekeepers, who would be, I imagine, about your fighting weight. But I confess
I have another reason for not wanting to jail you."
"And what is
that?" asked the other.
"Only that I quite
agree with you," answered Fisher. "I don’t exactly say you have a
right to poach, but I never could see that it was as wrong as being a thief. It
seems to me against the whole normal notion of property that a man should own
something because it flies across his garden. He might as well own the wind, or
think he could write his name on a morning cloud. Besides, if we want poor
people to respect property we must give them some property to respect. You
ought to have land of your own; and I’m going to give you some if I can."
"Going to give me
some land!" repeated Long Adam.
"I apologize for
addressing you as if you were a public meeting," said Fisher, "but I
am an entirely new kind of public man who says the same thing in public and in
private. I’ve said this to a hundred huge meetings throughout the country, and
I say it to you on this queer little island in this dismal pond. I would cut up
a big estate like this into small estates for everybody, even for poachers. I
would do in England as they did in Ireland-- buy the big men out, if possible;
get them out, anyhow. A man like you ought to have a little place of his own. I
don’t say you could keep pheasants, but you might keep chickens."
The man stiffened
suddenly and he seemed at once to blanch and flame at the promise as if it were
a threat.
"Chickens!"
he repeated, with a passion of contempt.
"Why do you
object?" asked the placid candidate. "Because keeping hens is rather
a mild amusement for a poacher? What about poaching eggs?"
"Because I am not
a poacher," cried Adam, in a rending voice that rang round the hollow
shrines and urns like the echoes of his gun. "Because the partridge lying
dead over there is my partridge. Because the land you are standing on is my
land. Because my own land was only taken from me by a crime, and a worse crime
than poaching. This has been a single estate for hundreds and hundreds of
years, and if you or any meddlesome mountebank comes here and talks of cutting
it up like a cake, if I ever hear a word more of you and your leveling lies--"
"You seem to be a
rather turbulent public," observed Horne Fisher, "but do go on. What
will happen if I try to divide this estate decently among decent people?"
The poacher had
recovered a grim composure as he replied. "There will be no partridge to
rush in between."
With that he turned his
back, evidently resolved to say no more, and walked past the temple to the
extreme end of the islet, where he stood staring into the water. Fisher
followed him, but, when his repeated questions evoked no answer, turned back
toward the shore. In doing so he took a second and closer look at the
artificial temple, and noted some curious things about it. Most of these
theatrical things were as thin as theatrical scenery, and he expected the
classic shrine to be a shallow thing, a mere shell or mask. But there was some
substantial bulk of it behind, buried in the trees, which had a gray,
labyrinthian look, like serpents of stone, and lifted a load of leafy towers to
the sky. But what arrested Fisher’s eye was that in this bulk of gray-white
stone behind there was a single door with great, rusty bolts outside; the
bolts, however, were not shot across so as to secure it. Then he walked round
the small building, and found no other opening except one small grating like a ventilator,
high up in the wall. He retraced his steps thoughtfully along the causeway to
the banks of the lake, and sat down on the stone steps between the two
sculptured funeral urns. Then he lit a cigarette and smoked it in ruminant
manner; eventually he took out a notebook and wrote down various phrases,
numbering and renumbering them till they stood in the following order:
"(1) Squire Hawker disliked his first wife. (2) He married his second wife
for her money. (3) Long Adam says the estate is really his. (4) Long Adam hangs
round the island temple, which looks like a prison. (5) Squire Hawker was not
poor when he gave up the estate. (6) Verner was poor when he got the
estate."
He gazed at these notes
with a gravity which gradually turned to a hard smile, threw away his
cigarette, and resumed his search for a short cut to the great house. He soon
picked up the path which, winding among clipped hedges and flower beds, brought
him in front of its long Palladian facade. It had the usual appearance of being,
not a private house, but a sort of public building sent into exile in the
provinces.
He first found himself
in the presence of the butler, who really looked much older than the building,
for the architecture was dated as Georgian; but the man’s face, under a highly
unnatural brown wig, was wrinkled with what might have been centuries. Only his
prominent eyes were alive and alert, as if with protest. Fisher glanced at him,
and then stopped and said:
"Excuse me. Weren’t
you with the late squire, Mr. Hawker?"
’Yes, sir, said the
man, gravely. "Usher is my name. What can I do for you?"
"Only take me into
Sir Francis Verner," replied the visitor.
Sir Francis Verner was
sitting in an easy chair beside a small table in a large room hung with
tapestries. On the table were a small flask and glass, with the green glimmer
of a liqueur and a cup of black coffee. He was clad in a quiet gray suit with a
moderately harmonious purple tie; but Fisher saw something about the turn of
his fair mustache and the lie of his flat hair--it suddenly revealed that his
name was Franz Werner.
"You are Mr. Horne
Fisher," he said. "Won’t you sit down?"
"No, thank
you," replied Fisher. "I fear this is not a friendly occasion, and I
shall remain standing. Possibly you know that I am already standing--standing
for Parliament, in fact--"
"I am aware we are
political opponents," replied Verner, raising his eyebrows. "But I
think it would be better if we fought in a sporting spirit; in a spirit of
English fair play."
"Much
better," assented Fisher. "It would be much better if you were
English and very much better if you had ever played fair. But what I’ve come to
say can be said very shortly. I don’t quite know how we stand with the law
about that old Hawker story, but my chief object is to prevent England being
entirely ruled by people like you. So whatever the law would say, I will say no
more if you will retire from the election at once."
"You are evidently
a lunatic," said Verner.
"My psychology may
be a little abnormal," replied Horne Fisher, in a rather hazy manner.
"I am subject to dreams, especially day-dreams. Sometimes what is
happening to me grows vivid in a curious double way, as if it had happened
before. Have you ever had that mystical feeling that things have happened
before?"
"I hope you are a
harmless lunatic," said Verner.
But Fisher was still
staring in an absent fashion at the golden gigantic figures and traceries of
brown and red in the tapestries on the walls; then he looked again at Verner
and resumed: "I have a feeling that this interview has happened before,
here in this tapestried room, and we are two ghosts revisiting a haunted
chamber. But it was Squire Hawker who sat where you sit and it was you who
stood where I stand." He paused a moment and then added, with simplicity,
"I suppose I am a blackmailer, too."
"If you are,"
said Sir Francis, "I promise you you shall go to jail." But his face
had a shade on it that looked like the reflection of the green wine gleaming on
the table. Horne Fisher regarded him steadily and answered, quietly enough:
"Blackmailers do
not always go to jail. Sometimes they go to Parliament. But, though Parliament
is rotten enough already, you shall not go there if I can help it. I am not so
criminal as you were in bargaining with crime. You made a squire give up his
country seat. I only ask you to give up your Parliamentary seat."
Sir Francis Verner
sprang to his feet and looked about for one of the bell ropes of the
old-fashioned, curtained room.
"Where is
Usher?" he cried, with a livid face.
"And who is
Usher?" said Fisher, softly. "I wonder how much Usher knows of the
truth."
Verner’s hand fell from
the bell rope and, after standing for a moment with rolling eyes, he strode
abruptly from the room. Fisher went but by the other door, by which he had
entered, and, seeing no sign of Usher, let himself out and betook himself again
toward the town.
That night he put an
electric torch in his pocket and set out alone in the darkness to add the last
links to his argument. There was much that he did not know yet; but he thought
he knew where he could find the knowledge. The night closed dark and stormy and
the black gap in the wall looked blacker than ever; the wood seemed to have
grown thicker and darker in a day. If the deserted lake with its black woods
and gray urns and images looked desolate even by daylight, under the night and
the growing storm it seemed still more kke the pool of Acheron in the land of
lost souls. As he stepped carefully along the jetty stones he seemed to be
traveling farther and farther into the abyss of night, and to have left behind
him the last points from which it would be possible to signal to the land of
the living. The lake seemed to have grown larger than a sea, but a sea of black
and slimy waters that slept with abominable serenity, as if they had washed out
the world. There was so much of this nightmare sense of extension and expansion
that he was strangely surprised to come to his desert island so soon. But he
knew it for a place of inhuman silence and solitude; and he felt as if he had
been walking for years.
Nerving himself to a
more normal mood, he paused under one of the dark dragon trees that branched
out above him, and, taking out his torch, turned in the direction of the door
at the back of the temple. It was unbolted as before, and the thought stirred
faintly in him that it was slightly open, though only by a crack. The more he
thought of it, however, the more certain he grew that this was but one of the
common illusions of light coming from a different angle. He studied in a more
scientific spirit the details of the door, with its rusty bolts and hinges,
when he became conscious of something very near him--indeed, nearly above his
head. Something was dangling from the tree that was not a broken branch. For
some seconds he stood as still as a stone, and as cold. What he saw above him
were the legs of a man hanging, presumably a dead man hanged. But the next
moment he knew better. The man was literally alive and kicking; and an instant
after he had dropped to the ground and turned on the intruder. Simultaneously
three or four other trees seemed to come to life in the same fashion. Five or
six other figures had fallen on their feet from these unnatural nests. It was
as if the place were an island of monkeys. But a moment after they had made a
stampede toward him, and when they laid their hands on him he knew that they
were men.
With the electric torch
in his hand he struck the foremost of them so furiously in the face that the
man stumbled and rolled over on the slimy grass; but the torch was broken and
extinguished, leaving everything in a denser obscurity. He flung another man
flat against the temple wall, so that he slid to the ground; but a third and
fourth carried Fisher off his feet and began to bear him, struggling, toward
the doorway. Even in the bewilderment of the battle he was conscious that the
door was standing open. Somebody was summoning the roughs from inside.
The moment they were
within they hurled him upon a sort of bench or bed with violence, but no
damage; for the settee, or whatever it was, seemed to be comfortably cushioned
for his reception. Their violence had in it a great element of haste, and
before he could rise they had all rushed for the door to escape. Whatever
bandits they were that infested this desert island, they were obviously uneasy
about their job and very anxious to be quit of it. He had the flying fancy that
regular criminals would hardly be in such a panic. The next moment the great
door crashed to and he could hear the bolts shriek as they shot into their
place, and the feet of the retreating men scampering and stumbling along the
causeway. But rapidly as it happened, it did not happen before Fisher had done
something that he wanted to to. Unable to rise from his sprawling attitude in
that flash of time, he had shot out one of his long legs and hooked it round
the ankle of the last man disappearing through the door. The man swayed and
toppled over inside the prison chamber, and the door closed between him and his
fleeing companions. Clearly they were in too much haste to realize that they
had left one of their company behind.
The man sprang to his
feet again and hammered and kicked furiously at the door. Fisher’s sense of
humor began to recover from the struggle and he sat up on his sofa with
something of his native nonchalance. But as he listened to the captive captor
beating on the door of the prison, a new and curious reflection came to him.
The natural course for
a man thus wishing to attract his friends’ attention would be to call out, to
shout as well as kick. This man was making as much noise as he could with his
feet and hands, but not a sound came from his throat. Why couldn’t he speak? At
first he thought the man might be gagged, which was manifestly absurd. Then his
fancy fell back on the ugly idea that the man was dumb. He hardly knew why it
was so ugly an idea, but it affected his imagination in a dark and
disproportionate fashion. There seemed to be something creepy about the idea of
being left in a dark room with a deaf mute. It was almost as if such a defect
were a deformity. It was almost as if it went with other and worse deformities.
It was as if the shape he could not trace in the darkness were some shape that
should not see the sun.
Then he had a flash of
sanity and also of insight. The explanation was very simple, but rather
interesting. Obviously the man did not use his voice because he did not wish
his voice to be recognized. He hoped to escape from that dark place before
Fisher found out who he was. And who was he? One thing at least was clear. He
was one or other of the four or five men with whom Fisher had already talked in
these parts, and in the development of that strange story.
"Now I wonder who
you are," he said, aloud, with all his old lazy urbanity. "I suppose
it’s no use trying to throttle you in order to find out; it would be
displeasing to pass the night with a corpse. Besides I might be the corpse. I’ve
got no matches and I’ve smashed my torch, so I can only speculate. Who could
you be, now? Let us think."
The man thus genially
addressed had desisted from drumming on the door and retreated sullenly into a
corner as Fisher continued to address him in a flowing monologue.
"Probably you are
the poacher who says he isn’t a poacher. He says he’s a landed proprietor; but
he will permit me to inform him that, whatever he is, he’s a fool. What hope
can there ever be of a free peasantry in England if the peasants themselves are
such snobs as to want to be gentlemen? How can we make a democracy with no
democrats? As it is, you want to be a landlord and so you consent to be a
criminal. And in that, you know, you are rather like somebody else. And, now I
think of it, perhaps you are somebody else."
There was a silence
broken by breathing from the corner and the murmur of the rising storm, that
came in through the small grating above the man’s head. Horne Fisher continued:
"Are you only a
servant, perhaps, that rather sinister old servant who was butler to Hawker and
Verner? If so, you are certainly the only link between the two periods. But if
so, why do you degrade yourself to serve this dirty foreigner, when you at
least saw the last of a genuine national gentry? People like you are generally
at least patriotic. Doesn’t England mean anything to you, Mr. Usher? All of
which eloquence is possibly wasted, as perhaps you are not Mr. Usher.
"More likely you
are Verner himself; and it’s no good wasting eloquence to make you ashamed of
yourself. Nor is it any good to curse you for corrupting England; nor are you
the right person to curse. It is the English who deserve to be cursed, and are
cursed, because they allowed such vermin to crawl into the high places of their
heroes and their kings. I won’t dwell on the idea that you’re Verner, or the throttling
might begin, after all. Is there anyone else you could be? Surely you’re not
some servant of the other rival organization. I can’t believe you’re Gryce, the
agent; and yet Gryce had a spark of the fanatic in his eye, too; and men will
do extraordinary things in these paltry feuds of politics. Or if not the
servant, is it the . . . No, I can’t believe it . . . not the red blood of
manhood and liberty . . . not the democratic ideal . . ."
He sprang up in
excitement, and at the same moment a growl of thunder came through the grating
beyond. The storm had broken, and with it a new light broke on his mind. There
was something else that might happen in a moment.
"Do you know what
that means?" he cried. "It means that God himself may hold a candle
to show me your infernal face."
Then next moment came a
crash of thunder; but before the thunder a white light had filled the whole
room for a single split second.
Fisher had seen two
things in front of him. One was the black-and-white pattern of the iron grating
against the sky; the other was the face in the corner. It was the face of his
brother.
Nothing came from Horne
Fisher’s lips except a Christian name, which was followed by a silence more
dreadful than the dark. At last the other figure stirred and sprang up, and the
voice of Harry Fisher was heard for the first time in that horrible room.
"You’ve seen me, I
suppose," he said, "and we may as well have a light now. You could
have turned it on at any time, if you’d found the switch."
He pressed a button in
the wall and all the details of that room sprang into something stronger than
daylight. Indeed, the details were so unexpected that for a moment they turned
the captive’s rocking mind from the last personal revelation. The room, so far
from being a dungeon cell, was more like a drawing-room, even a lady’s
drawing-room, except for some boxes of cigars and bottles of wine that were
stacked with books and magazines on a side table. A second glance showed him
that the more masculine fittings were quite recent, and that the more feminine
background was quite old. His eye caught a strip of faded tapestry, which
startled him into speech, to the momentary oblivion of bigger matters.
"This place was
furnished from the great house," he said.
"Yes,"
replied the other, "and I think you know why."
"I think I
do," said Horne Fisher, "and before I go on to more extraordinary
things I will, say what I think. Squire Hawker played both the bigamist and the
bandit. His first wife was not dead when he married the Jewess; she was
imprisoned on this island. She bore him a child here, who now haunts his
birthplace under the name of Long Adam. A bankruptcy company promoter named
Werner discovered the secret and blackmailed the squire into surrendering the
estate. That’s all quite clear and very easy. And now let me go on to something
more difficult. And that is for you to explain what the devil you are doing
kidnaping your born brother."
After a pause Henry
Fisher answered:
"I suppose you
didn’t expect to see me," he said. "But, after all, what could you
expect?"’
"I’m afraid I don’t
follow," said Horne Fisher.
"I mean what else
could you expect, after making such a muck of it?" said his brother,
sulkily. "We all thought you were so clever. How could we know you were
going to be--well, really, such a rotten failure?"
"This is rather
curious," said the candidate, frowning. "Without vanity, I was not
under the impression that my candidature was a failure. All the big meetings
were successful and crowds of people have promised me votes."
"I should jolly
well think they had," said’ Henry, grimly. "You’ve made a landslide
with your confounded acres and a cow, and Verner can hardly get a vote
anywhere. Oh, it’s too rotten for anything!"
"What on earth do
you mean?"
"Why, you lunatic,"
cried Henry, in tones of ringing sincerity, "you don’t suppose you were
meant to WIN the seat, did you? Oh, it’s too childish! I tell you Verner’s got
to get in. Of course he’s got to get in. He’s to have the Exchequer next
session, and there’s the Egyptian loan and Lord knows what else. We only wanted
you to split the Reform vote because accidents might happen after Hughes had
made a score at Barkington."
"I see," said
Fisher, "and you, I think, are a pillar and ornament of the Reform party.
As you say, I am not clever."
The appeal to party
loyalty fell on deaf ears; for the pillar of Reform was brooding on other
things. At last he said, in a more troubled voice:
"I didn’t want you
to catch me; I knew it would be a shock. But I tell you what, you never would
have caught me if I hadn’t come here myself, to see they didn’t ill treat you
and to make sure everything was as comfortable as it could be." There was
even a sort of break in his voice as he added, "I got those cigars because
I knew you liked them."
Emotions are queer
things, and the idiocy of this concession suddenly softened Horne Fisher like
an unfathomable pathos.
"Never mind, old
chap," he said; "we’ll say no more about it. I’ll admit that you’re
really as kind-hearted and affectionate a scoundrel and hypocrite as ever sold
himself to ruin his country. There, I can’t say handsomer than that. Thank you
for the cigars, old man. I’ll have one if you don’t mind."
By the time that Horne
Fisher had ended his telling of this story to Harold March they had come out
into one of the public parks and taken a seat on a rise of ground overlooking
wide green spaces under a blue and empty sky; and there was something
incongruous in the words with which the narration ended.
"I have been in
that room ever since," said Horne Fisher. "I am in it now. I won the
election, but I never went to the House. My life has been a life in that little
room on that lonely island. Plenty of books and cigars and luxuries, plenty of
knowledge and interest and information, but never a voice out of that tomb to
reach the world outside. I shall probably die there." And he smiled as he
looked across the vast green park to the gray horizon.
It was on the sunny
veranda of a seaside hotel, overlooking a pattern of flower beds and a strip of
blue sea, that Horne Fisher and Harold March had their final explanation, which
might be called an explosion.
Harold March had come
to the little table and sat down at it with a subdued excitement smoldering in
his somewhat cloudy and dreamy blue eyes. In the newspapers which he tossed
from him on to the table there was enough to explain some if not all of his
emotion. Public affairs in every department had reached a crisis. The
government which had stood so long that men were used to it, as they are used
to a hereditary despotism, had begun to be accused Of blunders and even of
financial abuses. Some said that the experiment of attempting to establish a
peasantry in the west of England, on the lines of an early fancy of Horne
Fisher’s, had resulted in nothing but dangerous quarrels with more industrial
neighbors. There had been particular complaints of the ill treatment of
harmless foreigners, chiefly Asiatics, who happened to be employed in the new
scientific works constructed on the coast. Indeed, the new Power which had
arisen in Siberia, backed by Japan and other powerful allies, was inclined to
take the matter up in the interests of its exiled subjects; and there had been
wild talk about ambassadors and ultimatums. But something much more serious, in
its personal interest for March himself, seemed to fill his meeting with his
friend with a mixture of embarrassment and indignation.
Perhaps it increased
his annoyance that there was a certain unusual liveliness about the usually
languid figure of Fisher. The ordinary image of him in March’s mind was that of
a pallid and bald-browed gentleman, who seemed to be prematurely old as well as
prematurely bald. He was remembered as a man who expressed the opinions of a
pessimist in the language of a lounger. Even now March could not be certain
whether the change was merely a sort of masquerade of sunshine, or that effect
of clear colors and clean-cut outlines that is always visible on the parade of
a marine resort, relieved against the blue dado of the sea. But Fisher had a
flower in his buttonhole, and his friend could have sworn he carried his cane
with something almost like the swagger of a fighter. With such clouds gathering
over England, the pessimist seemed to be the only man who carried his own
sunshine.
"Look here,"
said Harold March, abruptly, "you’ve been no end of a friend to me, and I
never was so proud of a friendship before; but there’s something I must get off
my chest. The more I found out, the less I understood how y ou could stand it.
And I tell you I’m going to stand it no longer."
Horne Fisher gazed
across at him gravely and attentively, but rather as if he were a long way off.
"You know I always
liked you," said Fisher, quietly, "but I also respect you, which is
not always the same thing. You may possibly guess that I like a good many
people I don’t respect. Perhaps it is my tragedy, perhaps it is my fault. But
you are very different, and I promise you this: that I will never try to keep
you as somebody to be liked, at the price of your not being respected."
"I know you are
magnanimous," said March after a silence, "and yet you tolerate and
perpetuate everything that is mean." Then after another silence he added:
"Do you remember when we first met, when you were fishing in that brook in
the affair of the target? And do you remember you said that, after all, it
might do no harm if I could blow the whole tangle of this society to hell with
dynamite."
"Yes, and what of
that?" asked Fisher.
"Only that I’m
going to blow it to hell with dynamite," said Harold March, "and I
think it right to give you fair warning. For a long time I didn’t believe
things were as bad as you said they were. But I never felt as if I could have
bottled up what you knew, supposing you really knew it. Well, the long and the
short of it is that I’ve got a conscience; and now, at last, I’ve also got a
chance. I’ve been put in charge of a big independent paper, with a free hand,
and we’re going to open a cannonade on corruption."
"That will
be--Attwood, I suppose," said Fisher, reflectively. "Timber merchant.
Knows a lot about China."
"He knows a lot
about England," said March, doggedly, "and now I know it, too, we’re
not going to hush it up any longer. The people of this country have a right to
know how they’re ruled-- or, rather, ruined. The Chancellor is in the pocket of
the money lenders and has to do as he is told; otherwise he’s bankrupt, and a
bad sort of bankruptcy, too, with nothing but cards and actresses behind it.
The Prime Minister was in the petrol-contract business; and deep in it, too.
The Foreign Minister is a wreck of drink and drugs. When you say that plainly
about a man who may send thousands of Englishmen to die for nothing, you’re
called personal. If a poor engine driver gets drunk and sends thirty or forty
people to death, nobody complains of the exposure being personal. The engine
driver is not a person."
"I quite agree
with you," said Fisher, calmly. "You are perfectly right."
"If you agree with
us,, why the devil don’t you act with us?" demanded his friend. "If
you think it’s right, why don’t you do what’s right? It’s awful to think of a
man of your abilities simply blocking the road to reform."
"We have often
talked about that," replied Fisher, with the same composure. "The
Prime Minister is my father’s friend. The Foreign Minister married my sister.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer is my first cousin. I mention the genealogy in
some detail just now for a particular reason. The truth is I have a curious
kind of cheerfulness at the moment. It isn’t altogether the sun and the sea,
sir. I am enjoying an emotion that is entirely new to me; a happy sensation I
never remember having had before."
"What the devil do
you mean?"
"I am feeling
proud of my family," said Horne Fisher.
Harold March stared at
him with round blue eyes, and seemed too much mystified even to ask a question.
Fisher leaned back in his chair in his lazy fashion, and smiled as he
continued.
"Look here, my
dear fellow. Let me ask a question in turn. You imply that I have always known
these things about my unfortunate kinsmen. So I have. Do you suppose that
Attwood hasn’t always known them? Do you suppose he hasn’t always known you as
an honest man who would say these things when he got a chance? Why does Attwood
unmuzzle you like a dog at this moment, after all these years? I know why he
does; I know a good many things, far too many things. And therefore, as I have
the honor to remark, I am proud of my family at last."
"But why?"
repeated March, rather feebly.
"I am proud of the
Chancellor because he gambled and the Foreign Minister because he drank and the
Prime Minister because he took a commission on a contract," said Fisher,
firmly. "I am proud of them because they did these things, and can be
denounced for them, and know they can be denounced for them, and are STANDING
FIRM FOR ALL THAT. I take off my hat to them because they are defying
blackmail, and refusing to smash their country to save themselves. I salute
them as if they were going to die on the battlefield."
After a pause he
continued: "And it will be a battlefield, too, and not a metaphorical one.
We have yielded to foreign financiers so long that now it is war or ruin, Even
the people, even the country people, are beginning to suspect that they are
being ruined. That is the meaning of the regrettable, incidents in the
newspapers."
"The meaning of
the outrages on Orientals?" asked March.
"The meaning of
the outrages on Orientals," replied Fisher, "is that the financiers
have introduced Chinese labor into this country with the deliberate intention
of reducing workmen and peasants to starvation. Our unhappy politicians have
made concession after concession; and now they are asking concessions which
amount to our ordering a massacre of our own poor. If we do not fight now we
shall never fight again. They will have put England in an economic position of
starving in a week. But we are going to fight now; I shouldn’t wonder if there
were an ultimatum in a week and an.invasion in a fortnight. All the past
corruption and cowardice is hampering us, of course; the West country is pretty
stormy and doubtful even in a military sense; and the Irish regiments there,
that are supposed to support us by the new treaty, are pretty well in mutiny;
for, of course, this infernal coolie capitalism is being pushed in Ireland,
too. But it’s to stop now; and if the government message of reassurance gets
through to them in time, they may turn up after all by the time the enemy
lands. For my poor old gang is going to stand to its guns at last. Of course it’s
only natural that when they have been whitewashed for half a century as
paragons, their sins should come back on them at the very moment when they are
behaving like men for the first time in their lives. Well, I tell you, March, I
know them inside out; and I know they are behaving like heroes. Every man of
them ought to have a statue, and on the pedestal words like those of the
noblest ruffian of the Revolution: ’Que mon nom soit fletri; que la France soit
libre.’"
"Good God!"
cried March, "shall we never get to the bottom of your mines and
countermines?"
After a silence Fisher
answered in a lower voice, looking his friend in the eyes.
"Did you think
there was nothing but evil at the bottom of them?" he asked, gently.
"Did you think I had found nothing but filth in the deep seas into which
fate has thrown me? Believe me, you never know the best about men till you know
the worst about them. It does not dispose of their strange human souls to know
that they were exhibited to the world as impossibly impeccable wax works, who
never looked after a woman or knew the meaning of a bribe. Even in a palace,
life can be lived well; and even in a Parliament, life can be lived with
occasional efforts to live it well. I tell you it is as true of these rich
fools and rascals as it is true of every poor footpad and pickpocket; that only
God knows how good they have tried to be. God alone knows what the conscience can
survive, or how a man who has lost his honor will still try to save his
soul."
There was another
silence, and March sat staring at the table and Fisher at the sea. Then Fisher
suddenly sprang to his feet and caught up his hat and stick with all his new alertness
and even pugnacity.
"Look here, old
fellow," he cried, "let us make a bargain. Before you open your
campaign for Attwood come down and stay with us for one week, to hear what we’re
really doing. I mean with the Faithful Few, formerly known as the Old Gang,
occasionally to be described as the Low Lot. There are really only five of us
that are quite fixed, and organizing the national defense; and we’re living
like a garrison in a sort of broken-down hotel in Kent. Come and see what we’re
really doing and what there is to be done, and do us justice. And after that,
with unalterable love and affection for you, publish and be damned."
Thus it came about that
in the last week before war, when events moved most rapidly, Harold March found
himself one of a sort of small house party of the people he was proposing to
denounce. They were living simply enough, for people with their tastes, in an
old brown-brick inn faced with ivy and surrounded by rather dismal gardens. At
the back of the building the garden ran up very steeply to a road along the
ridge above; and a zigzag path scaled the slope in sharp angles, turning to and
fro amid evergreens so somber that they might rather be called everblack. Here
and there up the slope were statues having all the cold monstrosity of such
minor ornaments of the eighteenth century; and a whole row of them ran as on a
terrace along the last bank at the bottom, opposite the back door. This detail
fixed itself first in March’s mind merely because it figured in the first
conversation he had with one of the cabinet ministers.
The cabinet ministers
were rather older than he had expected to find them. The Prime Minister no
longer looked like a boy, though he still looked a little like a baby. But it
was one of those old and venerable babies, and the baby had soft gray hair.
Everything about him was soft, to his speech and his way of walking; but over
and above that his chief function seemed to be sleep. People left alone with
him got so used to his eyes being closed that they were almost startled when
they realized in the stillness that the eyes were wide open, and even watching.
One thing at least would always make the old gentleman open his eyes. The one
thing he really cared for in this world was his hobby of armored weapons, especially
Eastern weapons, and he would talk for hours about Damascus blades and Arab
swordmanship. Lord James Herries, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a short,
dark, sturdy man with a very sallow face and a very sullen manner, which
contrasted with the gorgeous flower in his buttonhole and his festive trick of
being always slightly overdressed. It was something of a euphemism to call him
a well-known man about town. There was perhaps more mystery in the question of
how a man who lived for pleasure seemed to get so little pleasure out of it.
Sir David Archer, the Foreign Secretary, was the only one of them who was a
self-made man, and the only one of them who looked like an aristocrat. He was
tall and thin and very handsome, with a grizzled beard; his gray hair was very
curly, and even rose in front in two rebellious ringlets that seemed to the
fanciful to tremble like the antennae of some giant insect, or to stir
sympathetically with the restless tufted eyebrows over his rather haggard eyes.
For the Foreign Secretary made no secret of his somewhat nervous condition,
whatever might be the cause of it.
"Do you know that
mood when one could scream because a mat is crooked?" he said to March, as
they walked up and down in the back garden below the line of dingy statues.
"Women get into it when they’ve worked too hard; and I’ve been working
pretty hard lately, of course. It drives me mad when Herries will wear his hat
a little crooked-- habit of looking like a gay dog. Sometime I swear I’ll knock
it off. That statue of Britannia over there isn’t quite straight; it sticks
forward a bit as if the lady were going to topple over. The damned thing is
that it doesn’t topple over and be done with it. See, it’s clamped with an iron
prop. Don’t be surprised if I get up in the middle of the night to hike it
down."
They paced the path for
a few moments in silence and then he continued. "It’s odd those little
things seem specially big when there are bigger things to worry about. We’d
better go in and do some work."
Horne Fisher evidently
allowed for all the neurotic possibilities of Archer and the dissipated habits
of Herries; and whatever his faith in their present firmness, did not unduly
tax their time and attention, even in the case of the Prime Minister. He had
got the consent of the latter finally to the committing of the important
documents, with the orders to the Western armies, to the care of a less
conspicuous and more solid person--an uncle of his named Horne Hewitt, a rather
colorless country squire who had been a good soldier, and was the military
adviser of the committee. He was charged with expediting the government pledge,
along with the concerted military plans, to the half-mutinous command in the
west; and the still more urgent task of seeing that it did not fall into the
hands of the enemy, who might appear at any moment from the east. Over and
above this military official, the only other person present was a police
official, a certain Doctor Prince, originally a police surgeon and now a
distinguished detective, sent to be a bodyguard to the group. He was a
square-faced man with big spectacles and a grimace that expressed the intention
of keeping his mouth shut. Nobody else shared their captivity except the hotel
proprietor, a crusty Kentish man with a crab-apple face, one or two of his
servants, and another servant privately attached to Lord James Herries. He was
a young Scotchman named Campbell, who looked much more distinguished than his
bilious-looking master, having chestnut hair and a long saturnine face with
large but fine features. He was probably the one really efficient person in the
house.
After about four days
of the informal council, March had come to feel a sort of grotesque sublimity
about these dubious figures, defiant in the twilight of danger, as if they were
hunchbacks and cripples left alone to defend a town. All were working hard; and
he himself looked up from writing a page of memoranda in a private room to see
Horne Fisher standing in the doorway, accoutered as if for travel. He fancied that
Fisher looked a little pale; and after a moment that gentleman shut the door
behind him and said, quietly:
"Well, the worst
has happened. Or nearly the worst."
"The enemy has
landed," cried March, and sprang erect out of his chair.
"Oh, I knew the enemy
would land," said Fisher, with composure. "Yes, he’s landed; but that’s
not the worst that could happen. The worst is that there’s a leak of some sort,
even from this fortress of ours. It’s been a bit of a shock to me, I can tell
you; though I suppose it’s illogical. After all, I was full of admiration at
finding three honest men in politics. I ought not to be full of astonishment if
I find only two."
He ruminated a moment
and then said, in such a fashion that March could hardly tell if he were changing
the subject or no:
"It’s hard at
first to believe that a fellow like Herries, who had pickled himself in vice
like vinegar, can have any scruple left. But about that I’ve noticed a curious
thing. Patriotism is not the first virtue. Patriotism rots into Prussianism
when you pretend it is the first virtue. But patriotism is sometimes the last
virtue. A man will swindle or seduce who will not sell his country. But who
knows?"
"But what is to be
done?" cried March, indignantly.
"My uncle has the
papers safe enough," replied Fisher, "and is sending them west
to-night; but somebody is trying to get at them from out. side, I fear with the
assistance of somebody in. side. All I can do at present is to try to head off
the man outside; and I must get away now and do it. I shall be back in about
twenty-four hours. While I’m away I want you to keep an eye on these people and
find out what you can. Au revoir." He vanished down the stairs; and from
the window March could see him mount a motor cycle and trail away toward the
neighboring town.
On the following
morning, March was sitting in the window seat of the old inn parlor, which was
oak-paneled and ordinarily rather dark; but on that occasion it was full of the
white light of a curiously clear morning-- the moon had shone brilliantly for
the last two or three nights. He was himself somewhat in shadow in the corner
of the window seat; and Lord James Herries, coming in hastily from the garden
behind, did not see him. Lord James clutched the back of a chair, as if to steady
himself, and, sitting down abruptly at the table, littered with the last meal,
poured himself out a tumbler of brandy and drank it. He sat with his back to
March, but his yellow face appeared in a round mirror beyon and the tinge of it
was like that of some horrible malady. As March moved he started violently and
faced round.
"My God!" he
cried, "have you seen what’s outside?"
"Outside?"
repeated the other, glancing over his shoulder at the garden.
"Oh, go and look
for yourself," cried Herries in a sort of fury. "Hewitt’s murdered
and his papers stolen, that’s all."
He turned his back
again and sat down with a thud; his square shoulders were shaking. Harold March
darted out of the doorway into the back garden with its steep slope of statues.
The first thing he saw
was Doctor Prince, the detective, peering through his spectacles at something
on the ground; the second was the thing he was peering at. Even after the
sensational news he had heard inside, the sight was something of a sensation.
The monstrous stone
image of Britannia was lying prone and face downward on the garden path; and
there stuck out at random from underneath it, like the legs of a smashed fly,
an arm clad in a white shirt sleeve and a leg clad in a khaki trouser, and hair
of the unmistakable sandy gray that belonged to Horne Fisher’s unfortunate
uncle. There were pools of blood and the limbs were quite stiff in death.
"Couldn’t this
have been an accident?" said March, finding words at last.
"Look for
yourself, I say," repeated the harsh voice of Herries, who had followed
him with restless movements out of the door. "The papers are gone, I tell
you. The fellow tore the coat off the corpse and cut the papers out of the
inner pocket. There’s the coat over there on the bank, with the great slash in
it."
"But wait a
minute," said the detective, Prince, quietly. "In that case there
seems to be something of a mystery. A murderer might somehow have managed to
throw the statue down on him, as he seems to have done. But I bet he couldn’t easily
have lifted it up again. I’ve tried; and I’m sure it would want three men at
least. Yet we must suppose, on that theory, that the murderer first knocked him
down as he walked past, using the statue as a stone club, then lifted it up
again, took him out and deprived him of his coat, then put him back again in
the posture of death and neatly replaced the statue. I tell you it’s physically
impossible. And how else could he have unclothed a man covered with that stone
monument? It’s worse than the conjurer’s trick, when a man shuffles a coat off
with his wrists tied."
"Could he have
thrown down the statue after he’d stripped the corpse?" asked March.
"And why?"
asked Prince, sharply. "If he’d killed his man and got his papers, he’d be
away like the wind. He wouldn’t potter about in a garden excavating the
pedestals of statues. Besides--Hullo, who’s that up there?"
High on the ridge above
them, drawn in dark thin lines against the sky, was a figure looking so long
and lean as to be almost spidery. The dark silhouette of the head showed two
small tufts like horns; and they could almost have sworn that the horns moved.
"Archer!"
shouted Herries, with sudden passion, and called to him with curses to come
down. The figure drew back at the first cry, with an agitated movement so
abrupt as almost to be called an antic. The next moment the man seemed to
reconsider and collect himself, and began to come down the zigzag garden path,
but with obvious reluctance, his feet falling in slower and slower rhythm.
Through March’s mind were throbbing the phrases that this man himself had used,
about going mad in the middle of the night and wrecking the stone figure. just
so, he could fancy, the maniac who had done such a thing might climb the crest
of the hill, in that feverish dancing fashion, and look down on the wreck he
had made. But the wreck he had made here was not only a wreck of stone.
When the man emerged at
last on to the garden path, with the full light on his face and figure, he was
walking slowly indeed, but easily, and with no appearance of fear.
"This is a
terrible thing," he said. "I saw it from above; I was taking a stroll
along the ridge."
"Do you mean that
you saw the murder?" demanded March, "or the accident? I mean did you
see the statue fall?"
"No," said
Archer, "I mean I saw the statue fallen."
Prince seemed to be
paying but little attention; his eye was riveted on an object lying on the path
a yard or two from the corpse. It seemed to be a rusty iron bar bent crooked at
one end.
"One thing I don’t
understand,’ he said, "is all this blood. The poor fellow’s skull isn’t
smashed; most likely his neck is broken; but blood seems to have spouted as if
all his arteries were severed. I was wondering if some other instrument . . .
that iron thing, for instance; but I don’t see that even that is sharp enough.
I suppose nobody knows what it is."
"I know what it
is," said Archer in his deep but somewhat shaky voice. "I’ve seen it
in my nightmares. It was the iron clamp or prop on the pedestal, stuck on to
keep the wretched image upright when it began to wabble, I suppose. Anyhow, it
was always stuck in the stonework there; and I suppose it came out when the
thing collapsed."
Doctor Prince nodded,
but he continued to look down at the pools of blood and the bar of iron.
"I’m certain there’s
something more underneath all this," he said at last. "Perhaps
something more underneath the statue. I have a huge sort of hunch that there
is. We are four men now and between us we can lift that great tombstone
there."
They all bent their
strength to the business; there was a silence save for heavy breathing; and
then, after an instant of the tottering and staggering of eight legs, the great
carven column of rock was rolled away, and the body lying in its shirt and
trousers was fully revealed. The spectacles of Doctor Prince seemed almost to
enlarge with a restrained radiance like great eyes; for other things were
revealed also. One was that the unfortunate Hewitt had a deep gash across the
jugular, which the triumphant doctor instantly identified as having been made
with a sharp steel edge like a razor. The other was that immediately under the
bank lay littered three shining scraps of steel, each nearly a foot long, one
pointed and another fitted into a gorgeously jeweled hilt or handle. It was
evidently a sort of long Oriental knife, long enough to be called a sword, but
with a curious wavy edge; and there was a touch or two of blood on the point.
"I should have
expected more blood, hardly on the point," observed Doctor Prince,
thoughtfully, "but this is certainly the instrument. The slash was
certainly made with a weapon shaped like this, and probably the slashing of the
pocket as well. I suppose the brute threw in the statue, by way of giving him a
public funeral."
March did not answer;
he was mesmerized by the strange stones that glittered on the strange sword
hilt; and their possible significance was broadening upon him like a dreadful
dawn. It was a curious Asiatic weapon. He knew what name was connected in his
memory with curious Asiatic weapons. Lord James spoke his secret thought for
him, and yet it startled him like an irrelevance.
"Where is the
Prime Minister?" Herries had cried, suddenly, and somehow like the bark of
a dog at some discovery.
Doctor Prince turned on
him his goggles and his grim face; and it was grimmer than ever.
"I cannot find him
anywhere," he said. "I looked for him at once, as soon as I found the
papers were gone. That servant of yours, Campbell, made a most efficient search,
but there are no traces."
There was a long
silence, at the end of which Herries uttered another cry, but upon an entirely
new note.
"Well, you needn’t
look for him any longer," he said, "for here he comes, along with
your friend Fisher. They look as if they’d been for a little walking
tour."
The two figures
approaching up the path were indeed those of Fisher, splashed with the mire of
travel and carrying a scratch like that of a bramble across one side of his
bald forehead, and of the great and gray-haired statesman who looked like a
baby and was interested in Eastern swords and swordmanship. But beyond this
bodily recognition, March could make neither head nor tail of their presence or
demeanor, which seemed to give a final touch of nonsense to the whole
nightmare. The more closely he watched them, as they stood listening to the
revelations of the detective, the more puzzled he was by their attitude--Fisher
seemed grieved by the death of his uncle, but hardly shocked at it; the older
man seemed almost openly thinking about something else, and neither had
anything to suggest about a further pursuit of the fugitive spy and murderer,
in spite of the prodigious importance of the documents he had stolen. When the
detective had gone off to busy himself with that department of the business, to
telephone and write his report, when Herries had gone back, probably to the
brandy bottle, and the Prime Minister had blandly sauntered away toward a
comfortable armchair in another part of the garden, Horne Fisher spoke directly
to Harold March.
"My friend,"
he said, "I want you to come with me at once; there is no one else I can
trust so much as that. The journey will take us most of the day, and the chief
business cannot be done till nightfall. So we can talk things over thoroughly
on the way. But I want you to be with me; for I rather think it is my
hour."
March and Fisher both
had motor bicycles; and the first half of their day’s journey consisted in
coasting eastward amid the unconversational noise of those uncomfortable
engines. But when they came out beyond Canterbury into the flats of eastern
Kent, Fisher stopped at a pleasant little public house beside a sleepy stream;
and they sat down to cat and to drink and to speak almost for the first time.
It was a brilliant afternoon, birds were singing in the wood behind, and the
sun shone full on their ale bench and table; but the face of Fisher in the
strong sunlight had a gravity never seen on it before.
"Before we go any
farther," he said, "there is something you ought to know. You and I
have seen some mysterious things and got to the bottom of them before now; and
it’s only right that you should get to the bottom of this one. But in dealing
with the death of my uncle I must begin at the other end from where our old
detective yarns began. I will give you the steps of deduction presently, if you
want to listen to them; but I did not reach the truth of this by steps of
deduction. I will first of all tell you the truth itself, because I knew the
truth from the first. The other cases I approached from the outside, but in
this case I was inside. I myself was the very core and center of
everything."
Something in the
speaker’s pendent eyelids and grave gray eyes suddenly shook March to his
foundations; and he cried, distractedly, "I don’t understand!" as men
do when they fear that they do understand. There was no sound for a space but
the happy chatter of the birds, and then Horne Fisher said, calmly:
"It was I who
killed my uncle. If you particularly want more, it was I who stole the state
papers from him."
"Fisher!"
cried his friend in a strangled voice.
"Let me tell you
the whole thing before we part," continued the other, "and let me put
it, for the sake of clearness, as we used to put our old problems. Now there
are two things that are puzzling people about that problem, aren’t there? The
first is how the murderer managed to slip off the dead man’s coat, when he was
already pinned to the ground with that stone incubus. The other, which is much
smaller and less puzzling, is the fact of the sword that cut his throat being
slightly stained at the point, instead of a good deal more stained at the edge.
Well, I can dispose of the first question easily. Horne Hewitt took off his own
coat before he was killed. I might say he took off his coat to be killed."
"Do you call that
an explanation?" exclaimed March. "The words seem more meaningless,
than the facts."
"Well, let us go
on to the other facts," continued Fisher, equably. "The reason that
particular sword is not stained at the edge with Hewitt’s blood is that it was
not used to kill Hewitt.
"But the
doctor," protested March, "declared distinctly that the wound was
made by that particular sword."
"I beg your
pardon," replied Fisher. "He did not declare that it was made by that
particular sword. He declared it was made by a sword of that particular
pattern."
"But it was quite
a queer and exceptional pattern," argued March; "surely it is far too
fantastic a coincidence to imagine--"
"It was a
fantastic coincidence," reflected Horne Fisher. "It’s extraordinary
what coincidences do sometimes occur. By the oddest chance in the world, by one
chance in a million, it so happened that another sword of exactly the same
shape was in the same garden at the same time. It may be partly explained, by
the fact that I brought them both into the garden myself . . . come, my dear
fellow; surely you can see now what it means. Put those two things together;
there were two duplicate swords and he took off his coat for himself. It may
assist your speculations to recall the fact that I am not exactly an
assassin."
"A duel!"
exclaimed March, recovering himself. "Of course I ought to have thought of
that. But who was the spy who stole the papers?"
"My uncle was the
spy who stole the papers," replied Fisher, "or who tried to steal the
papers when I stopped him--in the only way I could. The papers, that should
have gone west to reassure our friends and give them the plans for repelling
the invasion, would in a few hours have been in the hands of the invader. What
could I do? To have denounced one of our friends at this moment would have been
to play into the hands of your friend Attwood, and all the party of panic and
slavery. Besides, it may be that a man over forty has a subconscious desire to
die as he has lived, and that I wanted, in a sense, to carry my secrets to the
grave. Perhaps a hobby hardens with age; and my hobby has been silence. Perhaps
I feel that I have killed my mother’s brother, but I have saved my mother’s
name. Anyhow, I chose a time when I knew you were all asleep, and he was
walking alone in the garden. I saw all the stone statues standing in the
moonlight; and I myself was like one of those stone statues walking. In a voice
that was not my own, I told him of his treason and demanded the papers; and
when he refused, I forced him to take one of the two swords. The swords were
among some specimens sent down here for the Prime Minister’s inspection; he is
a collector, you know; they were the only equal weapons I could find. To cut an
ugly tale short, we fought there on the path in front of the Britannia statue;
he was a man of great strength, but I had somewhat the advantage in skill. His
sword grazed my forehead almost at the moment when mine sank into the joint in
his neck. He fell against the statue, like Caesar against Pompey’s, hanging on
to the iron rail; his sword was already broken. When I saw the blood from that
deadly wound, everything else went from me; I dropped my sword and ran as if to
lift him up. As I bent toward him something happened too quick for me to
follow. I do not know whether the iron bar was rotted with rust and came away
in his hand, or whether he rent it out of the rock with his apelike strength;
but the thing was in his hand, and with his dying energies he swung it over my
head, as I knelt there unarmed beside him. I looked up wildly to avoid the
blow, and saw above us the great bulk of Britannia leaning outward like the
figurehead of a ship. The next instant I saw it was leaning an inch or two more
than usual, and all the skies with their outstanding stars seemed to be leaning
with it. For the third second it was as if the skies fell; and in the fourth I
was standing in the quiet garden, looking down on that flat ruin of stone and
bone at which you were looking to-day. He had plucked out the last prop that
held up the British goddess, and she had fallen and crushed the traitor in her
fall. I turned and darted for the coat which I knew to contain the package,
ripped it up with my sword, and raced away up the garden path to where my motor
bike was waiting on the road above. I had every reason for haste; but I fled
without looking back at the statue and the. body; and I think the thing I fled
from was the sight of that appalling allegory.
"Then I did the
rest of what I had to do. All through the night and into the daybreak and the
daylight I went humming through the villages and markets of South England like
a traveling bullet, till I came to the headquarters in the West where the
trouble was. I was just in time. I was able to placard the place, so to speak,
with the news that the government had not betrayed them, and that they would
find supports if they would push eastward against the enemy. There’s no time to
tell you all that happened; but I tell you it was the day of my life. A triumph
like a torchlight procession, with torchlights that might have been firebrands.
The mutinies simmered down; the men of Somerset and the western counties came
pouring into the market places; the men who died with Arthur and stood firm
with Alfred. The Irish regiments rallied to them, after a scene like a riot,
and marched eastward out of the town singing Fenian songs. There was all that
is not understood, about the dark laughter of that people, in the delight with which,
even when marching with the English to the defense of England, they shouted at
the top of their voices, ’High upon the gallows tree stood the noble-hearted
three . . . With England’s cruel cord about them cast.’ However, the chorus was
’God save Ireland,’ and we could all have sung that just then, in one sense or
another.
"But there was
another side to my mission. I carried the plans of the defense; and to a great
extent, luckily, the plans of the invasion also. I won’t worry you with
strategics; but we knew where the enemy had pushed forward the great battery
that covered all his movements; and though our friends from the West could
hardly arrive in time to intercept the main movement, they might get within
long artillery range of the battery and shell it, if they only knew exactly
where it was. They could hardly tell that unless somebody round about here sent
up some sort of signal. But, somehow, I rather fancy that somebody will."
With that he got up
from the table, and they remounted their machines and went eastward into the
advancing twilight of evening. The levels of the landscape Were repeated in
flat strips of floating cloud and the last colors of day clung to the circle of
the horizon. Reced. ing farther and farther behind them was the semicircle of
the last hills; and it was quite suddenly that they saw afar off the dim line
of the sea. It was not a strip of bright blue as they had seen it from the
sunny veranda, but of a sinister and smoky violet, a tint that seemed ominous
and dark. Here Horne Fisher dismounted once more.
"We must walk the
rest of the way," he said, "and the last bit of all I must walk
alone."
He bent down and began
to unstrap something from his bicycle. It was something that had puzzled his
companion all the way in spite of what held him to more interesting riddles; it
appeared to be several lengths of pole strapped together and wrapped up in
paper. Fisher took it under his arm and began to pick his way across the turf.
The ground was growing more tum. bled and irregular and he was walking toward a
mass of thickets and small woods; night grew darker every moment. "We must
not talk any more," said Fisher. "I shall whisper to you when you are
to halt. Don’t try to follow me then, for it will only spoil the show; one man
can barely crawl safely to the spot, and two would certainly be caught."
"I would follow
you anywhere," replied March, "but I would halt, too, if that is
better."
"I know you
would," said his friend in a low voice. "Perhaps you’re the only man
I ever quite trusted in this world."
A few paces farther on
they came to the end of a great ridge or mound looking monstrous against the
dim sky; and Fisher stopped with a gesture. He caught his companion’s hand and
wrung it with a violent tenderness, and then darted forward into the darkness.
March could faintly see his figure crawling along under the shadow of the
ridge, then he lost sight of it, and then he saw it again standing on another
mound two hundred yards away. Beside him stood a singular erection made apparently
of two rods. He bent over it and there was the flare of a light; all March’s
schoolboy memories woke in him, and he knew what it was. It was the stand of a
rocket. The confused, incongruous memories still possessed him up to the very
moment of a fierce but familiar sound; and an instant after the rocket left its
perch and went up into endless space like a starry arrow aimed at the stars.
March thought suddenly of the signs of the last days and knew he was looking at
the apocalyptic meteor of something like a Day of judgment.
Far up in the infinite
heavens the rocket drooped and sprang into scarlet stars. For a moment the
whole landscape out to the sea and back to the crescent of the wooded hills was
like a lake of ruby light, of a red strangely rich and glorious, as if the
world were steeped in wine rather than blood, or the earth were an earthly
paradise, over which paused forever the sanguine moment of morning.
"God save
England!" cried Fisher, with a tongue like the peal of a trumpet.
"And now it is for God to save."
As darkness sank again
over land and sea, there came another sound; far away in the passes of the
hills behind them the guns spoke like the baying of great hounds. Something
that was not a rocket, that came not hissing but screaming, went over Harold
March’s head and expanded beyond the mound into light and deafening din,
staggering the brain with unbearable brutalities of noise. Another came, and
then another, and the world was full of uproar and volcanic vapor and chaotic
light. The artillery of the West country and the Irish had located the great
enemy battery, and were pounding it to pieces.
In the mad excitement
of that moment March peered through the storm, looking again for the long lean
figure that stood beside the stand of the rocket. Then another flash lit up the
whole ridge. The figure was not there.
Before the fires of the
rocket had faded from the sky, long before the first gun had sounded from the
distant hills, a splutter of rifle fire had flashed and flickered all around from
the hidden trenches of the enemy. Something lay in the shadow at the foot of
the ridge, as stiff as the stick of the fallen rocket; and the man who knew too
much knew what is worth knowing.