The Man Who Knew Too Much
by
G.K. Chesterton
Part 2 out of 4
"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.
IV. THE BOTTOMLESS WELL
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.
V. THE FAD OF THE FISHERMAN
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."
VI. THE HOLE IN THE WALL
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
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