The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Man Who Knew Too Much, by GKC
#5 in our series by Gilbert K. Chesterton
Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
Please take a look at the important information in this header.
We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
electronic path open for the next readers. Do not remove this.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
further information is included below. We need your donations.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
by Gilbert K. Chesterton
February, 1999 [Etext #1647]
The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Man Who Knew Too Much, by GKC
******This file should be named mwktm10.txt or mwktm10.zip******
Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, mwktm11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, mwktm10a.txt
Etext prepared by Dianne Bean of Phoenix, Arizona.
Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
copyright notice is included. Therefore, we do NOT keep these books
in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise.
We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
of the official release dates, for time for better editing.
Please note: neither this list nor its contents are final till
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month. A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so. To be sure you have an
up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
in the first week of the next month. Since our ftp program has
a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
new copy has at least one byte more or less.
Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The
fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. This
projected audience is one hundred million readers. If our value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text
files per month, or 384 more Etexts in 1998 for a total of 1500+
If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
total should reach over 150 billion Etexts given away.
The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
Files by the December 31, 2001. [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only 10% of the present number of computer users. 2001
should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it
will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.
We need your donations more than ever!
All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
tax deductible to the extent allowable by law. (CMU = Carnegie-
Mellon University).
For these and other matters, please mail to:
Project Gutenberg
P. O. Box 2782
Champaign, IL 61825
When all other email fails try our Executive Director:
Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
We would prefer to send you this information by email
(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).
If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]
ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
login: anonymous
password: your@login
cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
dir [to see files]
get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
GET INDEX?00.GUT
for a list of books
and
GET NEW GUT for general information
and
MGET GUT* for newsletters.
**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
(Three Pages)
***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project"). Among other
things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.
THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.
INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:
[1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this
requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
etext or this "small print!" statement. You may however,
if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
*EITHER*:
[*] The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
does *not* contain characters other than those
intended by the author of the work, although tilde
(~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
be used to convey punctuation intended by the
author, and additional characters may be used to
indicate hypertext links; OR
[*] The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
form by the program that displays the etext (as is
the case, for instance, with most word processors);
OR
[*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
or other equivalent proprietary form).
[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
"Small Print!" statement.
[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
net profits you derive calculated using the method you
already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you
don't derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are
payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
University" within the 60 days following each
date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
you can think of. Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
Etext prepared by Dianne Bean of Phoenix, Arizona.
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
By
Gilbert K. Chesterton
CONTENTS
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH:
I. THE FACE IN THE TARGET
II. THE VANISHING PRINCE
III. THE SOUL OF THE SCHOOLBOY
IV. THE BOTTOMLESS WELL
V. THE FAD OF THE FISHERMAN
VI. THE HOLE IN THE WALL
VII. THE TEMPLE OF SILENCE
VIII. THE VENGEANCE OF THE STATUE
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
I. THE FACE IN THE TARGET
Harold March, the rising reviewer and social
critic, was walking vigorously across a great
tableland of moors and commons, the horizon
of which was fringed with the far-off woods of
the famous estate of Torwood Park. He was
a good-looking young man in tweeds, with
very pale curly hair and pale clear eyes.
Walking in wind and sun in the very landscape
of liberty, he was still young enough to
remember his politics and not merely try to
forget them. For his errand at Torwood Park
was a political one; it was the place of
appointment named by no less a person than
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Howard
Horne, then introducing his so-called Socialist
budget, and prepared to expound it in an
interview with so promising a penman. Harold
March was the sort of man who knows
everything about politics, and nothing about
politicians. He also knew a great deal about art,
letters, philosophy, and general culture; about almost
everything, indeed, except the world he was living in.
Abruptly, in the middle of those sunny and windy
flats, he came upon a sort of cleft almost narrow
enough to be called a crack in the land. It was just
large enough to be the water-course for a small
stream which vanished at intervals under green
tunnels of undergrowth, as if in a dwarfish forest.
Indeed, he had an odd feeling as if he were a giant
looking over the valley of the pygmies. When he
dropped into the hollow, however, the impression was
lost; the rocky banks, though hardly above the height
of a cottage, hung over and had the profile of a
precipice. As he began to wander down the course of
the stream, in idle but romantic curiosity, and saw the
water shining in short strips between the great gray
boulders and bushes as soft as great green mosses, he
fell into quite an opposite vein of fantasy. It was
rather as if the earth had opened and swallowed him
into a sort of underworld of dreams. And when he
became conscious of a human figure dark against the
silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking
rather like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of
the premonition's proper to a man who meets the
strangest friendship of his life.
The man was apparently fishing; or at least was
fixed in a fisherman's attitude with more than a
fisherman's immobility. March was able to examine
the man almost as if he had been a statue for some
minutes before the statue spoke. He was a tall, fair
man, cadaverous, and a little lackadaisical, with
heavy eyelids and a highbridged nose. When his face
was shaded with his wide white hat, his light
mustache and lithe figure gave him a look of youth.
But the Panama lay on the moss beside him; and the
spectator could see that his brow was prematurely
bald; and this, combined with a certain hollowness
about the eyes, had an air of headwork and even
headache. But the most curious thing about him,
realized after a short scrutiny, was that, though he
looked like a fisherman, he was not fishing.
He was holding, instead of a rod, something that
might have been a landing-net which some fishermen
use, but which was much more like the ordinary toy
net which children carry, and which they generally
use indifferently for shrimps or butterflies. He was
dipping this into the water at intervals, gravely
regarding its harvest of weed or mud, and emptying
it out again.
"No, I haven't caught anything," he remarked,
calmly, as if answering an unspoken query. "When I
do I have to throw it back again; especially the big
fish. But some of the little beasts interest me when I
get 'em."
"A scientific interest, I suppose?" observed March.
"Of a rather amateurish sort, I fear," answered the
strange fisherman. "I have a sort of hobby about
what they call 'phenomena of phosphorescence.' But
it would be rather awkward to go about in society
crying stinking fish."
"I suppose it would," said March, with a smile.
"Rather odd to enter a drawing-room carrying a
large luminous cod," continued the stranger, in his
listless way. "How quaint it would, be if one could
carry it about like a lantern, or have little sprats for
candles. Some of the seabeasts would really be very
pretty like lampshades; the blue sea-snail that glitters
all over like starlight; and some of the red starfish
really shine like red stars. But, naturally, I'm not
looking for them here."
March thought of asking him what he was looking
for; but, feeling unequal to a technical discussion at
least as deep as the deep-sea fishes, he returned to
more ordinary topics.
"Delightful sort of hole this is," he said. "This little
dell and river here. It's like those places Stevenson
talks about, where something ought to happen."
"I know," answered the other. "I think it's because
the place itself, so to speak, seems to happen and not
merely to exist. Perhaps that's what old Picasso and
some of the Cubists are trying to express by angles
and jagged lines. Look at that wall like low cliffs that
juts forward just at right angles to the slope of turf
sweeping up to it. That's like a silent collision. It's like
a breaker and the back-wash of a wave."
March looked at the low-browed crag
overhanging the green slope and nodded. He was
interested in a man who turned so easily from the
technicalities of science to those of art; and asked
him if he admired the new angular artists.
"As I feel it, the Cubists are not Cubist enough,"
replied the stranger. "I mean they're not thick
enough. By making things mathematical they make
them thin. Take the living lines out of that landscape,
simplify it to a right angle, and you flatten it out to a
mere diagram on paper. Diagrams have their own
beauty; but it is of just the other sort, They stand for
the unalterable things; the calm, eternal, mathematical
sort of truths; what somebody calls the 'white
radiance of'--"
He stopped, and before the next word came
something had happened almost too quickly and
completely to be realized. From behind the
overhanging rock came a noise and rush like that of a
railway train; and a great motor car appeared. It
topped the crest of cliff, black against the sun, like a
battle-chariot rushing to destruction in some wild
epic. March automatically put out his hand in one
futile gesture, as if to catch a falling tea-cup in a
drawing-room.
For the fraction of a flash it seemed to leave the
ledge of rock like a flying ship; then the very sky
seemed to turn over like a wheel, and it lay a ruin
amid the tall grasses below, a line of gray smoke
going up slowly from it into the silent air. A little
lower the figure of a man with gray hair lay tumbled
down the steep green slope, his limbs lying all at
random, and his face turned away.
The eccentric fisherman dropped his net and
walked swiftly toward the spot, his new acquaintance
following him. As they drew near there seemed a
sort of monstrous irony in the fact that the dead
machine was still throbbing and thundering as busily
as a factory, while the man lay so still.
He was unquestionably dead. The blood flowed in
the grass from a hopelessly fatal fracture at the back
of the skull; but the face, which was turned to the
sun, was uninjured and strangely arresting in itself. It
was one of those cases of a strange face so
unmistakable as to feel familiar. We feel, somehow,
that we ought to recognize it, even though we do not.
It was of the broad, square sort with great jaws,
almost like that of a highly intellectual ape; the wide
mouth shut so tight as to be traced by a mere line; the
nose short with the sort of nostrils that seem to gape
with an appetite for the air. The oddest thing about
the face was that one of the eyebrows was cocked
up at a much sharper angle than the other. March
thought he had never seen a face so naturally alive as
that dead one. And its ugly energy seemed all the
stranger for its halo of hoary hair. Some papers lay
half fallen out of the pocket, and from among them
March extracted a card-case. He read the name on
the card aloud.
"Sir Humphrey Turnbull. I'm sure I've heard that
name somewhere."
His companion only gave a sort of a little sigh and
was silent for a moment, as if ruminating, then he
merely said, "The poor fellow is quite gone," and
added some scientific terms in which his auditor once
more found himself out of his depth.
"As things are," continued the same curiously well-informed
person, "it will be more legal for us to leave
the body as it is until the police are informed. In fact,
I think it will be well if nobody except the police is
informed. Don't be surprised if I seem to be keeping
it dark from some of our neighbors round here." Then, as if
prompted to regularize his rather abrupt confidence, he said:
"I've come down to see my
cousin at Torwood; my name is Horne Fisher. Might
be a pun on my pottering about here, mightn't it?"
"Is Sir Howard Horne your cousin?" asked
March. "I'm going to Torwood Park to see him
myself; only about his public work, of course, and the
wonderful stand he is making for his principles. I
think this Budget is the greatest thing in English
history. If it fails, it will be the most heroic failure in
English history. Are you an admirer of your great
kinsman, Mr. Fisher?"
"Rather," said Mr. Fisher. "He's the best shot I
know."
Then, as if sincerely repentant of his nonchalance,
he added, with a sort of enthusiasm:
"No, but really, he's a BEAUTIFUL shot."
As if fired by his own words, he took a sort of leap
at the ledges of the rock above him, and scaled them
with a sudden agility in startling contrast to his
general lassitude. He had stood for some seconds on
the headland above, with his aquiline profile under the
Panama hat relieved against the sky and peering over
the countryside before his companion had collected
himself sufficiently to scramble up after him.
The level above was a stretch of common turf on
which the tracks of the fated car were plowed plainly
enough; but the brink of it was broken as with rocky
teeth; broken boulders of all shapes and sizes lay
near the edge; it was almost incredible that any one
could have deliberately driven into such a death trap,
especially in broad daylight.
"I can't make head or tail of it," said March.
"Was he blind? Or blind drunk?"
"Neither, by the look of him," replied the other.
"Then it was suicide."
"It doesn't seem a cozy way of doing it," remarked
the man called Fisher. "Besides, I don't fancy poor
old Puggy would commit suicide, somehow."
"Poor old who?" inquired the wondering journalist.,
"Did you know this unfortunate man?"
"Nobody knew him exactly," replied Fisher, with
some vagueness. "But one KNEW him, of course.
He'd been a terror in his time, in Parliament and the
courts, and so on; especially in that row about the
aliens who were deported as undesirables, when he
wanted one of 'em hanged for murder. He was so
sick about it that he retired from the bench. Since
then he mostly motored about by himself; but he was
coming to Torwood, too, for the week-end; and I
don't see why he should deliberately break his neck
almost at the very door. I believe Hoggs--I mean my
cousin Howard--was coming down specially to meet
him."
"Torwood Park doesn't belong to your cousin?"
inquired March.
"No; it used to belong to the Winthrops, you
know," replied the other. "Now a new man's
got it; a man from Montreal named Jenkins. Hoggs
comes for the shooting; I told you he was a lovely
shot."
This repeated eulogy on the great social statesman
affected Harold March as if somebody had defined
Napoleon as a distinguished player of nap. But he
had another half-formed impression struggling in this
flood of unfamiliar things, and he brought it to the
surface before it could vanish.
"Jenkins," he repeated. "Surely you don't mean
Jefferson Jenkins, the social reformer? I mean the
man who's fighting for the new cottage-estate
scheme. It would be as interesting to meet him as
any Cabinet Minister in the world, if you'll excuse my
saying so."
"Yes; Hoggs told him it would have to be
cottages," said Fisher. "He said the breed of cattle
had improved too often, and people were beginning to
laugh. And, of course, you must hang a peerage on to
something; though the poor chap hasn't got it yet.
Hullo, here's somebody else."
They had started walking in the tracks of the car,
leaving it behind them in the hollow, still humming
horribly like a huge insect that had killed a man. The
tracks took them to the corner of the road, one arm
of which went on in the same line toward the distant
gates of the park. It was clear that the car had been
driven down the long straight road, and then, instead
of turning with the road to the left, had gone straight
on over the turf to its doom. But it was not this
discovery that had riveted Fisher's eye, but something
even more solid. At the angle of the white road a
dark and solitary figure was standing almost as still
as a finger post. It was that of a big man in rough
shooting-clothes, bareheaded, and with tousled curly
hair that gave him a rather wild look. On a nearer
approach this first more fantastic impression faded;
in a full light the figure took on more conventional
colors, as of an ordinary gentleman who happened to
have come out without a hat and without very
studiously brushing his hair. But the massive stature
remained, and something deep and even cavernous
about the setting of the eyes redeemed. his animal
good looks from the commonplace. But March had
no time to study the man more closely, for, much to
his astonishment, his guide merely observed, "Hullo,
Jack!" and walked past him as if he had indeed been
a signpost, and without attempting to inform him of
the catastrophe beyond the rocks. It was relatively a
small thing, but it was only the first in a string of
singular antics on which his new and eccentric friend
was leading him.
The man they had passed looked after them in
rather a suspicious fashion, but Fisher continued serenely on his
way along the straight road that ran past the gates of the great
estate.
"That's John Burke, the traveler," he
condescended to explain. "I expect you've heard of
him; shoots big game and all that. Sorry I couldn't
stop to introduce you, but I dare say you'll meet him
later on."
"I know his book, of course," said March, with
renewed interest. "That is certainly a fine piece of
description, about their being only conscious of the
closeness of the elephant when the colossal head
blocked out the moon."
"Yes, young Halkett writes jolly well, I think.
What? Didn't you know Halkett wrote Burke's book
for him? Burke can't use anything except a gun; and
you can't write with that. Oh, he's genuine enough in
his way, you know, as brave as a lion, or a good deal
braver by all accounts."
"You seem to know all about him," observed
March, with a rather bewildered laugh, "and about a
good many other people."
Fisher's bald brow became abruptly corrugated,
and a curious expression came into his eyes.
"I know too much," he said. "That's what's the
matter with me. That's what's the matter with all of
us, and the whole show; we know too much. Too
much about one another; too much about ourselves.
That's why I'm really interested, just now, about one
thing that I don't know."
"And that is?" inquired the other.
"Why that poor fellow is dead."
They had walked along the straight road for nearly
a mile, conversing at intervals in this fashion; and
March had a singular sense of the whole world being
turned inside out. Mr. Horne Fisher did not especially
abuse his friends and relatives in fashionable society;
of some of them he spoke with affection. But they
seemed to be an entirely new set of men and women,
who happened to have the same nerves as the men
and women mentioned most often in the newspapers.
Yet no fury of revolt could have seemed to him more
utterly revolutionary than this cold familiarity. It was
like daylight on the other side of stage scenery.
They reached the great lodge gates of the
park, and, to March's surprise, passed them
and continued along the interminable white,
straight road. But he was himself too early
for his appointment with Sir Howard, and was
not disinclined to see the end of his new friend's
experiment, whatever it might be. They had
long left the moorland behind them, and half
the white road was gray in the great shadow of
the Torwood pine forests, themselves like gray
bars shuttered against the sunshine and within,
amid that clear noon, manufacturing their own
midnight. Soon, however, rifts began to appear in
them like gleams of colored windows; the trees
thinned and fell away as the road went forward,
showing the wild, irregular copses in which, as Fisher
said, the house-party had been blazing away all day.
And about two hundred yards farther on they came
to the first turn of the road.
At the corner stood a sort of decayed inn with the
dingy sign of The Grapes. The signboard was dark
and indecipherable by now, and hung black against
the sky and the gray moorland beyond, about as
inviting as a gallows. March remarked that it looked
like a tavern for vinegar instead of wine.
"A good phrase," said Fisher, "and so it would be
if you were silly enough to drink wine in it. But the
beer is very good, and so is the brandy."
March followed him to the bar parlor with some
wonder, and his dim sense of repugnance was not
dismissed by the first sight of the innkeeper, who was
widely different from the genial innkeepers of
romance, a bony man, very silent behind a black
mustache, but with black, restless eyes. Taciturn as
he was, the investigator succeeded at last in
extracting a scrap of information from him, by dint of
ordering beer and talking to him persistently and
minutely on the subject of motor cars. He evidently
regarded the innkeeper as in some singular way an
authority on motor cars; as being deep in the secrets
of the mechanism, management, and mismanagement
of motor cars; holding the man all the time with a
glittering eye like the Ancient Mariner. Out of all this
rather mysterious conversation there did emerge at
last a sort of admission that one particular motor car,
of a given description, had stopped before the inn
about an hour before, and that an elderly man had
alighted, requiring some mechanical assistance.
Asked if the visitor required any other assistance, the
innkeeper said shortly that the old gentleman had
filled his flask and taken a packet of sandwiches.
And with these words the somewhat inhospitable
host had walked hastily out of the bar, and they heard
him banging doors in the dark interior.
Fisher's weary eye wandered round the dusty and
dreary inn parlor and rested dreamily on a glass case
containing a stuffed bird, with a gun hung on hooks
above it, which seemed to be its only ornament.
"Puggy was a humorist," he observed, "at least in
his own rather grim style. But it seems rather too
grim a joke for a man to buy a packet of sandwiches
when he is just going to commit suicide."
"If you come to that," answered March, "it
isn't very usual for a man to buy a packet of
sandwiches when he's just outside the door of a
grand house he's going to stop at."
"No . . . no," repeated Fisher, almost mechanically;
and then suddenly cocked his eye at his interlocutor
with a much livelier expression.
"By Jove! that's an idea. You're perfectly right.
And that suggests a very queer idea, doesn't it?"
There was a silence, and then March started with
irrational nervousness as the door of the inn was
flung open and another man walked rapidly to the
counter. He had struck it with a coin and called out
for brandy before he saw the other two guests, who
were sitting at a bare wooden table under the
window. When he turned about with a rather wild
stare, March had yet another unexpected emotion,
for his guide hailed the man as Hoggs and introduced
him as Sir Howard Horne.
He looked rather older than his boyish portraits in
the illustrated papers, as is the way of politicians; his
flat, fair hair was touched with gray, but his face was
almost comically round, with a Roman nose which,
when combined with his quick, bright eyes, raised a
vague reminiscence of a parrot. He had a cap rather
at the back of his head and a gun under his arm.
Harold March had imagined many things about his
meeting with the great political reformer, but he had
never pictured him with a gun under his arm, drinking
brandy in a public house.
"So you're stopping at Jink's, too," said Fisher.
"Everybody seems to be at Jink's."
"Yes," replied the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
"Jolly good shooting. At least all of it that isn't Jink's
shooting. I never knew a chap with such good
shooting that was such a bad shot. Mind you, he's a
jolly good fellow and all that; I don't say a word
against him. But he never learned to hold a gun when
he was packing pork or whatever he did. They say
he shot the cockade off his own servant's hat; just
like him to have cockades, of course. He shot the
weathercock off his own ridiculous gilded
summerhouse. It's the only cock he'll ever kill, I
should think. Are you coming up there now?"
Fisher said, rather vaguely, that he was following
soon, when he had fixed something up; and the
Chancellor of the Exchequer left the inn. March
fancied he had been a little upset or impatient when
he called for the brandy; but he had talked himself
back into a satisfactory state, if the talk had not been
quite what his literary visitor had expected. Fisher, a
few minutes afterward, slowly led the way out of the
tavern and stood in the middle of the road, looking
down in the direction from which they had traveled.
Then he walked back about two
hundred yards in that direction and stood still
again.
"I should think this is about the place," he said.
"What place?" asked his companion.
"The place where the poor fellow was killed," said Fisher, sadly.
"What do you mean?" demanded March.
"He was smashed up on the rocks a mile and a half from here."
"No, he wasn't," replied Fisher. "He didn't
fall on the rocks at all. Didn't you notice that
he only fell on the slope of soft grass underneath? But I saw
that he had a bullet in him already."
Then after a pause he added:
"He was alive at the inn, but he was dead
long before he came to the rocks. So he was
shot as he drove his car down this strip of
straight road, and I should think somewhere
about here. After that, of course, the car went
straight on with nobody to stop or turn it. It's
really a very cunning dodge in its way; for the
body would be found far away, and most people
would say, as you do, that it was an accident to
a motorist. The murderer must have been a
clever brute."
"But wouldn't the shot be heard at the inn or somewhere?" asked
March.
"It would be heard. But it would not be
noticed. That," continued the investigator,
"is where he was clever again. Shooting was
going on all over the place all day; very likely
he timed his shot so as to drown it in a number
of others. Certainly he was a first-class criminal. And he was
something else as well."
"What do you mean?" asked his companion,
with a creepy premonition of something coming,
he knew not why.
"He was a first-class shot," said Fisher.
He had turned his back abruptly and was
walking down a narrow, grassy lane, little more
than a cart track, which lay opposite the inn and
marked the end of the great estate and the
beginning of the open moors. March plodded
after him with the same idle perseverance, and
found him staring through a gap in giant weeds
and thorns at the flat face of a painted paling. From behind the
paling rose the great
gray columns of a row of poplars, which filled
the heavens above them with dark-green shadow
and shook faintly in a wind which had sunk
slowly into a breeze. The afternoon was already deepening into
evening, and the titanic
shadows of the poplars lengthened over a third
of the landscape.
"Are you a first-class criminal?" asked Fisher,
in a friendly tone. "I'm afraid I'm not. But
I think I can manage to be a sort of fourth-rate
burglar."
And before his companion could reply he had
managed to swing himself up and over the fence;
March followed without much bodily effort, but
with considerable mental disturbance. The
poplars grew so close against the fence that they
had some difficulty in slipping past them, and
beyond the poplars they could see only a high
hedge of laurel, green and lustrous in the level
sun. Something in this limitation by a series of
living walls made him feel as if he were really
entering a shattered house instead of an open
field. It was as if he came in by a disused
door or window and found the way blocked by
furniture. When they had circumvented the
laurel hedge, they came out on a sort of terrace
of turf, which fell by one green step to an oblong lawn like a
bowling green. Beyond this
was the only building in sight, a low conservatory, which seemed
far away from anywhere,
like a glass cottage standing in its own fields in
fairyland. Fisher knew that lonely look of the
outlying parts of a great house well enough. He
realized that it is more of a satire on aristocracy
than if it were choked with weeds and littered
with ruins. For it is not neglected and yet it
is deserted; at any rate, it is disused. It is
regularly swept and garnished for a master who
never comes.
Looking over the lawn, however, he saw one
object which he had not apparently expected.
It was a sort of tripod supporting a large disk
like the round top of a table tipped sideways,
and it was not until they had dropped on to the
lawn and walked across to look at it that March
realized that it was a target. It was worn and
weatherstained; the gay colors of its concentric
rings were faded; possibly it had been set up in
those far-off Victorian days when there was a
fashion of archery. March had one of his
vague visions of ladies in cloudy crinolines and
gentlemen in outlandish hats and whiskers revisiting that lost
garden like ghosts.
Fisher, who was peering more closely at the
target, startled him by an exclamation.
"Hullo!" he said. "Somebody has been
peppering this thing with shot, after all, and
quite lately, too. Why, I believe old Jink's
been trying to improve his bad shooting here."
"Yes, and it looks as if it still wanted improving," answered
March, laughing. "Not one of these shots is anywhere near the
bull's-eye; they seem just scattered about in the wildest way."
"In the wildest way," repeated Fisher, still
peering intently at the target. He seemed
merely to assent, but March fancied his eye was
shining under its sleepy lid and that he straightened his
stooping figure with a strange effort.
"Excuse me a moment," he said, feeling in
his pockets. "I think I've got some of my chemicals; and after
that we'll go up to the house." And he stooped again over the
target, putting something with his finger over each of the
shot-holes, so far as March could see merely a dull-gray smear.
Then they went through the gathering twilight up the long green
avenues to the great house.
Here again, however, the eccentric investigator did not enter by
the front door. He
walked round the house until he found a window
open, and, leaping into it, introduced his friend
to what appeared to be the gun-room. Rows of
the regular instruments for bringing down birds
stood against the walls; but across a table in the
window lay one or two weapons of a heavier and
more formidable pattern.
"Hullo I these are Burke's big-game rifles,"
said Fisher. "I never knew he kept them here."
He lifted one of them, examined it briefly, and
put it down again, frowning heavily. Almost
as he did so a strange young man came hurriedly
into the room. He was dark and sturdy, with
a bumpy forehead and a bulldog jaw, and he
spoke with a curt apology.
"I left Major Burke's guns here," he said,
"and he wants them packed up. He's going away to-night."
And he carried off the two rifles without casting a glance at the
stranger; through the open
window they could see his short, dark figure
walking away across the glimmering garden.
Fisher got out of the window again and stood
looking after him.
"That's Halkett, whom I told you about," he
said. "I knew he was a sort of secretary and
had to do with Burke's papers; but I never knew
he. had anything to do with his guns. But he's
just the sort of silent, sensible little devil who
might be very good at anything; the sort of man
you know for years before you find he's a chess
champion."
He had begun to walk in the direction of the
disappearing secretary, and they soon came
within sight of the rest of the house-party talking
and laughing on the lawn. They could see the
tall figure and loose mane of the lion-hunter
dominating the little group.
"By the way," observed Fisher, "when we
were talking about Burke and Halkett, I said
that a man couldn't very well write with a gun.
Well, I'm not so sure now. Did you ever hear
of an artist so clever that he could draw with
a gun? There's a wonderful chap loose about
here."
Sir Howard hailed Fisher and his friend the
journalist with almost boisterous amiability. The
latter was presented to Major Burke and Mr.
Halkett and also (by way of a parenthesis) to
his host, Mr. Jenkins, a commonplace little man
in loud tweeds, whom everybody else seemed
to treat with a sort of affection, as if he were a
baby.
The irrepressible Chancellor of the Exchequer
was still talking about the birds he had brought
down, the birds that Burke and Halkett had
brought down, and the birds that Jenkins, their
host, had failed to bring down. It seemed to
be a sort of sociable monomania.
"You and your big game," he ejaculated,
aggressively, to Burke. "Why, anybody could
shoot big game. You want to be a shot to shoot
small game."
"Quite so," interposed Horne Fisher. "Now
if only a hippopotamus could fly up in the air out
of that bush, or you preserved flying elephants
on the estate, why, then--"
"Why even Jink might hit that sort of bird,"
cried Sir Howard, hilariously slapping his host
on the back. "Even he might hit a haystack or
a hippopotamus."
"Look here, you fellows," said Fisher. "I
want you to come along with me for a minute
and shoot at something else. Not a hippopotamus. Another kind of
queer animal I've found
on the estate. It's an animal with three legs and
one eye, and it's all the colors of the rainbow."
"What the deuce are you talking about?"
asked Burke.
"You come along and see," replied Fisher, cheerfully.
Such people seldom reject anything nonsensical, for they are
always seeking for somethingnew. They gravely rearmed themselves
fromthe gun-room and trooped along at the tail of their guide,
Sir Howard only pausing, in a sort
of ecstasy, to point out the celebrated gilt summerhouse on which
the gilt weathercock still
stood crooked. It was dusk turning to dark by
the time they reached the remote green by the
poplars and accepted the new and aimless game
of shooting at the old mark.
The last light seemed to fade from the lawn,
and the poplars against the sunset were like
great plumes upon a purple hearse, when the
futile procession finally curved round,and came
out in front of the target.
Sir Howard again slapped his host on the
shoulder, shoving him playfully forward to take
the first shot. The shoulder and arm he touched
seemed unnaturally stiff and angular. Mr.
Jenkins was holding his gun in an attitude more
awkward than any that his satiric friends had
seen or expected.
At the same instant a horrible scream seemed
to come from nowhere. It was so unnatural
and so unsuited to the scene that it might have
been made by some inhuman thing flying on wings
above them or eavesdropping in the dark woods
beyond. But Fisher knew that it had started
and stopped on the pale lips of Jefferson Jenkins,
of Montreal, and no one at that moment catching sight of
Jefferson Jenkins's face would have
complained that it was commonplace.
The next moment a torrent of guttural but
good-humored oaths came from Major Burke
as he and the two other men saw what was in
front of them. The target stood up in the dim
grass like a dark goblin grinning at them, and
it was literally grinning. It had two eyes like
stars, and in similar livid points of light were
picked out the two upturned and open nostrils
and the two ends of the wide and tight mouth.
A few white dots above each eye indicated
the hoary eyebrows; and one of them ran upward almost erect. It
was a brilliant caricature
done in bright botted lines and March knew of
whom. It shone in the shadowy grass, smeared
with sea fire as if one of the submarine monsters
had crawled into the twilight garden; but it had
the head of a dead man.
"It's only luminous paint," said Burke. "Old
Fisher's been having a joke with that phosphorescent stuff of
his."
"Seems to be meant for old Puggy"' observed
Sir Howard. "Hits him off very well."
With that they all laughed, except Jenkins.
When they had all done, he made a noise like
the first effort of an animal to laugh, and
Horne Fisher suddenly strode across to him
and said:
"Mr. Jenkins, I must speak to you at once in
private."
It was by the little watercourse in the moors,
on the slope under the hanging rock, that March
met his new friend Fisher, by appointment,
shortly after the ugly and almost grotesque scene
that had broken up the group in the garden.
"It was a monkey-trick of mine," observed
Fisher, gloomily, "putting phosphorus on the
target; but the only chance to make him jump
was to give him the horrors suddenly. And
when he saw the face he'd shot at shining on the
target he practiced on, all lit up with an infernal
light, he did jump. Quite enough for my own
intellectual satisfaction."
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand even
now," said March, "exactly what he did or why
he did it."
"You ought to," replied Fisher, with his
rather dreary smile, "for you gave me the first
suggestion yourself. Oh yes, you did; and it was.
a very shrewd one. You said a man wouldn't
take sandwiches with him to dine at a great
house. It was quite true; and the inference was
that, though he was going there, he didn't mean
to dine there. Or, at any rate, that he might
not be dining there. It occurred to me at once
that he probably expected the visit to be unpleasant, or the
reception doubtful, or something
that would prevent his accepting hospitality.
Then it struck me that Turnbull was a terror to
certain shady characters in the past, and that
he had come down to identify and denounce one
of them. The chances at the start pointed to
the host--that is, Jenkins. I'm morally certain
now that Jenkins was the undesirable alien Turnbull wanted to
convict in another shooting-affair,
but you see the shooting gentleman had another
shot in his locker."
"But you said he would have to be a very good
shot," protested March.
"Jenkins is a very good shot," said Fisher.
"A very good shot who can pretend to be a very
bad shot. Shall I tell you the second hint I hit
on, after yours, to make me think it was
Jenkins? It was my cousin's account of his
bad shooting. He'd shot a cockade off a hat
and a weathercock off a building. Now, in
fact, a man must shoot very well indeed to shoot
so badly as that. He must shoot very neatly to
hit the cockade and not the head, or even the hat.
If the shots had really gone at random, the
chances are a thousand to one that they would
not have hit such prominent and picturesque
objects. They were chosen because they were
prominent and picturesque objects. They make
a story to go the round of society. He keeps the
crooked weathercock in the summerhouse to
perpetuate the story of a legend. And then he
lay in wait with his evil eye and wicked gun,
safely ambushed behind the legend of his own
incompetence.
"But there is more than that. There is the
summerhouse itself. I mean there is the whole
thing. There's all that Jenkins gets chaffed
about, the gilding and the gaudy colors and all
the vulgarity that's supposed to stamp him as an
upstart. Now, as a matter of fact, upstarts
generally don't do this. God knows there's
enough of 'em in society; and one knows 'em well
enough. And this is the very last thing they do.
They're generally only too keen to know the
right thing and do it; and they instantly put
themselves body and soul into the hands of art
decorators and art experts, who do the whole
thing for them. There's hardly another millionaire alive who has
the moral courage to have
a gilt monogram on a chair like that one in
the gun-room. For that matter, there's the name
as well as the monogram. Names like Tompkins
and Jenkins and Jinks are funny without being
vulgar; I mean they are vulgar without being
common. If you prefer it, they are commonplace without being
common. They are just the
names to be chosen to LOOK ordinary, but they're
really rather extraordinary. Do you know many
people called Tompkins? It's a good deal rarer
than Talbot. It's pretty much the same with the
comic clothes of the parvenu. Jenkins dresses
like a character in Punch. But that's because he
is a character in Punch. I mean he's a fictitious
character. He's a fabulous animal. He doesn't
exist.
"Have you ever considered what it must be
like to be a man who doesn't exist? I mean to
be a man with a fictitious character that he has
to keep up at the expense not merely of personal
talents: To be a new kind of hypocrite hiding
a talent in a new kind of napkin. This man has
chosen his hypocrisy very ingeniously; it was
really a new one. A subtle villain has dressed
up as a dashing gentleman and a worthy business
man and a philanthropist and a saint; but the
loud checks of a comical little cad were really
rather a new disguise. But the disguise must be
very irksome to a man who can really do things.
This is a dexterous little cosmopolitan guttersnipe who can do
scores of things, not only shoot,
but draw and paint, and probably play the fiddle.
Now a man like that may find the hiding of his
talents useful; but he could never help wanting
to use them where they were useless. If he can
draw, he will draw absent-mindedly on blotting
paper. I suspect this rascal has often drawn
poor old Puggy's face on blotting paper. Probably he began doing
it in blots as he afterward
did it in dots, or rather shots. It was the same
sort of thing; he found a disused target in a deserted yard and
couldn't resist indulging in a
little secret shooting, like secret drinking. You
thought the shots all scattered and irregular, and
so they were; but not accidental. No two distances were alike;
but the different points were
exactly where he wanted to put them. There's
nothing needs such mathematical precision as a
wild caricature. I've dabbled a little in drawing
myself, and I assure you that to put one dot
where you want it is a marvel with a pen close
to a piece of paper. It was a miracle to do it
across a garden with a gun. But a man who can
work those miracles will always itch to work
them, if it's only in the dark."
After a pause March observed, thoughtfully,
"But he couldn't have brought him down like a
bird with one of those little guns."
"No; that was why I went into the gun-room,"
replied Fisher. "He did it with one of Burke's
rifles, and Burke thought he knew the sound of
it. That's why he rushed out without a hat,
looking so wild. He saw nothing but a car passing quickly, which
he followed for a little way,
and then concluded he'd made a mistake."
There was another silence, during which Fisher
sat on a great stone as motionless as on their
first meeting, and watched the gray and silver
river eddying past under the bushes. Then
March said, abruptly, "Of course he knows the
truth now."
"Nobody knows the truth but you and I,"
answered Fisher, with a certain softening in his
voice. "And I don't think you and I will ever quarrel."
"What do you mean?" asked March, in an
altered accent. "What have you done about it?"
Horne Fisher continued to gaze steadily at
the eddying stream. At last he said, "The police
have proved it was a motor accident."
"But you know it was not."
"I told you that I know too much," replied
Fisher, with his eye on the river. "I know that,
and I know a great many other things. I know
the atmosphere and the way the whole thing
works. I know this fellow has succeeded in making himself
something incurably commonplace and comic. I know you can't get
up a persecution of old Toole or Little Tich. If I were
to tell Hoggs or Halkett that old Jink was an
assassin, they would almost die of laughter before my eyes. Oh, I
don't say their laughter's quite innocent, though it's genuine in
its way. They want old Jink, and they couldn't do without him. I
don't say I'm quite innocent. I like Hoggs; I don't want him to
be down and out; and he'd be done for if Jink can't pay for his
coronet. They were devilish near the line at the last election.
But the only real objection to it is that it's impossible. Nobody
would believe it; it's not in the picture. The crooked
weathercock would always turn it into a joke."
"Don't you think this is infamous?" asked March, quietly.
"I think a good many things," replied the
other. "If you people ever happen to blow the
whole tangle of society to hell with dynamite,
I don't know that the human race will be much
the worse. But don't be too hard on me merely
because I know what society is. That's why I
moon away my time over things like stinking
fish."
There was a pause as he settled himself down
again by the stream; and then he added:
"I told you before I had to throw back the big fish."
II. THE VANISHING PRINCE
This tale begins among a tangle of tales round a
name that is at once recent and legendary. The name
is that of Michael O'Neill, popularly called Prince
Michael, partly because he claimed descent from
ancient Fenian princes, and partly because he was
credited with a plan to make himself prince president
of Ireland, as the last Napoleon did of France. He
was undoubtedly a gentleman of honorable pedigree
and of many accomplishments, but two of his
accomplishments emerged from all the rest. He had
a talent for appearing when he was not wanted and a
talent for disappearing when he was wanted,
especially when he was wanted by the police. It may
be added that his disappearances were more
dangerous than his appearances. In the latter he
seldom went beyond the sensational--pasting up
seditious placards, tearing down official placards,
making flamboyant speeches, or unfurling forbidden
flags. But in order to effect the former he would
sometimes fight for his freedom with startling energy,
from which men were sometimes lucky to escape
with a broken head instead of a broken neck. His
most famous feats of escape, however, were due to
dexterity and not to violence. On a cloudless summer
morning he had come down a country road white
with dust, and, pausing outside a farmhouse, had told
the farmer's daughter, with elegant indifference, that
the local police were in pursuit of him. The girl's
name was Bridget Royce, a somber and even sullen
type of beauty, and she looked at him darkly, as if in
doubt, and said, "Do you want me to hide you?"
Upon which he only laughed, leaped lightly over the
stone wall, and strode toward the farm, merely
throwing over his shoulder the remark, "Thank you, I
have generally been quite capable of hiding myself."
In which proceeding he acted with a tragic ignorance
of the nature of women; and there fell on his path in
that sunshine a shadow of doom.
While he disappeared through the farmhouse the
girl remained for a few moments looking up the road,
and two perspiring policemen came plowing up to the
door where she stood. Though still angry, she was
still silent, and a quarter of an hour later the officers
had searched the house and were already inspecting
the kitchen garden and cornfield behind it. In the ugly
reaction of her mood she might have been tempted
even to point out the fugitive, but for a small
difficulty that she had no more notion than the policemen
had of where he could possibly have gone. The
kitchen garden was inclosed by a very low wall,
and the cornfield beyond lay aslant like a square
patch on a great green hill on which he could still
have been seen even as a dot in the distance.
Everything stood solid in its familiar place; the
apple tree was too small to support or hide a
climber; the only shed stood open and obviously
empty; there was no sound save the droning of
summer flies and the occasional flutter of a bird
unfamiliar enough to be surprised by the scarecrow in the field;
there was scarcely a shadow
save a few blue lines that fell from the thin tree;
every detail was picked out by the brilliant day
light as if in a microscope. The girl described
the scene later, with all the passionate realism of
her race, and, whether or no the policemen had
a similar eye for the picturesque, they had at
least an eye for the facts of the case, and were
compelled to give up the chase and retire from
the scene. Bridget Royce remained as if in a
trance, staring at the sunlit garden in which a
man had just vanished like a fairy. She was still
in a sinister mood, and the miracle took in her
mind a character of unfriendliness and fear, as
if the fairy were decidedly a bad fairy. The sun
upon the glittering garden depressed her more
than the darkness, but she continued to stare at
it. Then the world itself went half-witted and
she screamed. The scarecrow moved in the sun
light. It had stood with its back to her in a battered
old black hat and a tattered garment, and with all its
tatters flying, it strode away across the hill.
She did not analyze the audacious trick by which
the man had turned to his advantage the subtle effects
of the expected and the obvious; she was still under
the cloud of more individual complexities, and she
noticed must of all that the vanishing scarecrow did
not even turn to look at the farm. And the fates that
were running so adverse to his fantastic career of
freedom ruled that his next adventure, though it had
the same success in another quarter, should increase
the danger in this quarter. Among the many similar
adventures related of him in this manner it is also said
that some days afterward another girl, named Mary
Cregan, found him concealed on the farm where she
worked; and if the story is true, she must also have
had the shock of an uncanny experience, for when
she was busy at some lonely task in the yard she
heard a voice speaking out of the well, and found that
the eccentric had managed to drop himself into the
bucket which was some little way below, the well only
partly full of water. In this case, however, he had to
appeal to the woman to wind up the rope. And men
say it was when this news was told to the other
woman that her soul walked over the border line of
treason.
Such, at least, were the stories told of him in the
countryside, and there were many more--as that he
had stood insolently in a splendid green dressing gown
on the steps of a great hotel, and then led the police a
chase through a long suite of grand apartments, and
finally through his own bedroom on to a balcony that
overhung the river. The moment the pursuers stepped
on to the balcony it broke under them, and they
dropped pell-mell into the eddying waters, while
Michael, who had thrown off his gown and dived,
was able to swim away. It was said that he had
carefully cut away the props so that they would not
support anything so heavy as a policeman. But here
again he was immediately fortunate, yet ultimately
unfortunate, for it is said that one of the men was
drowned, leaving a family feud which made a little rift
in his popularity. These stories can now be told in
some detail, not because they are the most marvelous
of his many adventures, but because these alone
were not covered with silence by the loyalty of the
peasantry. These alone found their way into official
reports, and it is these which three of the chief
officials of the country were reading and discussing
when the more remarkable part of this story begins.
Night was far advanced and the lights shone in the
cottage that served for a temporary police station
near the coast. On one side of it were the last houses
of the straggling village, and on the other nothing but
a waste moorland stretching away toward the sea,
the line of which was broken by no landmark except
a solitary tower of the prehistoric pattern still found in
Ireland, standing up as slender as a column, but
pointed like a pyramid. At a wooden table in front of
the window, which normally looked out on this
landscape, sat two men in plain clothes, but with
something of a military bearing, for indeed they were
the two chiefs of the detective service of that district.
The senior of the two, both in age and rank, was a
sturdy man with a short white beard, and frosty
eyebrows fixed in a frown which suggested rather
worry than severity.
His name was Morton, and he was a Liverpool
man long pickled in the Irish quarrels, and doing his
duty among them in a sour fashion not altogether
unsympathetic. He had spoken a few sentences to his
companion, Nolan, a tall, dark man with a cadaverous
equine Irish face, when he seemed to remember
something and touched a bell which rang in another
room. The subordinate he had summoned immediately
appeared with a sheaf of papers in his hand.
"Sit down, Wilson," he said. "Those are the
dispositions, I suppose."
"Yes," replied the third officer. "I think I've got
all there is to be got out of them, so I sent the
people away."
"Did Mary Cregan give evidence?" asked
Morton, with a frown that looked a little heavier than
usual.
"No, but her master did," answered the man called
Wilson, who had flat, red hair and a plain, pale face,
not without sharpness. "I think he's hanging round the
girl himself and is out against a rival. There's always
some reason of that sort when we are told the truth
about anything. And you bet the other girl told right
enough."
"Well, let's hope they'll be some sort of use,"
remarked Nolan, in a somewhat hopeless manner,
gazing out into the darkness.
"Anything is to the good," said Morton, "that lets
us know anything about him."
"Do we know anything about him?" asked the
melancholy Irishman.
"We know one thing about him," said Wilson, "and
it's the one thing that nobody ever knew before. We
know where be is."
"Are you sure?" inquired Morton, looking at him
sharply.
"Quite sure," replied his assistant. "At this very
minute he is in that tower over there by the shore. If
you go near enough you'll see the candle burning in
the window."
As he spoke the noise of a horn sounded on the
road outside, and a moment after they heard the
throbbing of a motor car brought to a standstill before
the door. Morton instantly sprang to his feet.
tly sprang to his feet.
"Thank the Lord that's the car from Dublin," he
said. "I can't do anything without special authority,
not if he were sitting on the top of the tower and
putting out his tongue at us. But the chief can do
what he thinks best."
He hurried out to the entrance and was soon
exchanging greetings with a big handsome man in a
fur coat, who brought into the dingy little station the
indescribable glow of the great cities and the luxuries
of the great world.
For this was Sir Walter Carey, an official of such
eminence in Dublin Castle that nothing short of the
case of Prince Michael would have brought him on
such a journey in the middle of the night. But the case
of Prince Michael, as it happened, was complicated
by legalism as well as lawlessness. On the last
occasion he had escaped by a forensic quibble and
not, as usual, by a private escapade; and it was a
question whether at the moment he was amenable to
the law or not. It might be necessary to stretch a
point, but a man like Sir Walter could probably stretch
it as far as he liked.
Whether he intended to do so was a question to be
considered. Despite the almost aggressive touch of
luxury in the fur coat, it soon became apparent that
Sir Walter's large leonine head was for use as well as
ornament, and he considered the matter soberly and
sanely enough. Five chairs were set round the plain
deal table, for who should Sir Walter bring with him but his
young relative and secretary, Horne Fisher. Sir
Walter listened with grave attention, and his
secretary with polite boredom, to the string of
episodes by which the police had traced the flying
rebel from the steps of the hotel to the solitary tower
beside the sea. There at least he was cornered
between the moors and the breakers; and the scout
sent by Wilson reported him as writing under a
solitary candle, perhaps composing another of his
tremendous proclamations. Indeed, it would have
been typical of him to choose it as the place in which
finally to turn to bay. He had some remote claim on it,
as on a family castle; and those who knew him
thought him capable of imitating the primitive Irish
chieftains who fell fighting against the sea.
"I saw some queer-looking people leaving as I
came in," said Sir Walter Carey. "I suppose they
were your witnesses. But why do they turn up here
at this time of night?"
Morton smiled grimly. "They come here by night
because they would be dead men if they came here
by day. They are criminals committing a crime that is
more horrible here than theft or murder."
"What crime do you mean?" asked the other, with
some curiosity.
"They are helping the law," said Morton.
There was a silence, and Sir Walter considered the papers before
him with an abstracted eye. At last he spoke.
"Quite so; but look here, if the local feeling is as
lively as that there are a good many points to
consider. I believe the new Act will enable
me to collar him now if I think it best. But is
it best? A serious rising would do us no good
in Parliament, and the government has enemies
in England as well as Ireland. It won't do if I
have done what looks a little like sharp practice,
and then only raised a revolution."
"It's all the other way," said the man called Wilson,
rather quickly. "There won't be half so much of a
revolution if you arrest him as there will if you leave
him loose for three days longer. But, anyhow, there
can't be anything nowadays that the proper police
can't manage."
"Mr. Wilson is a Londoner," said the Irish
detective, with a smile.
"Yes, I'm a cockney, all right," replied Wilson,
"and I think I'm all the better for that. Especially at
this job, oddly enough."
Sir Walter seemed slightly amused at the
pertinacity of the third officer, and perhaps even
more amused at the slight accent with which he
spoke, which rendered rather needless his boast
about his origin.
"Do you mean to say," he asked, "that you know
more about the business here because you have
come from London?"
"Sounds funny, I know, but I do believe it,"
answered Wilson. "I believe these affairs want fresh
methods. But most of all I believe they want a fresh
eye."
The superior officers laughed, and the redhaired
man went on with a slight touch of temper:
"Well, look at the facts. See how the fellow got
away every time, and you'll understand what I mean.
Why was he able to stand in the place of the
scarecrow, hidden by nothing but an old hat?
Because it was a village policeman who knew the
scarecrow was there, was expecting it, and therefore
took no notice of it. Now I never expect a
scarecrow. I've never seen one in the street, and I
stare at one when I see it in the field. It's a new thing
to me and worth noticing. And it was just the same
when he hid in the well. You are ready to find a well
in a place like that; you look for a well, and so you
don't see it. I don't look for it, and therefore I do look
at it."
"It is certainly an idea," said Sir Walter, smiling,
"but what about the balcony? Balconies are
occasionally seen in London."
"But not rivers right under them, as if it was in
Venice," replied Wilson.
"It is certainly a new idea," repeated Sir Walter,
with something like respect. He had all the love of
the luxurious classes for new ideas. But he also had
a critical faculty, and was inclined to think, after due
reflection, that it was a true idea as well.
Growing dawn had already turned the window
panes from black to gray when Sir Walter got
abruptly to his feet. The others rose also, taking this
for a signal that the arrest was to be undertaken. But
their leader stood for a moment in deep thought, as if
conscious that he had come to a parting of the ways.
Suddenly the silence was pierced by a long,
wailing cry from the dark moors outside. The silence
that followed it seemed more startling than the shriek
itself, and it lasted until Nolan said, heavily:
" 'Tis the banshee. Somebody is marked for the grave."
His long, large-featured face was as pale as a
moon, and it was easy to remember that he was the
only Irishman in the room.
"Well, I know that banshee," said Wilson,
cheerfully, "ignorant as you think I am of these
things. I talked to that banshee myself an hour ago,
and I sent that banshee up to the tower and told her
to sing out like that if she could get a glimpse of our
friend writing his proclamation."
"Do you mean that girl Bridget Royce?" asked
Morton, drawing his frosty brows together. "Has she
turned king's evidence to that extent?"
"Yes," answered Wilson. "I know very little of
these local things, you tell me, but I reckon an angry
woman is much the same in all countries."
Nolan, however, seemed still moody and unlike
himself. "It's an ugly noise and an ugly business
altogether," he said. "If it's really the end of Prince
Michael it may well be the end of other things as
well. When the spirit is on him he would escape by a
ladder of dead men, and wade through that sea if it
were made of blood."
"Is that the real reason of your pious alarms?"
asked Wilson, with a slight sneer.
The Irishman's pale face blackened with a new passion.
"I have faced as many murderers in County Clare
as you ever fought with in Clapham junction, Mr.
Cockney," he said.
"Hush, please," said Morton, sharply. "Wilson, you
have no kind of right to imply doubt of your superior's
conduct. I hope you will prove yourself as
courageous and trustworthy as he has always been."
The pale face of the red-haired man seemed a
shade paler, but he was silent and composed, and Sir
Walter went up to Nolan with marked courtesy,
saying, "Shall we go outside now, and get this
business done?"
Dawn had lifted, leaving a wide chasm of white
between a great gray cloud and the great gray
moorland, beyond which the tower was outlined
against the daybreak and the sea.
Something in its plain and primitive shape vaguely
suggested the dawn in the first days of the earth, in
some prehistoric time when even the colors were
hardly created, when there was only blank daylight
between cloud and clay. These dead hues were
relieved only by one spot of gold--the spark of the
candle alight in the window of the lonely tower, and
burning on into the broadening daylight. As the
group of detectives, followed by a cordon of
policemen, spread out into a crescent to cut off all
escape, the light in the tower flashed as if it were
moved for a moment, and then went out. They knew
the man inside had realized the daylight and blown
out his candle.
"There are other windows, aren't there?" asked
Morton, "and a door, of course, somewhere round the
corner? Only a round tower has no corners."
"Another example of my small suggestion,"
observed Wilson, quietly. "That queer tower
was the first thing I saw when I came to these
parts; and I can tell you a little more about it--or, at any
rate, the outside of it. There are four windows altogether, one a
little way from this one, but just out of sight. Those are both
on the ground floor, and so is the third on the
other side, making a sort of triangle. But the
fourth is just above the third, and I suppose it
looks on an upper floor."
"It's only a sort of loft, reached by a ladder, said
Nolan. "I've played in the place when I was a child.
It's no more than an empty shell." And his sad face
grew sadder, thinking perhaps of the tragedy of his
country and the part that he played in it.
"The man must have got a table and chair, at any
rate," said Wilson, "but no doubt he could have got
those from some cottage. If I might make a
suggestion, sir, I think we ought to approach all the
five entrances at once, so to speak. One of us should
go to the door and one to each window; Macbride
here has a ladder for the upper window."
Mr. Horne Fisher languidly turned to his distinguished relative
and spoke for the first time.
"I am rather a convert to the cockney school
of psychology," he said in an almost inaudible voice.
The others seemed to feel the same influence in different ways,
for the group began to break up in the manner indicated. Morton
moved toward the window immediately in front of them, where the
hidden outlaw had just snuffed the candle; Nolan, a little
farther westward to the next window; while Wilson, followed by
Macbride with the ladder, went round to the two windows at the
back. Sir Walter Carey himself, followed by his secretary, began
to walk round toward the only door, to demand admittance in a
more regular fashion.
"He will be armed, of course," remarked Sir
Walter, casually.
"By all accounts," replied Horne Fisher, "he can do
more with a candlestick than most men with a pistol.
But he is pretty sure to have the pistol, too."
Even as he spoke the question was answered with
a tongue of thunder. Morton had just placed himself in
front of the nearest window, his broad shoulders.
blocking the aperture. For an instant it was lit from
within as with red fire, followed by a thundering
throng of echoes. The square shoulders seemed to
alter in shape, and the sturdy figure collapsed among
the tall, rank grasses at the foot of the tower. A puff
of smoke floated from the window like a little cloud.
The two men behind rushed to the spot and raised
him, but he was dead.
Sir Walter straightened himself and called out
something that was lost in another noise of firing; it
was possible that the police were already avenging
their comrade from the other side. Fisher had already
raced round to the next window, and a new cry of
astonishment from him brought his patron to the same
spot. Nolan, the Irish policeman, had also fallen,
sprawling all his great length in the grass, and it was
red with his blood. He was still alive when they reached him,
but there was death on his face, and he was only able
to make a final gesture telling them that all was over;
and, with a broken word and a heroic effort,
motioning them on to where his other comrades were
besieging the back of the tower. Stunned by these
rapid and repeated shocks, the two men could only
vaguely obey the gesture, and, finding their way to
the other windows at the back, they discovered a
scene equally startling, if less final and tragic. The
other two officers were not dead or mortally
wounded, but Macbride lay with a broken leg and his
ladder on top of him, evidently thrown down from the
top window of the tower; while Wilson lay on his
face, quite still as if stunned, with his red head among
the gray and silver of the sea holly. In him, however,
the impotence was but momentary, for he began to
move and rise as the others came round the tower.
"My God! it's like an explosion!" cried Sir Walter;
and indeed it was the only word for this unearthly
energy, by which one man had been able to deal
death or destruction on three sides of the same small
triangle at the same instant.
Wilson had already scrambled to his feet and with
splendid energy flew again at the window, revolver in
hand. He fired twice into the opening and then
disappeared in his own smoke; but the thud of his
feet and the shock of a falling chair told them that
the intrepid Londoner had managed at last to leap
into the room. Then followed a curious silence; and
Sir Walter, walking to the window through the
thinning smoke, looked into the hollow shell of the
ancient tower. Except for Wilson, staring around him,
there was nobody there.
The inside of the tower was a single empty room,
with nothing but a plain wooden chair and a table on
which were pens, ink and paper, and the candlestick.
Halfway up the high wall there was a rude timber
platform under the upper window, a small loft which
was more like a large shelf. It was reached only by a
ladder, and it seemed to be as bare as the bare walls.
Wilson completed his survey of the place and then
went and stared at the things on the table. Then he
silently pointed with his lean forefinger at the open
page of the large notebook. The writer had suddenly
stopped writing, even in the middle of a word.
"I said it was like an explosion," said Sir Walter
Carey at last. "And really the man himself seems to
have suddenly exploded. But he has blown himself up
somehow without touching the tower. He's burst
more like a bubble than a bomb."
"He has touched more valuable things than the
tower," said Wilson, gloomily.
There was a long silence, and then Sir Walter said,
seriously: "Well, Mr. Wilson, I am not a detective,
and these unhappy happenings have left you in
charge of that branch of the business. We all lament
the cause of this, but I should like to say that I myself
have the strongest confidence in your capacity for
carrying on the work. What do you think we should
do next?"
Wilson seemed to rouse himself from his
depression and acknowledged the speaker's words
with a warmer civility than he had hitherto shown to
anybody. He called in a few of the police to assist in
routing out the interior, leaving the rest to spread
themselves in a search party outside.
"I think," he said, "the first thing is to make quite
sure about the inside of this place, as it was hardly
physically possible for him to have got outside. I
suppose poor Nolan would have brought in his
banshee and said it was supernaturally possible. But
I've got no use for disembodied spirits when I'm
dealing with facts. And the facts before me are an
empty tower with a ladder, a chair, and a table."
"The spiritualists," said Sir Walter, with a smile,
"would say that spirits could find a great deal of use
for a table."
"I dare say they could if the spirits were on
the table--in a bottle," replied Wilson, with a
curl of his pale lip. "The people round here, when
they're all sodden up with Irish whisky, may believe
in such things. I think they want a little education in
this country."
Horne Fisher's heavy eyelids fluttered in a faint
attempt to rise, as if he were tempted to a lazy
protest against the contemptuous tone of the
investigator.
"The Irish believe far too much in spirits to
believe in spiritualism," he murmured. "They know
too much about 'em. If you want a simple and
childlike faith in any spirit that comes along you can
get it in your favorite London."
"I don't want to get it anywhere," said Wilson,
shortly. "I say I'm dealing with much simpler things
than your simple faith, with a table and a chair and a
ladder. Now what I want to say about them at the
start is this. They are all three made roughly enough
of plain wood. But the table and the chair are fairly
new and comparatively clean. The ladder is covered
with dust and there is a cobweb under the top rung of
it. That means that he borrowed the first two quite
recently from some cottage, as we supposed, but the
ladder has been a long time in this rotten old dustbin.
Probably it was part of the original furniture, an
heirloom in this magnificent palace of the Irish kings."
Again Fisher looked at him under his eyelids, but
seemed too sleepy to speak, and Wilson went on
with his argument.
"Now it's quite clear that something very odd has
just happened in this place. The chances are ten to
one, it seems to me, that it had something specially to
do with this place. Probably he came here because
he could do it only here; it doesn't seem very inviting
otherwise. But the man knew it of old; they say it
belonged to his family, so that altogether, I think,
everything points to something in the construction of
the tower itself."
"Your reasoning seems to me excellent," said Sir
Walter, who was listening attentively. "But what
could it be?"
"You see now what I mean about the ladder,"
went on the detective; "it's the only old piece of
furniture here and the first thing that caught that
cockney eye of mine. But there is something else.
That loft up there is a sort of lumber room without
any lumber. So far as I can see, it's as empty as
everything else; and, as things are, I don't see the use
of the ladder leading to it. It seems to me, as I can't
find anything unusual down here, that it might pay us
to look up there."
He got briskly off the table on which he was
sitting (for the only chair was allotted to Sir Walter)
and ran rapidly up the ladder to the platform above.
He was soon followed by the others, Mr. Fisher
going last, however, with an appearance of
considerable nonchalance.
At this stage, however, they were destined to
disappointment; Wilson nosed in every corner like a
terrier and examined the roof almost in the posture of
a fly, but half an hour afterward they had to confess
that they were still without a clew. Sir Walter's
private secretary seemed more and more threatened
with inappropriate slumber, and, having been the last
to climb up the ladder, seemed now to lack the
energy even to climb down again.
"Come along, Fisher," called out Sir Walter from
below, when the others had regained the floor. "We
must consider whether we'll pull the whole place to
pieces to see what it's made of."
"I'm coming in a minute," said the voice from the
ledge above their heads, a voice somewhat
suggestive of an articulate yawn.
"What are you waiting for?" asked Sir Walter,
impatiently. "Can you see anything there?"
"Well, yes, in a way," replied the voice, vaguely.
"In fact, I see it quite plain now."
"What is it?" asked Wilson, sharply, from the table
on which he sat kicking his heels restlessly.
"Well, it's a man," said Horne Fisher.
Wilson bounded off the table as if he had been
kicked off it. "What do you mean?" he cried. "How
can you possibly see a man?"
"I can see him through the window," replied the secretary,
mildly. "I see him coming across
the moor. He's making a bee line across the open
country toward this tower. He evidently means to pay
us a visit. And, considering who it seems to be,
perhaps it would be more polite. if we were all at the
door to receive him." And in a leisurely manner the
secretary came down the ladder.
"Who it seems to be!" repeated Sir Walter in
astonishment.
"Well, I think it's the man you call Prince
Michael," observed Mr. Fisher, airily. "In fact, I'm
sure it is. I've seen the police portraits of him."
There was a dead silence, and Sir Walter's usually
steady brain seemed to go round like a windmill.
"But, hang it all!" he said at last, "even supposing
his own explosion could have thrown him half a mile
away, without passing through any of the windows,
and left him alive enough for a country walk--even
then, why the devil should he walk in this direction?
The murderer does not generally revisit the scene of
his crime so rapidly as all that."
"He doesn't know yet that it is the scene of his
crime," answered Horne Fisher.
"What on earth do you mean? You credit him
with rather singular absence of mind."
"Well, the truth is, it isn't the scene of his crime,
said Fisher, and went and looked out of the window.
There was another silence, and then Sir Walter
said, quietly: "What sort of notion have you really got
in your head, Fisher? Have you developed a new
theory about how this fellow escaped out of the ring
round him?"
"He never escaped at all," answered the man
at the window, without turning round. "He
never escaped out of the ring because he was
never inside the ring. He was not in this tower
at all, at least not when we were surrounding it."
He turned and leaned back against the window,
but, in spite of his usual listless manner, they almost
fancied that the face in shadow was a little pale.
"I began to guess something of the sort when we
were some way from the tower," he said. "Did you
notice that sort of flash or flicker the candle gave
before it was extinguished? I was almost certain it
was only the last leap the flame gives when a candle
burns itself out. And then I came into this room and I
saw that."
He pointed at the table and Sir Walter caught his
breath with a sort of curse at his own blindness. For
the candle in the candlestick had obviously burned
itself away to nothing and left him, mentally, at least,
very completely in the dark.
"Then there is a sort of mathematical question," went on Fisher,
leaning back in his limp way
and looking up at the bare walls, as if tracing
imaginary diagrams there. "It's not so easy for a man
in the third angle to face the other two at the same
moment, especially if they are at the base of an
isosceles. I am sorry if it sounds like a lecture on
geometry, but--"
"I'm afraid we have no time for it," said Wilson,
coldly. "If this man is really coming back, I must give
my orders at once."
"I think I'll go on with it, though," observed Fisher,
staring at the roof with insolent serenity.
"I must ask you, Mr. Fisher, to let me conduct my
inquiry on my own lines," said Wilson, firmly. "I am
the officer in charge now."
"Yes," remarked Horne Fisher, softly, but with an
accent that somehow chilled the hearer. "Yes. But why?"
Sir Walter was staring, for he had never seen his
rather lackadaisical young friend look like that
before. Fisher was looking at Wilson with lifted lids,
and the eyes under them seemed to have shed or
shifted a film, as do the eyes of an eagle.
"Why are you the officer in charge now?" he
asked. "Why can you conduct the inquiry on your
own lines now? How did it come about, I wonder,
that the elder officers are not here to interfere with
anything you do?"
Nobody spoke, and nobody can say how soon anyone would have
collected his wits to speak when a noise came from
without. It was the heavy and hollow sound of a blow
upon the door of the tower, and to their shaken spirits it
sounded strangely like the hammer of doom.
The wooden door of the tower moved on its rusty
hinges under the hand that struck it and Prince
Michael came into the room. Nobody had the smallest
doubt about his identity. His light clothes, though
frayed with his adventures, were of fine and almost
foppish cut, and he wore a pointed beard, or imperial,
perhaps as a further reminiscence of Louis Napoleon;
but he was a much taller and more graceful man that
his prototype. Before anyone could speak he had
silenced everyone for an instant with a slight but
splendid gesture of hospitality.
"Gentlemen," he said, "this is a poor place now,
but you are heartily welcome."
Wilson was the first to recover, and he took a
stride toward the newcomer.
"Michael O'Neill, I arrest you in the king's name
for the murder of Francis Morton and James Nolan.
It is my duty to warn you--"
"No, no, Mr. Wilson," cried Fisher, suddenly.
"You shall not commit a third murder."
Sir Walter Carey rose from his chair, which fell
over with a crash behind him. "What does all this
mean?" he called out in an authoritative manner.
"It means," said Fisher, "that this man, Hooker
Wilson, as soon as he had put his head in at that
window, killed his two comrades who had put their
heads in at the other windows, by firing across the
empty room. That is what it means. And if you want
to know, count how many times he is supposed to
have fired and then count the charges left in his
revolver."
Wilson, who was still sitting on the table, abruptly
put a hand out for the weapon that lay beside him.
But the next movement was the most unexpected of
all, for the prince standing in the doorway passed
suddenly from the dignity of a statue to the swiftness
of an acrobat and rent the revolver out of the
detective's hand.
"You dog!" he cried. "So you are the type of
English truth, as I am of Irish tragedy--you who come
to kill me, wading through the blood of your brethren.
If they had fallen in a feud on the hillside, it would be
called murder, and yet your sin might be forgiven
you. But I, who am innocent, I was to be slain with
ceremony. There would belong speeches and patient
judges listening to my vain plea of innocence, noting
down my despair and disregarding it. Yes, that is
what I call assassination. But killing may be no
murder; there is one shot left in this little gun, and I
know where it should go."
Wilson turned quickly on the table, and even as he
turned he twisted in agony, for Michael shot him
through the body where he sat, so that he tumbled
off the table like lumber.
The police rushed to lift him; Sir Walter stood
speechless; and then, with a strange and weary
gesture, Horne Fisher spoke.
"You are indeed a type of the Irish tragedy," he
said. "You were entirely in the right, and you have
put yourself in the wrong."
The prince's face was like marble for a space
then there dawned in his eyes a light not unlike that
of despair. He laughed suddenly and flung the
smoking pistol on the ground.
"I am indeed in the wrong," he said. "I have
committed a crime that may justly bring a curse on
me and my children."
Horne Fisher did not seem entirely satisfied with
this very sudden repentance; he kept his eyes on the
man and only said, in a low voice, "What crime do
you mean?"
"I have helped English justice," replied Prince
Michael. "I have avenged your king's officers; I have
done the work of his hangman. For that truly I
deserve to be hanged."
And he turned to the police with a gesture that did
not so much surrender to them, but rather command
them to arrest him.
This was the story that Horne Fisher told to
Harold March, the journalist, many years after, in a
little, but luxurious, restaurant near Picca
dilly. He had invited March to dinner some time after
the affair he called "The Face in the Target," and the
conversation had naturally turned on that mystery and
afterward on earlier memories of Fisher's life and the
way in which he was led to study such problems as
those of Prince Michael. Horne Fisher was fifteen
years older; his thin hair had faded to frontal baldness,
and his long, thin hands dropped less with affectation
and more with fatigue. And he told the story of the
Irish adventure of his youth, because it recorded the
first occasion on which he had ever come in contact
with crime, or discovered how darkly and how terribly
crime can be entangled with law.
"Hooker Wilson was the first criminal I ever
knew, and he was a policeman," explained Fisher,
twirling his wine glass. "And all my life has been a
mixed-up business of the sort. He was a man of very
real talent, and perhaps genius, and well worth
studying, both as a detective and a criminal. His
white face and red hair were typical of him, for he
was one of those who are cold and yet on fire for
fame; and he could control anger, but not ambition.
He swallowed the snubs of his superiors in that first
quarrel, though he boiled with resentment; but when
he suddenly saw the two heads dark against the
dawn and framed in the two windows, he could not
miss the chance, not only of revenge, but of the
removal of the two obstacles to his promotion. He
was a dead shot and counted on silencing both,
though proof against him would have been hard in
any case. But, as a matter of fact, he had a narrow
escape, in the case of Nolan, who lived just long
enough to say, 'Wilson' and point. We thought he was
summoning help for his comrade, but he was really
denouncing his murderer. After that it was easy to
throw down the ladder above him (for a man up a
ladder cannot see clearly what is below and behind)
and to throw himself on the ground as another victim
of the catastrophe.
"But there was mixed up with his murderous
ambition a real belief, not only in his own talents, but
in his own theories. He did believe in what he called a
fresh eye, and he did want scope for fresh methods.
There was something in his view, but it failed where
such things commonly fail, because the fresh eye
cannot see the unseen. It is true about the ladder and
the scarecrow, but not about the life and the soul; and
he made a bad mistake about what a man like
Michael would do when he heard a woman scream.
All Michael's very vanity and vainglory made him
rush out at once; he would have walked into Dublin
Castle for a lady's glove. Call it his pose or what you
will, but he would have done it. What happened when
he met her is another story, and one we may never
know, but from tales I've heard since, they must have been
reconciled. Wilson was wrong there; but there was something, for
all that, in his notion that the newcomer sees most, and
that the man on the spot may know too much to
know anything. He was right about some things. He
was right about me."
"About you?" asked Harold March in some wonder.
"I am the man who knows too much to know
anything, or, at any rate, to do anything," said Horne
Fisher. "I don't mean especially about Ireland. I mean
about England. I mean about the whole way we are
governed, and perhaps the only way we can be
governed. You asked me just now what became of
the survivors of that tragedy. Well, Wilson recovered
and we managed to persuade him to retire. But we
had to pension that damnable murderer more magnificently than any
hero who ever fought for England. I managed to save Michael from
the worst, but we had to send that perfectly innocent man to
penal servitude for a crime we know he never committed,
and it was only afterward that we could connive in a
sneakish way at his escape. And Sir Walter Carey is
Prime Minister of this country, which he would
probably never have been if the truth had been told of
such a horrible scandal in his department. It might
have done for us altogether in Ireland; it would
certainly have done for him. And he is my father's old
friend, and has always smothered me with kindness. I
am too tangled up with the whole thing, you see, and I
was certainly never born to set it right. You look
distressed, not to say shocked, and I'm not at all
offended at it. Let us change the subject by all means,
if you like. What do you think of this Burgundy? It's
rather a discovery of mine, like the restaurant itself."
And he proceeded to talk learnedly and luxuriantly
on all the wines of the world; on which subject, also,
some moralists would consider that he knew too much.
III. THE SOUL OF THE SCHOOLBOY
A large map of London would be needed to display
the wild and zigzag course of
one day's journey undertaken by an uncle and
his nephew; or, to speak more truly, of a nephew
and his uncle. For the nephew, a schoolboy on
a holiday, was in theory the god in the car, or in
the cab, tram, tube, and so on, while his uncle
was at most a priest dancing before him and
offering sacrifices. To put it more soberly, the
schoolboy had something of the stolid air of a
young duke doing the grand tour, while his
elderly relative was reduced to the position of a
courier, who nevertheless had to pay for everything like a
patron. The schoolboy was officially
known as Summers Minor, and in a more social
manner as Stinks, the only public tribute to his
career as an amateur photographer and electrician. The uncle was
the Rev. Thomas Twyford, a lean and lively old gentleman with a
red, eager face and white hair. He was in the ordinary way a
country clergyman, but he was one of
those who achieve the paradox of being famous
in an obscure way, because they are famous in
an obscure world. In a small circle of ecclesiastical
archaeologists, who were the only people who could
even understand one another's discoveries, he
occupied a recognized and respectable place. And a
critic might have found even in that day's journey at
least as much of the uncle's hobby as of the
nephew's holiday.
His original purpose had been wholly paternal and
festive. But, like many other intelligent people, he was
not above the weakness of playing with a toy to
amuse himself, on the theory that it would amuse a
child. His toys were crowns and miters and croziers
and swords of state; and he had lingered over them,
telling himself that the boy ought to see all the sights
of London. And at the end of the day, after a
tremendous tea, he rather gave the game away by
winding up with a visit in which hardly any human
boy could be conceived as taking an interest--an
underground chamber supposed to have been a
chapel, recently excavated on the north bank of the
Thames, and containing literally nothing whatever
but one old silver coin. But the coin, to those who
knew, was more solitary and splendid than the Koh-i-noor. It was
Roman, and was said to bear the head of
St. Paul; and round it raged the most vital
controversies about the ancient British Church. It
could hardly be denied, however, that the
controversies left Summers Minor comparatively
cold.
Indeed, the things that interested Summers Minor,
and the things that did not interest him, had mystified
and amused his uncle for several hours. He exhibited
the English schoolboy's startling ignorance and
startling knowledge--knowledge of some special
classification in which he can generally correct and
confound his elders. He considered himself entitled,
at Hampton Court on a holiday, to forget the very
names of Cardinal Wolsey or William of Orange; but
he could hardly be dragged from some details about
the arrangement of the electric bells in the
neighboring hotel. He was solidly dazed by
Westminster Abbey, which is not so unnatural since
that church became the lumber room of the larger
and less successful statuary of the eighteenth
century. But he had a magic and minute knowledge
of the Westminster omnibuses, and indeed of the
whole omnibus system of London, the colors and
numbers of which he knew as a herald knows
heraldry. He would cry out against a momentary
confusion between a light-green Paddington and a
dark-green Bayswater vehicle, as his uncle would at
the identification of a Greek ikon and a Roman
image.
"Do you collect omnibuses like stamps?" asked his
uncle. "They must need a rather large album. Or do
you keep them in your locker?"
"I keep them in my head," replied the nephew,
with legitimate firmness.
"It does you credit, I admit," replied the
clergyman. "I suppose it were vain to ask for what
purpose you have learned that out of a thousand
things. There hardly seems to be a career in it, unless
you could be permanently on the pavement to
prevent old ladies getting into the wrong bus. Well,
we must get out of this one, for this is our place. I
want to show you what they call St. Paul's Penny."
"Is it like St. Paul's Cathedral?" asked the youth
with resignation, as they alighted.
At the entrance their eyes were arrested by a
singular figure evidently hovering there with a similar
anxiety to enter. It was that of a dark, thin man in a
long black robe rather like a cassock; but the black
cap on his head was of too strange a shape to be a
biretta. It suggested, rather, some archaic headdress
of Persia or Babylon. He had a curious black beard
appearing only at the corners of his chin, and his large
eyes were oddly set in his face like the flat decorative
eyes painted in old Egyptian profiles. Before they had
gathered more than a general impression of him, he
had dived into the doorway that was their own
destination.
Nothing could be seen above ground of the sunken
sanctuary except a strong wooden hut, of the sort
recently run up for many military and official
purposes, the wooden floor of which was indeed a
mere platform over the excavated
cavity below. A soldier stood as a sentry outside, and a superior
soldier, an Anglo-Indian
officer of distinction, sat writing at the desk inside. Indeed,
the sightseers soon found that this
particular sight was surrounded with the most
extraordinary precautions. I have compared the
silver coin to the Koh-i-noor, and in one sense it
was even conventionally comparable, since by a
historical accident it was at one time almost
counted among the Crown jewels, or at least
the Crown relics, until one of the royal princes
publicly restored it to the shrine to which it was
supposed to belong. Other causes combined to
concentrate official vigilance upon it; there had
been a scare about spies carrying explosives in
small objects, and one of those experimental
orders which pass like waves over bureaucracy
had decreed first that all visitors should change
their clothes for a sort of official sackcloth, and
then (when this method caused some murmurs)
that they should at least turn out their pockets.
Colonel Morris, the officer in charge, was a
short, active man with a grim and leathery face,
but a lively and humorous eye--a contradiction
borne out by his conduct, for he at once derided
the safeguards and yet insisted on them.
"I don't care a button myself for Paul's Penny,
or such things," he admitted in answer to some
antiquarian openings from the clergyman who
was slightly acquainted with him, "but I wear the
King's coat, you know, and it's a serious thing when
the King's uncle leaves a thing here with his own
hands under my charge. But as for saints and relics
and things, I fear I'm a bit of a Voltairian; what you
would call a skeptic."
"I'm not sure it's even skeptical to believe in the
royal family and not in the 'Holy' Family," replied Mr.
Twyford. "But, of course, I can easily empty my
pockets, to show I don't carry a bomb."
The little heap of the parson's possessions which he
left on the table consisted chiefly of papers, over and
above a pipe and a tobacco pouch and some Roman
and Saxon coins. The rest were catalogues of old
books, and pamphlets, like one entitled "The Use of
Sarum," one glance at which was sufficient both for
the colonel and the schoolboy. They could not see the
use of Sarum at all. The contents of the boy's pockets
naturally made a larger heap, and included marbles, a
ball of string, an electric torch, a magnet, a small
catapult, and, of course, a large pocketknife, almost to
be described as a small tool box, a complex apparatus
on which he seemed disposed to linger, pointing out
that it included a pair of nippers, a tool for punching
holes in wood, and, above all, an instrument for taking
stones out of a horse's hoof. The comparative absence
of any horse he appeared to regard as irrelevant, as
if it were a mere appendage easily supplied. But when the turn
came of the gentleman in the black gown, he did not turn out
his pockets, but merely spread out his hands.
"I have no possessions," he said.
"I'm afraid I must ask you to empty your pockets
and make sure," observed the colonel, gruffly.
"I have no pockets," said the stranger.
Mr. Twyford was looking at the long black gown
with a learned eye.
"Are you a monk?" he asked, in a puzzled fashion.
"I am a magus," replied the stranger. "You have
heard of the magi, perhaps? I am a magician."
"Oh, I say!" exclaimed Summers Minor, with
prominent eyes.
"But I was once a monk," went on the other. "I am
what you would call an escaped monk. Yes, I have
escaped into eternity. But the monks held one truth at
least, that the highest life should be without
possessions. I have no pocket money and no pockets,
and all the stars are my trinkets."
"They are out of reach, anyhow," observed
Colonel Morris, in a tone which suggested that
it was well for them. "I've known a good many
magicians myself in India--mango plant and all.
But the Indian ones are all frauds, I'll swear. In fact, I
had a good deal of fun showing them up. More fun
than I have over this dreary job, anyhow. But here
comes Mr. Symon, who will show you over the old
cellar downstairs."
Mr. Symon, the official guardian and guide, was a
young man, prematurely gray, with a grave mouth
which contrasted curiously with a very small, dark
mustache with waxed points, that seemed somehow,
separate from it, as if a black fly had settled on his
face. He spoke with the accent of Oxford and the
permanent official, but in as dead a fashion as the
most indifferent hired guide. They descended a dark
stone staircase, at the floor of which Symon pressed a
button and a door opened on a dark room, or, rather, a
room which had an instant before been dark. For
almost as the heavy iron door swung open an almost
blinding blaze of electric lights filled the whole interior.
The fitful enthusiasm of Stinks at once caught fire,
and he eagerly asked if the lights and the door worked
together.
"Yes, it's all one system," replied Symon. "It was
all fitted up for the day His Royal Highness deposited
the thing here. You see, it's locked up behind a glass
case exactly as he left it."
A glance showed that the arrangements for
guarding the treasure were indeed as strong as they
were simple. A single pane of glass cut off one
corner of the room, in an iron framework let into the
rock walls and the wooden roof
above; there was now no possibility of
reopening the case without elaborate labor, except by
breaking the glass, which would probably arouse the
night watchman who was always within a few feet
of it, even if he had fallen asleep. A close
examination would have showed many more
ingenious safeguards; but the eye of the Rev. Thomas Twyford, at
least, was already riveted on
what interested him much more--the dull silver disk
which shone in the white light against a plain
background of black velvet.
"St. Paul's Penny, said to commemorate the visit of
St. Paul to Britain, was probably preserved in this
chapel until the eighth century," Symon was saying in
his clear but colorless voice. "In the ninth century it is
supposed to have been carried away by the
barbarians, and it reappears, after the conversion of
the northern Goths, in the possession of the royal
family of Gothland. His Royal Highness, the Duke of
Gothland, retained it always in his own private
custody, and when he decided to exhibit it to the
public, placed it here with his own hand. It was
immediately sealed up in such a manner--"
Unluckily at this point Summers Minor, whose
attention had somewhat strayed from the religious
wars of the ninth century, caught sight of a short
length of wire appearing in a broken patch in the
wall. He precipitated himself at it, calling out, "I say,
say, does that connect?"
It was evident that it did connect, for no sooner
had the boy given it a twitch than the whole room
went black, as if they had all been struck blind, and
an instant afterward they heard the dull crash of the
closing door.
"Well, you've done it now," said Symon, in his
tranquil fashion. Then after a pause he added, "I
suppose they'll miss us sooner or later, and no doubt
they can get it open; but it may take some little time."
There was a silence, and then the unconquerable
Stinks observed:
"Rotten that I had to leave my electric torch."
"I think," said his uncle, with restraint, "that we are
sufficiently convinced of your interest in electricity."
Then after a pause he remarked, more amiably: "I
suppose if I regretted any of my own impedimenta, it
would be the pipe. Though, as a matter of fact, it's
not much fun smoking in the dark. Everything seems
different in the dark."
"Everything is different in the dark," said a third
voice, that of the man who called himself a magician.
It was a very musical voice, and rather in contrast
with his sinister and swarthy visage, which was now
invisible. "Perhaps you don't know how terrible a
truth that is. All you see are pictures made by the
sun, faces and furniture and flowers and trees. The
things themselves may be quite strange to you. Something else
may be standing now where you saw a table or a
chair. The face of your friend may be quite different
in the dark."
A short, indescribable noise broke the stillness.
Twyford started for a second, and then said, sharply:
"Really, I don't think it's a suitable occasion for
trying to frighten a child."
"Who's a child?" cried the indignant Summers,
with a voice that had a crow, but also something of a
crack in it. "And who's a funk, either? Not me."
"I will be silent, then," said the other voice out of
the darkness. "But silence also makes and unmakes."
The required silence remained unbroken for a long
time until at last the clergyman said to Symon in a
low voice:
"I suppose it's all right about air?"
"Oh, yes," replied the other aloud; "there's a
fireplace and a chimney in the office just by the
door."
A bound and the noise of a falling chair told them
that the irrepressible rising generation had once more
thrown itself across the room. They heard the
ejaculation: "A chimney! Why, I'll be--" and the rest
was lost in muffled, but exultant, cries.
The uncle called repeatedly and vainly, groped his
way at last to the opening, and, peering up it, caught a
glimpse of a disk of daylight, which seemed to
suggest that the fugitive had vanished in safety.
Making his way back to the group by the glass case, he
fell over the fallen chair and took a moment to
collect himself again. He had opened his mouth to
speak to Symon, when he stopped, and suddenly
found himself blinking in the full shock of the white
light, and looking over the other man's shoulder, he
saw that the door was standing open.
"So they've got at us at last," he observed to Symon.
The man in the black robe was leaning against the
wall some yards away, with a smile carved on his
face.
"Here comes Colonel Morris," went on Twyford,
still speaking to Symon. "One of us will have to tell
him how the light went out. Will you?"
But Symon still said nothing. He was standing as
still as a statue, and looking steadily at the black
velvet behind the glass screen. He was looking at the
black velvet because there was nothing else to look
at. St. Paul's Penny was gone.
Colonel Morris entered the room with two
new visitors; presumably two new sightseers delayed
by the accident. The foremost was a tall,
fair, rather languid-looking man with a bald
brow and a high-bridged nose; his companion was a
younger man with light, curly hair and frank, and
even innocent, eyes. Symon scarcely seemed to hear
the newcomers; it seemed almost as if he had not
realized that the return of the light revealed his
brooding attitude. Then he started in a guilty fashion,
and when he saw the elder of the two strangers, his
pale face seemed to turn a shade paler.
"Why it's Horne Fisher!" and then after a pause
he said in a low voice, "I'm in the devil of a hole,
Fisher."
"There does seem a bit of a mystery to be cleared
up," observed the gentleman so addressed.
"It will never be cleared up," said the pale Symon.
"If anybody could clear it up, you could. But nobody
could."
"I rather think I could," said another voice from
outside the group, and they turned in surprise to
realize that the man in the black robe had spoken
again.
"You!" said the colonel, sharply. "And how do you
propose to play the detective?"
"I do not propose to play the detective," answered
the other, in a clear voice like a bell. "I propose to
play the magician. One of the magicians you show up
in India, Colonel."
No one spoke for a moment, and then Horne
Fisher surprised everybody by saying, "Well, let's go
upstairs, and this gentleman can have a try."
He stopped Symon, who had an automatic finger
on the button, saying: "No, leave all the lights on. It's
a sort of safeguard."
"The thing can't be taken away now," said Symon,
bitterly.
"It can be put back," replied Fisher.
Twyford had already run upstairs for news
of his vanishing nephew, and he received news
of him in a way that at once puzzled and reassured him. On the
floor above lay one of
those large paper darts which boys throw at
each other when the schoolmaster is out of the
room. It had evidently been thrown in at the
window, and on being unfolded displayed a
scrawl of bad handwriting which ran: "Dear
Uncle; I am all right. Meet you at the hotel
later on," and then the signature.
Insensibly comforted by this, the clergyman found
his thoughts reverting voluntarily to his favorite relic,
which came a good second in his sympathies to his
favorite nephew, and before he knew where he was
he found himself encircled by the group discussing its
loss, and more or less carried away on the current of
their excitement. But an undercurrent of query
continued to run in his mind, as to what had really
happened to the boy, and what was the boy's exact
definition of being all right.
Meanwhile Horne Fisher had considerably puzzled
everybody with his new tone and attitude. He had
talked to the colonel about the military and
mechanical arrangements, and displayed a
remarkable knowledge both of the details of
discipline and the technicalities of electricity. He had
talked to the clergyman, and shown an equally
surprising knowledge of the religious and historical
interests involved in the relic. He had talked to the
man who called himself a magician, and not only
surprised but scandalized the company by an equally
sympathetic familiarity with the most fantastic forms
of Oriental occultism and psychic experiment. And in
this last and least respectable line of inquiry he was
evidently prepared to go farthest; he openly
encouraged the magician, and was plainly prepared
to follow the wildest ways of investigation in which
that magus might lead him.
"How would you begin now?" he inquired, with an
anxious politeness that reduced the colonel to a
congestion of rage.
"It is all a question of a force; of establishing
communications for a force," replied that adept,
affably, ignoring some military mutterings about the
police force. "It is what you in the West used to call
animal magnetism, but it is much more than that. I
had better not say how much more. As to setting
about it, the usual method is to throw some
susceptible person into a trance, which serves as a
sort of bridge or cord of communication, by which
the force beyond can give him, as it were, an electric
shock, and awaken his higher senses. It opens the
sleeping eye of the mind."
"I'm suspectible," said Fisher, either with simplicity
or with a baffling irony. "Why not open my mind's
eye for me? My friend Harold March here will tell
you I sometimes see things, even in the dark."
"Nobody sees anything except in the dark," said
the magician.
Heavy clouds of sunset were closing round the
wooden hut, enormous clouds, of which only the
corners* could be seen in the little window, like
purple horns and tails, almost as if some huge
monsters were prowling round the place. But the
purple was already deepening to dark gray; it would
soon be night.
"Do not light the lamp," said the magus with quiet
authority, arresting a movement in that direction. "I
told you before that things happen only in the dark."
How such a topsy-turvy scene ever came to be
tolerated in the colonel's office, of all places, was
afterward a puzzle in the memory of many, including
the colonel. They recalled it like a sort of nightmare,
like something they could not control. Perhaps there
was really a magnetism about the mesmerist;
perhaps there was even more magnetism about the man mesmerized.
Anyhow, the man was being mesmerized, for Horne
Fisher had collapsed into a chair with his long limbs
loose and sprawling and his eyes staring at vacancy;
and the other man was mesmerizing him, making
sweeping movements with his darkly draped arms as
if with black wings. The colonel had passed the point
of explosion, and he dimly realized that eccentric
aristocrats are allowed their fling. He comforted
himself with the knowledge that he had already sent
for the police, who would break up any such
masquerade, and with lighting a cigar, the red end of
which, in the gathering darkness, glowed with protest.
"Yes, I see pockets," the man in the trance was
saying. "I see many pockets, but they are all empty.
No; I see one pocket that is not empty."
There was a faint stir in the stillness, and the
magician said, "Can you see what is in the pocket?"
"Yes," answered the other; "there are two bright
things. I think they are two bits of steel. One of the
pieces of steel is bent or crooked."
"Have they been used in the removal of the relic
from downstairs?"
"Yes."
There was another pause and the inquirer added,
"Do you see anything of the relic itself?"
"I see something shining on the floor, like the
shadow or the ghost of it. It is over there in the
corner beyond the desk."
There was a movement of men turning and then a
sudden stillness, as of their stiffening, for over in the
corner on the wooden floor there was really a round
spot of pale light. It was the only spot of light in the
room. The cigar had gone out.
"It points the way," came the voice of the oracle.
"The spirits are pointing the way to penitence, and
urging the thief to restitution. I can see nothing
more." His voice trailed off into a silence that lasted
solidly for many minutes, like the long silence below
when the theft had been committed. Then it was
broken by the ring of metal on the floor, and the
sound of something spinning and falling like a tossed
halfpenny.
"Light the lamp!" cried Fisher in a loud and even
jovial voice, leaping to his feet with far less languor
than usual. "I must be going now, but I should like to
see it before I go. Why, I came on purpose to see it."
The lamp was lit, and he did see it, for St. Paul's
Penny was lying on the floor at his feet.
"Oh, as for that," explained Fisher, when he was
entertaining March and Twyford at lunch about a
month later, "I merely wanted to play with the
magician at his own game."
"I thought you meant to catch him in his own trap,"
said Twyford. "I can't make head or tail of anything
yet, but to my mind he was always the suspect. I
don't think he was necessarily a thief in the vulgar
sense. The police always seem to think that silver is
stolen for the sake of silver, but a thing like that might
well be stolen out of some religious mania. A
runaway monk turned mystic might well want it for
some mystical purpose."
"No," replied Fisher, "the runaway monk is not a
thief. At any rate he is not the thief. And he's not
altogether a liar, either. He said one true thing at
least that night."
"And what was that?" inquired March.
"He said it was all magnetism. As a matter of fact,
it was done by means of a magnet." Then, seeing
they still looked puzzled, he added, "It was that toy
magnet belonging to your nephew, Mr. Twyford."
"But I don't understand," objected March. "If it
was done with the schoolboy's magnet, I suppose it
was done by the schoolboy."
"Well," replied Fisher, reflectively, "it rather
depends which schoolboy."
"What on earth do you mean?"
"The soul of a schoolboy is a curious thing," Fisher
continued, in a meditative manner. "It can survive a
great many things besides climbing out of a chimney.
A man can grow gray in great campaigns, and still
have the soul of a schoolboy. A man can return with
a great reputation from India and be put in charge of
a great public treasure, and still have the soul of a
schoolboy, waiting to be awakened by an accident.
And it is ten times more so when to the schoolboy
you add the skeptic, who is generally a sort of
stunted schoolboy. You said just now that things
might be done by religious mania. Have you ever
heard of irreligious mania? I assure you it exists very
violently, especially in men who like showing up
magicians in India. But here the skeptic had the
temptation of showing up a much more tremendous
sham nearer home."
A light came into Harold March's eyes as he
suddenly saw, as if afar off, the wider implication of
the suggestion. But Twyford was still wrestling with
one problem at a time.
"Do you really mean," he said, "that Colonel
Morris took the relic?"
"He was the only person who could use the
magnet," replied Fisher. "In fact, your obliging
nephew left him a number of things he could use. He
had a ball of string, and an instrument for making a
hole in the wooden floor--I made a little play with
that hole in the floor in my trance, by the way; with
the lights left on below, it shone like a new shilling."
Twyford suddenly bounded on his chair. "But
in that case," he cried, in a new and altered voice,
"why then of course--You said a piece of steel--?"
"I said there were two pieces of steel," said
Fisher. "The bent piece of steel was the boy's
magnet. The other was the relic in the glass case."
"But that is silver," answered the archaeologist, in
a voice now almost unrecognizable.
"Oh," replied Fisher, soothingly, "I dare say it was
painted with silver a little."
There was a heavy silence, and at last Harold
March said, "But where is the real relic?"
"Where it has been for five years," replied Horne
Fisher, "in the possession of a mad millionaire named
Vandam, in Nebraska. There was a playful little
photograph about him in a society paper the other
day, mentioning his delusion, and saying he was
always being taken in about relics."
Harold March frowned at the tablecloth; then,
after an interval, he said: "I think I understand your
notion of how the thing was actually done; according
to that, Morris just made a hole and fished it up with
a magnet at the end of a string. Such a monkey trick
looks like mere madness, but I suppose he was mad,
partly with the boredom of watching over what he
felt was a fraud, though he couldn't prove it. Then
came a chance to prove it, to himself at least, and he
had what he called 'fun' with it. Yes, I think I see a
lot of details now. But it's just the whole thing that
knocks me. How did it all come to be like that?"
Fisher was looking at him with level lids and an
immovable manner.
"Every precaution was taken," he said. "The Duke
carried the relic on his own person, and locked it up
in the case with his own hands."
March was silent; but Twyford stammered. "I
don't understand you. You give me the creeps. Why
don't you speak plainer?"
"If I spoke plainer you would understand me less,"
said Horne Fisher.
"All the same I should try," said March, still
without lifting his head.
"Oh, very well," replied Fisher, with a sigh; "the
plain truth is, of course, that it's a bad business.
Everybody knows it's a bad business who knows
anything about it. But it's always happening, and in
one way one can hardly blame them. They get stuck
on to a foreign princess that's as stiff as a Dutch doll,
and they have their fling. In this case it was a pretty
big fling."
The face of the Rev. Thomas Twyford certainly
suggested that he was a little out of his depth in the
seas of truth, but as the other went on speaking
vaguely the old gentleman's features sharpened and
set.
"If it were some decent morganatic affair I
wouldn't say; but he must have been a fool to throw
away thousands on a woman like that. At the end it
was sheer blackmail; but it's something that the old
ass didn't get it out of the taxpayers. He could only
get it out of the Yank, and there you are."
The Rev. Thomas Twyford had risen to his feet.
"Well, I'm glad my nephew had nothing to do with
it," he said. "And if that's what the world is like, I
hope he will never have anything to, do with it."
"I hope not," answered Horne Fisher. "No one
knows so well as I do that one can have far too
much to do with it."
For Summers Minor had indeed nothing to do with
it; and it is part of his higher significance that he has
really nothing to do with the story, or with any such
stories. The boy went like a bullet through the tangle
of this tale of crooked politics and crazy mockery and
came out on the other side, pursuing his own
unspoiled purposes. From the top of the chimney he
climbed he had caught sight of a new omnibus, whose
color and name he had never known, as a naturalist
might see a new bird or a botanist a new flower. And
he had been sufficiently enraptured in rushing after it,
and riding away upon that fairy ship.
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
the signals of the expansion of London. Mr. Haddow,
who was engaged in historical researches both in the
library and the locality, could find little assistance in
the latter. He had already realized, from the
documents, that Prior's Park had originally been
something like Prior's Farm, named after some local
figure, but the new social conditions were all against
his tracing the story by its traditions. Had any of the
real rustics remained, he would probably have found
some lingering legend of Mr. Prior, however remote
he might be. But the new nomadic population of
clerks and artisans, constantly shifting their homes
from one suburb to another, or their children from one
school to another, could have no corporate continuity.
They had all that forgetfulness of history that goes
everywhere with the extension of education.
Nevertheless, when he came out of the library
next morning and saw the wintry trees standing
round the frozen pond like a black forest, he felt he
might well have been far in the depths of the country.
The old wall running round the park kept that
inclosure itself still entirely rural and romantic, and
one could easily imagine that the depths of that dark
forest faded away
indefinitely into distant vales and hills. The gray and
black and silver of the wintry wood were all the more
severe or somber as a contrast to the colored
carnival groups that already stood on and around the
frozen pool. For the house party had already flung
themselves impatiently into fancy dress, and the
lawyer, with his neat black suit and red hair, was the
only modern figure among them.
"Aren't you going to dress up?" asked Juliet,
indignantly shaking at him a horned and towering blue
headdress of the fourteenth century which framed
her face very becomingly, fantastic as it was.
"Everybody here has to be in the Middle Ages. Even
Mr. Brain has put on a sort of brown dressing gown
and says he's a monk; and Mr. Fisher got hold of
some old potato sacks in the kitchen and sewed them
together; he's supposed to be a monk, too. As to the
prince, he's perfectly glorious, in great crimson robes
as a cardinal. He looks as if he could poison
everybody. You simply must be something."
"I will be something later in the day," he replied.
"At present I am nothing but an antiquary and an
attorney. I have to see your brother presently, about
some legal business and also some local
investigations he asked me to make. I must look a
little like a steward when I give an account of my stewardship."
"Oh, but my brother has dressed up!" cried the
girl. "Very much so. No end, if I may say so. Why
he's bearing down on you now in all his glory."
The noble lord was indeed marching toward them
in a magnificent sixteenth-century costume of purple
and gold, with a gold-hilted sword and a plumed cap,
and manners to match. Indeed, there was something
more than his usual expansiveness of bodily action in
his appearance at that moment. It almost seemed, so
to speak, that the plumes on his hat had gone to his
head. He flapped his great, gold-lined cloak like the
wings of a fairy king in a pantomime; he even drew
his sword with a flourish and waved it about as he did
his walking stick. In the light of after events there
seemed to be something monstrous and ominous
about that exuberance, something of the spirit that is
called fey. At the time it merely crossed a few people's
minds that he might possibly be drunk.
As he strode toward his sister the first figure he
passed was that of Leonard Crane, clad in Lincoln
green, with the horn and baldrick and sword
appropriate to Robin Hood; for he was standing
nearest to the lady, where, indeed, he might have
been found during a disproportionate part of the time.
He had displayed one of his buried talents in the
matter of skating, and now that the skating was
over seemed disposed to
prolong the partnership. The boisterous Bulmer
playfully made a pass at him with his drawn sword,
going forward with the lunge in the proper fencing
fashion, and making a somewhat too familiar
Shakespearean quotation about a rodent and a
Venetian coin.
Probably in Crane also there was a subdued
excitement just then; anyhow, in one flash he had
drawn his own sword and parried; and then suddenly,
to the surprise of everyone, Bulmer's weapon
seemed to spring out of his hand into the air and
rolled away on the ringing ice.
"Well, I never!" said the lady, as if with justifiable
indignation. "You never told me you could fence,
too."
Bulmer put up his sword with an air rather
bewildered than annoyed, which increased the
impression of something irresponsible in his mood at
the moment; then he turned rather abruptly to his
lawyer, saying:
"We can settle up about the estate after dinner;
I've missed nearly all the skating as it is, and I doubt
if the ice will hold till to-morrow night. I think I shall
get up early and have a spin by myself."
"You won't be disturbed with my company," said
Horne Fisher, in his weary fashion. "If I have to
begin the day with ice, in the American fashion, I
prefer it in smaller quantities. But no early hours for
me in December. The early bird catches the cold."
"Oh, I sha'n't die of catching a cold," answered
Bulmer, and laughed.
A considerable group of the skating party had
consisted of the guests staying at the house, and
the rest had tailed off in twos and threes some
time before most of the guests began to retire
for the night. Neighbors, always invited to
Prior's Park on such occasions, went back to
their own houses in motors or on foot; the legal
and archeoological gentleman had returned to the
Inns of Court by a late train, to get a paper called
for during his consultation with his client; and
most of the other guests were drifting and lingering at various
stages on their way up to bed. Horne Fisher, as if to deprive
himself of any excuse for his refusal of early rising, had been
the first to retire to his room; but, sleepy as he
looked, he could not sleep. He had picked up
from a table the book of antiquarian topography,
in which Haddow had found his first hints about
the origin of the local name, and, being a man
with a quiet and quaint capacity for being interested in
anything, he began to read it steadily,
making notes now and then of details on which
his previous reading left him with a certain doubt
about his present conclusions. His room was the
one nearest to the lake in the center of the woods,
and was therefore the quietest, and none of the last
echoes of the evening's festivity could reach him. He
had followed carefully the argument which
established the derivation from Mr. Prior's farm and
the hole in the wall, and disposed of any fashionable
fancy about monks and magic wells, when he began
to be conscious of a noise audible in the frozen
silence of the night. It was not a particularly loud
noise, but it seemed to consist of a series of thuds or
heavy blows, such as might be struck on a wooden
door by a man seeking to enter. They were followed
by something like a faint creak or crack, as if the
obstacle had either been opened or had given way.
He opened his own bedroom door and listened, but as
he heard talk and laughter all over the lower floors,
he had no reason to fear that a summons would be
neglected or the house left without protection. He
went to his open window, looking out over the frozen
pond and the moonlit statue in the middle of their
circle of darkling woods, and listened again. But
silence had returned to that silent place, and, after
straining his ears for a considerable time, he could
hear nothing but the solitary hoot of a distant
departing train. Then he reminded himself how many
nameless noises can be heard by the wakeful during
the most ordinary night, and shrugging his shoulders,
went wearily to bed.
He awoke suddenly and sat up in bed with his ears
filled, as with thunder, with the throbbing echoes of a
rending cry. He remained rigid for a moment, and
then sprang out of bed, throwing on the loose gown of
sacking he had worn all day. He went first to the
window, which was open, but covered with a thick
curtain, so that his room was still completely dark; but
when he tossed the curtain aside and put his head out,
he saw that a gray and silver daybreak had already
appeared behind the black woods that surrounded the
little lake, and that was all that he did see. Though the
sound had certainly come in through the open window
from this direction, the whole scene was still and
empty under the morning light as under the moonlight.
Then the long, rather lackadaisical hand he had laid on
a window sill gripped it tighter, as if to master a
tremor, and his peering blue eyes grew bleak with
fear. It may seem that his emotion was exaggerated
and needless, considering the effort of common sense
by which he had conquered his nervousness about the
noise on the previous night. But that had been a very
different sort of noise. It might have been made by
half a hundred things, from the chopping of wood to
the breaking of bottles. There was only one thing in
nature from which could come the sound that
echoed through the dark house at daybreak. It was
the awful articulate voice
of man; and it was something worse, for he knew
what man.
He knew also that it had been a shout for help. It
seemed to him that he had heard the very word; but
the word, short as it was, had been swallowed up, as
if the man had been stifled or snatched away even
as he spoke. Only the mocking reverberations of it
remained even in his memory, but he had no doubt of
the original voice. He had no doubt that the great
bull's voice of Francis Bray, Baron Bulmer, had been
heard for the last time between the darkness and the
lifting dawn.
How long he stood there he never knew, but he
was startled into life by the first living thing that he
saw stirring in that half-frozen landscape. Along the
path beside the lake, and immediately under his
window, a figure was walking slowly and softly, but
with great composure--a stately figure in robes of a
splendid scarlet; it was the Italian prince, still in his
cardinal's costume. Most of the company had indeed
lived in their costumes for the last day or two, and
Fisher himself had assumed his frock of sacking as a
convenient dressing gown; but there seemed,
nevertheless, something unusually finished and
formal, in the way of an early bird, about this
magnificent red cockatoo. It was as if the early
bird had been up all night.
"What is the matter?" he called, sharply, leaning out of the
window, and the Italian turned up his great yellow face like a
mask of brass.
"We had better discuss it downstairs," said Prince Borodino.
Fisher ran downstairs, and encountered the great,
red-robed figure entering the doorway and blocking
the entrance with his bulk.
"Did you hear that cry?" demanded Fisher.
"I heard a noise and I came out," answered the
diplomatist, and his face was too dark in the shadow
for its expression to be read.
"It was Bulmer's voice," insisted Fisher. "I'll swear
it was Bulmer's voice."
"Did you know him well?" asked the other.
The question seemed irrelevant, though it was not
illogical, and Fisher could only answer in a, random
fashion that he knew Lord Bulmer only slightly.
"Nobody seems to have known him well," continued
the Italian, in level tones. "Nobody except that man
Brain. Brain is rather older than Bulmer, but I fancy
they shared a good many secrets."
Fisher moved abruptly, as if waking from a
momentary trance, and said, in a new and more
vigorous voice, "But look here, hadn't we better get
outside and see if anything has happened."
"The ice seems to be thawing," said the other,
almost with indifference.
When they emerged from the house, dark
stains and stars in the gray field of ice did indeed
indicate that the frost was breaking up, as their host
had prophesied the day before, and the very memory
of yesterday brought back the mystery of to-day.
"He knew there would be a thaw," observed the
prince. "He went out skating quite early on purpose.
Did he call out because he landed in the water, do
you think?"
Fisher looked puzzled. "Bulmer was the last man
to bellow like that because he got his boots wet. And
that's all he could do here; the water would hardly
come up to the calf of a man of his size. You can see
the flat weeds on the floor of the lake, as if it were
through a thin pane of glass. No, if Bulmer had only
broken the ice he wouldn't have said much at the
moment, though possibly a good deal afterward. We
should have found him stamping and damning up and
down this path, and calling for clean boots."
"Let us hope we shall find him as happily
employed," remarked the diplomatist. "In that case
the voice must have come out of the wood."
"I'll swear it didn't come out of the house," said
Fisher; and the two disappeared together into the
twilight of wintry trees.
The plantation stood dark against the fiery
colors of sunrise, a black fringe having that
feathery appearance which makes trees when
they are bare the very reverse of rugged. Hours and
hours afterward, when the same dense, but delicate,
margin was dark against the greenish colors opposite
the sunset, the search thus begun at sunrise had not
come to an end. By successive stages, and to slowly
gathering groups of the company, it became apparent
that the most extraordinary of all gaps had appeared
in the party; the guests could find no trace of their
host anywhere. The servants reported that his bed
had been slept in and his skates and his fancy
costume were gone, as if he had risen early for the
purpose he had himself avowed. But from the top of
the house to the bottom, from the walls round the
park to the pond in the center, there was no trace of
Lord Bulmer, dead or alive. Horne Fisher realized
that a chilling premonition had already prevented him
from expecting to find the man alive. But his bald
brow was wrinkled over an entirely new and
unnatural problem, in not finding the man at all.
He considered the possibility of Bulmer having
gone off of his own accord, for some reason; but
after fully weighing it he finally dismissed it. It was
inconsistent with the unmistakable voice heard at
daybreak, and with many other practical obstacles.
There was only one gateway in the ancient and lofty
wall round the small park; the lodge keeper kept it
locked till late in the morning, and the lodge keeper
had seen no one pass. Fisher was fairly sure that he had before
him a mathematical problem in an inclosed space. His
instinct had been from the first so attuned to the
tragedy that it would have been almost a relief to him
to find the corpse. He would have been grieved, but
not horrified, to come on the nobleman's body
dangling from one of his own trees as from a gibbet,
or floating in his own pool like a pallid weed. What
horrified him was to find nothing.
He soon become conscious that he was not alone
even in his most individual and isolated experiments.
He often found a figure following him like his
shadow, in silent and almost secret clearings in the
plantation or outlying nooks and corners of the old
wall. The dark-mustached mouth was as mute as the
deep eyes were mobile, darting incessantly hither and
thither, but it was clear that Brain of the Indian police
had taken up the trail like an old hunter after a tiger.
Seeing that he was the only personal friend of the
vanished man, this seemed natural enough, and Fisher
resolved to deal frankly with him.
"This silence is rather a social strain," he said.
"May I break the ice by talking about the weather?--which, by the
way, has already broken the ice. I know that breaking the ice
might be a rather melancholy metaphor in this case."
"I don't think so," replied Brain, shortly. "I don't
fancy the ice had much to do with it. I don't see how it could."
"What would you propose doing?" asked Fisher.
"Well, we've sent for the authorities, of course, but
I hope to find something out before they come,"
replied the Anglo-Indian. "I can't say I have much
hope from police methods in this country. Too much
red tape, habeas corpus and that sort of thing. What
we want is to see that nobody bolts; the nearest we
could get to it would be to collect the company and
count them, so to speak. Nobody's left lately, except
that lawyer who was poking about for antiquities."
"Oh, he's out of it; he left last night," answered the
other. "Eight hours after Bulmer's chauffeur saw his
lawyer off by the train I heard Bulmer's own voice
as plain as I hear yours now."
"I suppose you don't believe in spirits?" said the
man from India. After a pause he added: "There's
somebody else I should like to find, before we go
after a fellow with an alibi in the Inner Temple.
What's become of that fellow in green--the architect
dressed up as a forester? I haven't seem him about."
Mr. Brain managed to secure his assembly of all
the distracted company before the arrival of the
police. But when he first began to coment once more
on the young architect's delay in putting in an
appearance, he found himself in
the presence of a minor mystery, and a psychological
development of an entirely unexpected kind.
Juliet Bray had confronted the catastrophe of her
brother's disappearance with a somber stoicism in
which there was, perhaps, more paralysis than pain;
but when the other question came to the surface she
was both agitated and angry.
"We don't want to jump to any conclusions about
anybody," Brain was saying in his staccato style. "But
we should like to know a little more about Mr. Crane.
Nobody seems to know much about him, or where he
comes from. And it seems a sort of coincidence that
yesterday he actually crossed swords with poor
Bulmer, and could have stuck him, too, since he
showed himself the better swordsman. Of course,
that may be an accident and couldn't possibly be
called a case against anybody; but then we haven't
the means to make a real case against anybody. Till
the police come we are only a pack of very amateur
sleuthhounds."
"And I think you're a pack of snobs," said Juliet.
"Because Mr. Crane is a genius who's made his own
way, you try to suggest he's a murderer without
daring to say so. Because he wore a toy sword and
happened to know how to use it, you want us to
believe he used it like a bloodthirsty maniac for no
reason in the world. And because he could have hit
my brother and didn't, you deduce that he did. That's
the sort of way you argue. And as for his having
disappeared, you're wrong in that as you are in
everything else, for here he comes."
And, indeed, the green figure of the fictitious
Robin Hood slowly detached itself from the gray
background of the trees, and came toward them as
she spoke.
He approached the group slowly, but with
composure; but he was decidedly pale, and the eyes
of Brain and Fisher had already taken in one detail of
the green-clad figure more clearly than all the rest.
The horn still swung from his baldrick, but the sword
was gone.
Rather to the surprise of the company, Brain did
not follow up the question thus suggested; but, while
retaining an air of leading the inquiry, had also an
appearance of changing the subject.
"Now we're all assembled," he observed, quietly,
"there is a question I want to ask to begin with. Did
anybody here actually see Lord Bulmer this
morning?"
Leonard Crane turned his pale face round the
circle of faces till he came to Juliet's; then he
compressed his lips a little and said:
"Yes, I saw him."
"Was he alive and well?" asked Brain, quickly.
"How was he dressed?"
"He appeared exceedingly well," replied Crane,
with a curious intonation. "He was dressed as he was
yesterday, in that purple costume copied from the
portrait of his ancestor in the sixteenth century. He
had his skates in his hand."
"And his sword at his side, I suppose," added the
questioner. "Where is your own sword, Mr. Crane?"
"I threw it away."
In the singular silence that ensued, the train of
thought in many minds became involuntarily a series
of colored pictures.
They had grown used to their fanciful garments
looking more gay and gorgeous against the dark gray
and streaky silver of the forest, so that the moving
figures glowed like stained-glass saints walking. The
effect had been more fitting because so many of them
had idly parodied pontifical or monastic dress. But the
most arresting attitude that remained in their
memories had been anything but merely monastic;
that of the moment when the figure in bright green
and the other in vivid violet had for a moment made a
silver cross of their crossing swords. Even when it
was a jest it had been something of a drama; and it
was a strange and sinister thought that in the gray
daybreak the same figures in the same posture might
have been repeated as a tragedy.
"Did you quarrel with him?" asked Brain, suddenly.
"Yes," replied the immovable man in green. "Or he quarreled with
me."
"Why did he quarrel with you?" asked the
investigator; and Leonard Crane made no reply.
Horne Fisher, curiously enough, had only given half
his attention to this crucial cross-examination. His
heavy-lidded eyes had languidly followed the figure
of Prince Borodino, who at this stage had strolled
away toward the fringe of the wood; and, after a
pause, as of meditation, had disappeared into the
darkness of the trees.
He was recalled from his irrelevance by the voice
of Juliet Bray, which rang out with an altogether new
note of decision:
"If that is the difficulty, it had best be cleared up.
I am engaged to Mr. Crane, and when we told my
brother he did not approve of it; that is all."
Neither Brain nor Fisher exhibited any surprise,
but the former added, quietly:
"Except, I suppose, that he and your brother went
off into the wood to discuss it, where Mr. Crane
mislaid his sword, not to mention his companion."
"And may I ask," inquired Crane, with a certain
flicker of mockery passing over his pallid features,
"what I am supposed to have done with
either of them? Let us adopt the cheerful thesis that I
am a murderer; it has yet to be shown that I am a
magician. If I ran your unfortunate friend through the
body, what did I do with the body? Did I have it
carried away by seven flying dragons, or was it
merely a trifling matter of turning it into a milk-white
hind?"
"It is no occasion for sneering," said the Anglo-Indian judge,
with abrupt authority. "It doesn't make it
look better for you that you can joke about the loss."
Fisher's dreamy, and even dreary, eye was still on
the edge of the wood behind, and he became
conscious of masses of dark red, like a stormy sunset
cloud, glowing through the gray network of the thin
trees, and the prince in his cardinal's robes reemerged on to the
pathway. Brain had had half a
notion that the prince might have gone to look for the
lost rapier. But when he reappeared he was carrying
in his hand, not a sword, but an ax.
The incongruity between the masquerade and the
mystery had created a curious psychological
atmosphere. At first they had all felt horribly
ashamed at being caught in the foolish disguises of a
festival, by an event that had only too much the
character of a funeral. Many of them would have
already gone back and dressed in clothes that were
more funereal or at least more formal. But somehow
at the moment this seemed like a second
masquerade, more artificial and frivolous than the
first. And as they reconciled themselves to their
ridiculous trappings, a curious sensation had come
over some of them, notably over the more sensitive,
like Crane and Fisher and Juliet, but in some degree
over everybody except the practical Mr. Brain. It
was almost as if they were the ghosts of their own
ancestors haunting that dark wood and dismal lake,
and playing some old part that they only half
remembered. The movements of those colored
figures seemed to mean something that had been
settled long before, like a silent heraldry. Acts,
attitudes, external objects, were accepted as an
allegory even without the key; and they knew when a
crisis had come, when they did not know what it was.
And somehow they knew subconsciously that the
whole tale had taken a new and terrible turn, when
they saw the prince stand in the gap of the gaunt
trees, in his robes of angry crimson and with his
lowering face of bronze, bearing in his hand a new
shape of death. They could not have named a reason,
but the two swords seemed indeed to have become
toy swords and the whole tale of them broken and
tossed away like a toy. Borodino looked like the Old
World headsman, clad in terrible red, and carrying the
ax for the execution of the criminal. And the criminal
was not Crane.
Mr. Brain of the Indian police was glaring
at the new object, and it was a moment or two
before he spoke, harshly and almost hoarsely.
"What are you doing with that?" he asked. "Seems
to be a woodman's chopper."
"A natural association of ideas," observed Horne
Fisher. "If you meet a cat in a wood you think it's a
wildcat, though it may have just strolled from the
drawing-room sofa. As a matter of fact, I happen to
know that is not the woodman's chopper. It's the
kitchen chopper, or meat ax, or something like that,
that somebody has thrown away in the wood. I saw
it in the kitchen myself when I was getting the potato
sacks with which I reconstructed a mediaeval
hermit."
"All the same, it is not without interest," remarked
the prince, holding out the instrument to Fisher, who
took it and examined it carefully. "A butcher's
cleaver that has done butcher's work."
"It was certainly the instrument of the crime,"
assented Fisher, in a low voice.
Brain was staring at the dull blue gleam of the ax
head with fierce and fascinated eyes. "I don't
understand you," he said. "There is no--there are no
marks on it."
"It has shed no blood," answered Fisher, "but for
all that it has committed a crime. This is as near as
the criminal came to the crime when he committed it."
"What do you mean?"
"He was not there when he did it," explained
Fisher. "It's a poor sort of murderer who can't
murder people when he isn't there."
"You seem to be talking merely for the sake of
mystification," said Brain. "If you have any practical
advice to give you might as well make it intelligible."
"The only practical advice I can suggest," said
Fisher, thoughtfully, "is a little research into local
topography and nomenclature. They say there used
to be a Mr. Prior, who had a farm in this
neighborhood. I think some details about the
domestic life of the late Mr. Prior would throw a light
on this terrible business."
"And you have nothing more immediate than your
topography to offer," said Brain, with a sneer, "to
help me avenge my friend?"
"Well," said Fisher, "I should find out the truth
about the Hole in the Wall."
That night, at the close of a stormy twilight and
under a strong west wind that followed the breaking
of the frost, Leonard Crane was wending his way in
a wild rotatory walk round and round the high,
continuous wall that inclosed the little wood. He was
driven by a desperate idea of solving for himself the
riddle that had clouded his reputation and already
even threatened his liberty. The police authorities,
now in
charge of the inquiry, had not arrested him, but
he knew well enough that if he tried to move far
afield he would be instantly arrested. Horne
Fisher's fragmentary hints, though he had refused to expand them
as yet, had stirred the
artistic temperament of the architect to a sort of
wild analysis, and he was resolved to read the
hieroglyph upside down and every way until it
made sense. If it was something connected with
a hole in the wall he would find the hole in the
wall; but, as a matter of fact, he was unable to
find the faintest crack in the wall. His professional knowledge
told him that the masonry was
all of one workmanship and one date, and, except for the regular
entrance, which threw no
light on the mystery, he found nothing suggesting any sort of
hiding place or means of escape.
Walking a narrow path between the winding
wall and the wild eastward bend and sweep of
the gray and feathery trees, seeing shifting
gleams of a lost sunset winking almost like
lightning as the clouds of tempest scudded
across the sky and mingling with the first faint
blue light from a slowly strengthened moon behind him, he began
to feel his head going round
as his heels were going round and round the
blind recurrent barrier. He had thoughts on the
border of thought; fancies about a fourth dimension which was
itself a hole to hide anything, of seeing everything from a new
angle out of a new window in the senses; or of some mystical
light and transparency, like the new rays of chemistry, in
which he could see Bulmer's body, horrible and
glaring, floating in a lurid halo over the woods and
the wall. He was haunted also with the hint, which
somehow seemed to be equally horrifying, that it all
had something to do with Mr. Prior. There seemed
even to be something creepy in the fact that he was
always respectfully referred to as Mr. Prior, and that
it was in the domestic life of the dead farmer that he
had been bidden to seek the seed of these dreadful
things. As a matter of fact, he had found that no local
inquiries had revealed anything at all about the Prior
family.
The moonlight had broadened and brightened, the
wind had driven off the clouds and itself died fitfully
away, when he came round again to the artificial lake
in front of the house. For some reason it looked a
very artificial lake; indeed, the whole scene was like
a classical landscape with a touch of Watteau; the
Palladian facade of the house pale in the moon, and
the same silver touching the very pagan and naked
marble nymph in the middle of the pond. Rather to his
surprise, he found another figure there beside the
statue, sitting almost equally motionless; and the same
silver pencil traced the wrinkled brow and patient
face of Horne Fisher, still dressed as a hermit and
apparently practicing something of
the solitude of a hermit. Nevertheless, he looked up
at Leonard Crane and smiled, almost as if he had
expected him.
"Look here," said Crane, planting himself in front
of him, "can you tell me anything about this
business?"
"I shall soon have to tell everybody everything
about it," replied Fisher, "but I've no objection to
telling you something first. But, to begin with, will you
tell me something? What really happened when you
met Bulmer this morning? You did throw away your
sword, but you didn't kill him."
"I didn't kill him because I threw away my sword,"
said the other. "I did it on purpose--or I'm not sure
what might have happened."
After a pause he went on, quietly: "The late Lord
Bulmer was a very breezy gentleman, extremely
breezy. He was very genial with his inferiors, and
would have his lawyer and his architect staying in his
house for all sorts of holidays and amusements. But
there was another side to him, which they found out
when they tried to be his equals. When I told him that
his sister and I were engaged, something happened
which I simply can't and won't describe. It seemed to
me like some monstrous upheaval of madness. But I
suppose the truth is painfully simple. There is such a
thing as the coarseness of a gentleman. And it is the
most horrible thing in humanity."
"I know," said Fisher. "The Renaissance nobles of
the Tudor time were like that."
"It is odd that you should say that," Crane went on.
"For while we were talking there came on me a
curious feeling that we were repeating some scene of
the past, and that I was really some outlaw, found in
the woods like Robin Hood, and that he had really
stepped in all his plumes and purple out of the picture
frame of the ancestral portrait. Anyhow, he was the
man in possession, and he neither feared God nor
regarded man. I defied him, of course, and walked
away. I might really have killed him if I had not
walked away."
"Yes," said Fisher, nodding, "his ancestor was in
possession and he was in possession, and this is the
end of the story. It all fits in."
"Fits in with what?" cried his companion, with
sudden impatience. "I can't make head or tail of it.
You tell me to look for the secret in the hole in the
wall, but I can't find any hole in the wall."
"There isn't any," said Fisher. "That's the secret."
After reflecting a moment, he added: "Unless you
call it a hole in the wall of the world. Look here; I'll
tell you if you like, but I'm afraid it involves an
introduction. You've got to understand one of the
tricks of the modern mind, a
tendency that most people obey without noticing it. In
the village or suburb outside there's an inn with the
sign of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose I
went about telling everybody that this was only a
corruption of King George and the Dragoon. Scores
of people would believe it, without any inquiry, from a
vague feeling that it's probable because it's prosaic. It
turns something romantic and legendary into
something recent and ordinary. And that somehow
makes it sound rational, though it is unsupported by
reason. Of course some people would have the sense
to remember having seen St. George in old Italian
pictures and French romances, but a good many
wouldn't think about it at all. They would just swallow
the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern
intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it
will accept anything without authority. That's exactly
what has happened here.
"When some critic or other chose to say that
Prior's Park was not a priory, but was named
after some quite modern man named Prior, nobody
really tested the theory at all. It never
occurred to anybody repeating the story to ask
if there WAS any Mr. Prior, if anybody had ever
seen him or heard of him. As a matter of fact,
it was a priory, and shared the fate of most
priories--that is, the Tudor gentleman with the
plumes simply stole it by brute force and turned
it into his own private house; he did worse things, as
you shall hear. But the point here is that this is how
the trick works, and the trick works in the same way
in the other part of the tale. The name of this district
is printed Holinwall in all the best maps produced by
the scholars; and they allude lightly, not without a
smile, to the fact that it was pronounced Holiwell by
the most ignorant and old-fashioned of the poor. But
it is spelled wrong and pronounced right."
"Do you mean to say," asked Crane, quickly, "that
there really was a well?"
"There is a well," said Fisher, "and the truth lies at
the bottom of it."
As he spoke he stretched out his hand and pointed
toward the sheet of water in front of him.
"The well is under that water somewhere,"
he said, "and this is not the first tragedy connected
with it. The founder of this house did
something which his fellow ruffians very seldom
did; something that had to be hushed up even
in the anarchy of the pillage of the monasteries.
The well was connected with the miracles of
some saint, and the last prior that guarded it
was something like a saint himself; certainly he
was something very like a martyr. He defied
the new owner and dared him to pollute the place,
till the noble, in a fury, stabbed him and flung
his body into the well, whither, after four hundred
years, it has been followed by an heir of the usurper,
clad in the same purple and walking the world with
the same pride."
"But how did it happen," demanded Crane, "that
for the first time Bulmer fell in at that particular
spot?"
"Because the ice was only loosened at that
particular spot, by the only man who knew it,"
answered Horne Fisher. "It was cracked deliberately,
with the kitchen chopper, at that special place; and I
myself heard the hammering and did not understand
it. The place had been covered with an artificial lake,
if only because the whole truth had to be covered
with an artificial legend. But don't you see that it is
exactly what those pagan nobles would have done, to
desecrate it with a sort of heathen goddess, as the
Roman Emperor built a temple to Venus on the Holy
Sepulchre. But the truth could still be traced out, by
any scholarly man determined to trace it. And this
man was determined to trace it."
"What man?" asked the other, with a shadow of
the answer in his mind.
"The only man who has an alibi," replied Fisher.
"James Haddow, the antiquarian lawyer, left the night
before the fatality, but he left that black star of death
on the ice. He left abruptly, having previously
proposed to stay; probably, I think, after an ugly
scene with Bulmer, at their legal interview. As you
know yourself, Bulmer could make a man feel pretty
murderous, and I rather fancy the lawyer had himself
irregularities to confess, and was in danger of
exposure by his client. But it's my reading of human
nature that a man will cheat in his trade, but not in his
hobby. Haddow may have been a dishonest lawyer,
but he couldn't help being an honest antiquary. When
he got on the track of the truth about the Holy Well
he had to follow it up; he was not to be bamboozled
with newspaper anecdotes about Mr. Prior and a
hole in the wall; he found out everything, even to the
exact location of the well, and he was rewarded, if
being a successful assassin can be regarded as a
reward."
"And how did you get on the track of all this
hidden history?" asked the young architect.
A cloud came across the brow of Horne Fisher. "I
knew only too much about it already," he said, "and,
after all, it's shameful for me to be speaking lightly of
poor Bulmer, who has paid his penalty; but the rest of
us haven't. I dare say every cigar I smoke and every
liqueur I drink comes directly or indirectly from the
harrying of the holy places and the persecution of the
poor. After all, it needs very little poking about in the
past to find that hole in the wall, that great breach in
the defenses of English history. It lies just under the
surface of a
thin sheet of sham information and instruction, just as
the black and blood-stained well lies just under that
floor of shallow water and flat weeds. Oh, the ice is
thin, but it bears; it is strong enough to support us
when we dress up as monks and dance on it, in
mockery of the dear, quaint old Middle Ages. They
told me I must put on fancy dress; so I did put on
fancy dress, according to my own taste and fancy. I
put on the only costume I think fit for a man who has
inherited the position of a gentleman, and yet has not
entirely lost the feelings of one."
In answer to a look of inquiry, he rose with a
sweeping and downward gesture.
"Sackcloth," he said; "and I would wear the ashes
as well if they would stay on my bald head."
VII. THE TEMPLE OF SILENCE
Harold March and the few who cultivated the
friendship of Horne Fisher, especially if they saw
something of him in his own social setting, were
conscious of a certain solitude in his very sociability.
They seemed to be always meeting his relations and
never meeting his family. Perhaps it would be truer to
say that they saw much of his family and nothing of
his home. His cousins and connections ramified like a
labyrinth all over the governing class of Great Britain,
and he seemed to be on good, or at least on good-
humored, terms with most of them. For Horne Fisher
was remarkable for a curious impersonal information
and interest touching all sorts of topics, so that one
could sometimes fancy that his culture, like his
colorless, fair mustache and pale, drooping features,
had the neutral nature of a chameleon. Anyhow, he
could always get on with viceroys and Cabinet
Ministers and all the great men responsible for great
departments, and talk to each of them on his own
subject, on the branch of study with which he was
most seriously concerned. Thus he could
converse with the Minister for War about
silkworms, with the Minister of Education about
detective stories, with the Minister of Labor about
Limoges enamel, and with the Minister of Missions
and Moral Progress (if that be his correct title)
about the pantomime boys of the last four decades.
And as the first was his first cousin, the second his
second cousin, the third his brother-in-law, and the fourth his
uncle by marriage, this conversational
versatility certainly served in one sense to create a
happy family. But March never seemed to get a
glimpse of that domestic interior to which men of the
middle classes are accustomed in their friendships,
and which is indeed the foundation of friendship and
love and everything else in any sane and stable
society. He wondered whether Horne Fisher was
both an orphan and an only child.
It was, therefore, with something like a start that
he found that Fisher had a brother, much more
prosperous and powerful than himself, though
hardly, March thought, so entertaining. Sir Henry
Harland Fisher, with half the alphabet after his
name, was something at the Foreign Office far more
tremendous than the Foreign Secretary. Apparently,
it ran in the family, after all; for it seemed there was
another brother, Ashton Fisher, in India, rather
more tremendous than the Viceroy. Sir Henry
Fisher was a heavier, but handsomer edition of his
brother, with a brow equally bald, but much more
smooth. He was very courteous, but a shade
patronizing, not only to March, but even, as March
fancied, to Horne Fisher as well. The latter
gentleman, who had many intuitions about the half-formed thoughts
of others, glanced at the topic
himself as they came away from the great house in
Berkeley Square.
"Why, don't you know," he observed quietly,
"that I am the fool of the family?"
"It must be a clever family," said Harold March,
with a smile.
"Very gracefully expressed," replied Fisher; "that
is the best of having a literary training. Well, perhaps
it is an exaggeration to say I am the fool of the
family. It's enough to say I am the failure of the
family."
"It seems queer to me that you should fail
especially," remarked the journalist. "As they say in
the examinations, what did you fail in?"
"Politics," replied his friend. "I stood for
Parliament when I was quite a young man and got in
by an enormous majority, with loud cheers and
chairing round the town. Since then, of course, I've
been rather under a cloud."
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand the 'of course,'" answered
March, laughing.
"That part of it isn't worth understanding," said
Fisher. "But as a matter of fact, old chap, the other
part of it was rather odd and interesting.
Quite a detective story in its way, as well as the first
lesson I had in what modern politics are made of. If
you like, I'll tell you all about it." And the following,
recast in a less allusive and conversational manner, is
the story that he told.
Nobody privileged of late years to meet Sir Henry
Harland Fisher would believe that he had ever been
called Harry. But, indeed, he had been boyish enough
when a boy, and that serenity which shone on him
through life, and which now took the form of gravity,
had once taken the form of gayety. His friends would
have said that he was all the more ripe in his maturity
for having been young in his youth. His enemies
would have said that he was still light minded, but no
longer light hearted. But in any case, the whole of the
story Horne Fisher had to tell arose out of the
accident which had made young Harry Fisher private
secretary to Lord Saltoun. Hence his later connection
with the Foreign Office, which had, indeed, come to
him as a sort of legacy from his lordship when that
great man was the power behind the throne. This is
not the place to say much about Saltoun, little as was
known of him and much as there was worth knowing.
England has had at least three or four such secret
statesmen. An aristocratic polity produces every now
and then an aristocrat who is also an accident, a man
of intellectual independence and insight, a Napoleon
born in the purple. His vast work was mostly invisible,
and very little could be got out of him in private life
except a crusty and rather cynical sense of humor.
But it was certainly the accident of his presence at a
family dinner of the Fishers, and the unexpected
opinion he expressed, which turned what might have
been a dinner-table joke into a sort of small
sensational novel.
Save for Lord Saltoun, it was a family party
of Fishers, for the only other distinguished
stranger had just departed after dinner, leaving the
rest to their coffee and cigars. This had
been a figure of some interest--a young Cambridge
man named Eric Hughes who was the
rising hope of the party of Reform, to which the
Fisher family, along with their friend Saltoun,
had long been at least formally attached. The
personality of Hughes was substantially summed
up in the fact that he talked eloquently and earnestly
through the whole dinner, but left immediately after to
be in time for an appointment. All his actions had something at
once ambitious and conscientious; he drank no wine, but was
slightly intoxicated with words. And his face and
phrases were on the front page of all the newspapers
just then, because he was contesting the
safe seat of Sir Francis Verner in the great by-election in the
west. Everybody was talking
about the powerful speech against squirarchy which
he had just delivered; even in the Fisher circle
everybody talked about it except Horne Fisher
himself who sat in a corner, lowering over the fire.
"We jolly well have to thank him for putting some
new life into the old party," Ashton Fisher was
saying. "This campaign against the old squires just
hits the degree of democracy there is in this county.
This act for extending county council control is
practically his bill; so you may say he's in the
government even before he's in the House."
"One's easier than the other," said Harry,
carelessly. "I bet the squire's a bigger pot than the
county council in that county. Verner is pretty well
rooted; all these rural places are what you call
reactionary. Damning aristocrats won't alter it."
"He damns them rather well," observed Ashton.
"We never had a better meeting than the one in
Barkington, which generally goes Constitutional. And
when he said, 'Sir Francis may boast of blue blood;
let us show we have red blood,' and went on to talk
about manhood and liberty, the room simply rose at
him."
"Speaks very well," said Lord Saltoun, gruffly,
making his only contribution to the conversation so
far.
Then the almost equally silent Horne Fisher
suddenly spoke, without, taking his brooding eyes
off the fire.
"What I can't understand," he said, "is why
nobody is ever slanged for the real reason."
"Hullo!" remarked Harry, humorously, "you
beginning to take notice?"
"Well, take Verner," continued Horne Fisher. "If
we want to attack Verner, why not attack him? Why
compliment him on being a romantic reactionary
aristocrat? Who is Verner? Where does he come
from? His name sounds old, but I never heard of it
before, as the man said of the Crucifixion. Why talk
about his blue blood? His blood may be gamboge
yellow with green spots, for all anybody knows. All
we know is that the old squire, Hawker, somehow
ran through his money (and his second wife's, I
suppose, for she was rich enough), and sold the
estate to a man named Verner. What did he make his
money in? Oil? Army contracts?"
"I don't know," said Saltoun, looking at him
thoughtfully.
"First thing I ever knew you didn't know," cried
the exuberant Harry.
"And there's more, besides," went on Horne
Fisher, who seemed to have suddenly found his
tongue. "If we want country people to vote for us,
why don't we get somebody with some notion about
the country? We don't talk to people in Threadneedle
Street about nothing but turnips
and pigsties. Why do we talk to people in Somerset
about nothing but slums and socialism? Why don't we
give the squire's land to the squire's tenants, instead
of dragging in the county council?"
"Three acres and a cow," cried Harry, emitting
what the Parliamentary reports call an ironical cheer.
"Yes," replied his brother, stubbornly. "Don't you
think agricultural laborers would rather have three
acres and a cow than three acres of printed forms
and a committee? Why doesn't somebody start a
yeoman party in politics, appealing to the old
traditions of the small landowner? And why don't
they attack men like Verner for what they are, which
is something about as old and traditional as an
American oil trust?"
"You'd better lead the yeoman party yourself,"
laughed Harry. "Don't you think it would be a joke,
Lord Saltoun, to see my brother and his merry men,
with their bows and bills, marching down to Somerset
all in Lincoln green instead of Lincoln and Bennet
hats?"
"No," answered Old Saltoun, "I don't think it would
be a joke. I think it would be an exceedingly serious
and sensible idea."
"Well, I'm jiggered!" cried Harry Fisher, staring at
him. "I said just now it was the first fact you didn't
know, and I should say this is the first joke you didn't
see."
"I've seen a good many things in my time," said the
old man, in his rather sour fashion. "I've told a good
many lies in my time, too, and perhaps I've got rather
sick of them. But there are lies and lies, for all that.
Gentlemen used to lie just as schoolboys lie, because
they hung together and partly to help one another out.
But I'm damned if I can see why we should lie for
these cosmopolitan cads who only help themselves.
They're not backing us up any more; they're simply
crowding us out. If a man like your brother likes to go
into Parliament as a yeoman or a gentleman or a
Jacobite or an Ancient Briton, I should say it would
be a jolly good thing."
In the rather startled silence that followed Horne
Fisher sprang to his feet and all his dreary manner
dropped off him.
"I'm ready to do it to-morrow," he cried. "I
suppose none of you fellows would back me up."
Then Harry Fisher showed the finer side of his
impetuosity. He made a sudden movement as if to
shake hands.
"You're a sport," he said, "and I'll back you up, if
nobody else will. But we can all back you up, can't
we? I see what Lord Saltoun means, and, of course,
he's right. He's always right."
"So I will go down to Somerset," said Horne
Fisher.
"Yes, it is on the way to Westminster," said Lord
Saltoun, with a smile.
And so it happened that Horne Fisher arrived
some days later at the little station of a rather remote
market town in the west, accompanied by a light
suitcase and a lively brother. It must not be
supposed, however, that the brother's cheerful tone
consisted entirely of chaff. He supported the new
candidate with hope as well as hilarity; and at the
back of his boisterous partnership there was an
increasing sympathy and encouragement. Harry
Fisher had always had an affection for his more
quiet and eccentric brother, and was now coming
more and more to have a respect for him. As the
campaign proceeded the respect increased to ardent
admiration. For Harry was still young, and could feel
the sort of enthusiasm for his captain in
electioneering that a schoolboy can feel for his
captain in cricket.
Nor was the admiration undeserved. As the
new three-cornered contest developed it became
apparent to others besides his devoted kinsman
that there was more in Horne Fisher than had
ever met the eye. It was clear that his outbreak by
the family fireside had been but the
culmination of a long course of brooding and
studying on the question. The talent he retained
through life for studying his subject, and
even somebodys else's subject, had long been
concentrated on this idea of championing a new
peasantry against a new plutocracy. He spoke to a
crowd with eloquence and replied to an individual
with humor, two political arts that seemed to come to
him naturally. He certainly knew much more about
rural problems than either Hughes, the Reform
candidate, or Verner, the Constitutional candidate.
And he probed those problems with a human
curiosity, and went below the surface in a way that
neither of them dreamed of doing. He soon became
the voice of popular feelings that are never found in
the popular press. New angles of criticism, arguments
that had never before been uttered by an educated
voice, tests and comparisons that had been made
only in dialect by men drinking in the little local public
houses, crafts half forgotten that had come down by
sign of hand and tongue from remote ages when their
fathers were free all this created a curious and double
excitement. It startled the well informed by being a
new and fantastic idea they had never encountered. It
startled the ignorant by being an old and familiar idea
they never thought to have seen revived. Men saw
things in a new light, and knew not even whether it
was the sunset or the dawn.
Practical grievances were there to make the
movement formidable. As Fisher went to and fro
among the cottages and country inns, it was
borne in on him without difficulty that Sir Francis
Verner was a very bad landlord. Nor was the story of
his acquisition of the land any more ancient and
dignified than he had supposed; the story was well
known in the county and in most respects was obvious
enough. Hawker, the old squire, had been a loose,
unsatisfactory sort of person, had been on bad terms
with his first wife (who died, as some said, of
neglect), and had then married a flashy South
American Jewess with a fortune. But he must have
worked his way through this fortune also with
marvelous rapidity, for he had been compelled to sell
the estate to Verner and had gone to live in South
America, possibly on his wife's estates. But Fisher
noticed that the laxity of the old squire was far less
hated than the efficiency of the new squire. Verner's
history seemed to be full of smart bargains and
financial flutters that left other people short of money
and temper. But though he heard a great deal about
Verner, there was one thing that continually eluded
him; something that nobody knew, that even Saltoun
had not known. He could not find out how Verner had
originally made his money.
"He must have kept it specially dark," said Horne
Fisher to himself. "It must be something he's really
ashamed of. Hang it all! what IS a man ashamed of
nowadays?"
And as he pondered on the possibilities they grew darker and more
distorted in his mind; he thought vaguely of things remote and
repulsive, strange forms of slavery or sorcery, and then of ugly
things yet more unnatural but nearer home. The figure of Verner
seemed to be blackened and transfigured in his imagination, and
to stand against varied backgrounds and strange skies.
As he strode up a village street, brooding thus, his
eyes encountered a complete contrast in the face of
his other rival, the Reform candidate. Eric Hughes,
with his blown blond hair and eager undergraduate
face, was just getting into his motor car and saying a
few final words to his agent, a sturdy, grizzled man
named Gryce. Eric Hughes waved his hand in a
friendly fashion; but Gryce eyed him with some
hostility. Eric Hughes was a young man with genuine
political enthusiasms,, but he knew that political
opponents are people with whom one may have to
dine any day. But Mr. Gryce was a grim little local
Radical, a champion of the chapel, and one of those
happy people whose work is also their hobby. He
turned his back as the motor car drove away, and
walked briskly up the sunlit high street of the little
town, whistling, with political papers sticking out of
his pocket.
Fisher looked pensively after the resolute figure
for a moment, and then, as if by an impulse, began to
follow it. Through the busy market
place, amid the baskets and barrows of market day,
under the painted wooden sign of the Green Dragon,
up a dark side entry, under an arch, and through a
tangle of crooked cobbled streets the two threaded
their way, the square, strutting figure in front and the
lean, lounging figure behind him, like his shadow in
the sunshine. At length they came to a brown brick
house with a brass plate, on which was Mr. Gryce's
name, and that individual turned and beheld his
pursuer with a stare.
"Could I have a word with you, sir?" asked Horne
Fisher, politely. The agent stared still more, but
assented civilly, and led the other into an office
littered with leaflets and hung all round with highly
colored posters which linked the name of Hughes
with all the higher interests of humanity.
"Mr. Horne Fisher, I believe," said Mr. Gryce.
"Much honored by the call, of course. Can't pretend
to congratulate you on entering the contest, I'm
afraid; you won't expect that. Here we've been
keeping the old flag flying for freedom and reform,
and you come in and break the battle line."
For Mr. Elijah Gryce abounded in military
metaphors and in denunciations of militarism. He was
a square-jawed, blunt-featured man with a
pugnacious cock of the eyebrow. He had been
pickled in the politics of that countryside from
boyhood, he knew everybody's secrets, and
electioneering was the romance of his life.
"I suppose you think I'm devoured with ambition,"
said Horne Fisher, in his rather listless voice, "aiming
at a dictatorship and all that. Well, I think I can clear
myself of the charge of mere selfish ambition. I only
want certain things done. I don't want to do them. I
very seldom want to do anything. And I've come
here to say that I'm quite willing to retire from the
contest if you can convince me that we really want to
do the same thing."
The agent of the Reform party looked at him with
an odd and slightly puzzled expression, and before he
could reply, Fisher went on in the same level tones:
"You'd hardly believe it, but I keep a conscience
concealed about me; and I am in doubt about several
things. For instance, we both want to turn Verner out
of Parliament, but what weapon are we to use? I've
heard a lot of gossip against him, but is it right to act
on mere gossip? Just as I want to be fair to you, so I
want to be fair to him. If some of the things I've
heard are true he ought to be turned out of
Parliament and every other club in London. But I
don't want to turn him out of Parliament if they aren't
true."
At this point the light of battle sprang into Mr.
Gryce's eyes and he became voluble, not to say
violent. He, at any rate, had no doubt that
the stories were true; he could testify, to his own
knowledge, that they were true. Verner was not only
a hard landlord, but a mean landlord, a robber as well
as a rackrenter; any gentleman would be justified in
hounding him out. He had cheated old Wilkins out of
his freehold by a trick fit for a pickpocket; he had
driven old Mother Biddle to the workhouse; he had
stretched the law against Long Adam, the poacher,
till all the magistrates were ashamed of him.
"So if you'll serve under the old banner,"
concluded Mr. Gryce, more genially, "and turn out a
swindling tyrant like that, I'm sure you'll never regret
it."
"And if that is the truth," said Horne Fisher, "are
you going to tell it?"
"What do you mean? Tell the truth?" demanded Gryce.
"I mean you are going to tell the truth as you have
just told it," replied Fisher. "You are going to placard
this town with the wickedness done to old Wilkins.
You are going to fill the newspapers with the
infamous story of Mrs. Biddle. You are going to
denounce Verner from a public platform, naming him
for what he did and naming the poacher he did it to.
And you're going to find out by what trade this man
made the money with which he bought the estate;
and when you know the truth, as I said before, of
course you are going to tell it. Upon those terms I
come under the old flag, as you call it, and haul down
my little pennon."
The agent was eying him with a curious
expression, surly but not entirely unsympathetic.
"Well," he said, slowly, "you have to do these things in
a regular way, you know, or people don't understand.
I've had a lot of experience, and I'm afraid what you
say wouldn't do. People understand slanging squires in
a general way, but those personalities aren't
considered fair play. Looks like hitting below the belt."
"Old Wilkins hasn't got a belt, I suppose," replied
Horne Fisher. "Verner can hit him anyhow, and
nobody must say a word. It's evidently very important
to have a belt. But apparently you have to be rather
high up in society to have one. Possibly," he added,
thoughtfully--"possibly the explanation of the phrase 'a
belted earl,' the meaning of which has always
escaped me."
"I mean those personalities won't do," returned
Gryce, frowning at the table.
"And Mother Biddle and Long Adam, the poacher,
are not personalities," said Fisher, "and
suppose we mustn't ask how Verner made all the
money that enabled him to become--a personality."
Gryce was still looking at him under lowering
brows, but the singular light in his eyes had
brightened. At last he said, in another and much
quieter voice:
"Look here, sir. I like you, if you don't mind my
saying so. I think you are really on the side of the
people and I'm sure you're a brave man. A lot braver
than you know, perhaps. We daren't touch what you
propose with a barge pole; and so far from wanting
you in the old party, we'd rather you ran your own
risk by yourself. But because I like you and respect
your pluck, I'll do you a good turn before we part. I
don't want you to waste time barking up the wrong
tree. You talk about how the new squire got the
money to buy, and the ruin of the old squire, and all
the rest of it. Well, I'll give you a hint about that, a
hint about something precious few people know."
"I am very grateful," said Fisher, gravely. "What is
it?"
"It's in two words," said the other. "The new squire
was quite poor when he bought. The old squire was
quite rich when he sold."
Horne Fisher looked at him thoughtfully as he
turned away abruptly and busied himself with the
papers on his desk. Then Fisher uttered a short
phrase of thanks and farewell, and went out into the
street, still very thoughtful.
His reflection seemed to end in resolution, and,
falling into a more rapid stride, he passed out of the
little town along a road leading toward the gate of
the great park, the country seat of Sir Francis
Verner. A glitter of sunlight made the early winter
more like a late autumn, and the dark woods were
touched here and there with red and golden leaves,
like the last rays of a lost sunset. From a higher part
of the road he had seen the long, classical facade of
the great house with its many windows, almost
immediately beneath him, but when the road ran
down under the wall of the estate, topped with
towering trees behind, he realized that it was half a
mile round to the lodge gates, After walking for a
few minutes along the lane, however, he came to a
place where the wall had cracked and was in
process of repair. As it was, there was a great gap in
the gray masonry that looked at first as black as a
cavern and only showed at a second glance the
twilight of the twinkling trees. There was something
fascinating about that unexpected gate, like the
opening of a fairy tale.
Horne Fisher had in him something of the
aristocrat, which is very near to the anarchist. It was
characteristic of him that he turned into this dark and
irregular entry as casually as into his own front door,
merely thinking that it would be a short cut to the
house. He made his way through the dim wood for
some distance and with some difficulty, until there
began to shine through the trees a level light, in lines
of silver, which he did not at first understand. The
next moment he had come out into the daylight at the top
of a steep bank, at the bottom of which a path ran
round the rim of a large ornamental lake. The sheet
of water which he had seen shimmering through the
trees was of considerable extent, but was walled
in on every side with woods which were not only
dark, but decidedly dismal. At one end of the path
was a classical statue of some nameless nymph, and
at the other end it was flanked by two classical urns;
but the marble was weather-stained and streaked
with green and gray. A hundred other signs, smaller
but more significant, told him that he had come on
some outlying corner of the grounds neglected and
seldom visited. In the middle of the lake was what
appeared to be an island, and on the island what
appeared to be meant for a classical temple, not open
like a temple of the winds, but with a blank wall
between its Doric pillars. We may say it only seemed
like an island, because a second glance revealed a
low causeway of flat stones running up to it from the
shore and turning it into a peninsula. And certainly it
only seemed like a temple, for nobody knew better
than Horne Fisher that no god had ever dwelt in that
shrine.
"That's what makes all this classical landscape
gardening so desolate," he said to himself. "More
desolate than Stonehenge or the Pyramids. We don't
believe in Egyptian mythology, but the Egyptians
did; and I suppose even the Druids believed in
Druidism. But the eighteenth-century gentleman who
built these temples didn't believe in Venus or Mercury
any more than we do; that's why the reflection of
those pale pillars in the lake is truly only the shadow
of a shade. They were men of the age of Reason;
they, who filled their gardens with these stone
nymphs, had less hope than any men in all history of
really meeting a nymph in the forest."
His monologue stopped aruptly with a sharp noise like
a thundercrack that rolled in dreary echoes round the
dismal mere. He knew at once what it was--somebody had fired off
a gun. But as to the meaning of it he was momentarily staggered,
and strange thoughts thronged into his mind. The next moment he
laughed; for he saw lying a little way along the path
below him the dead bird that the shot had brought down.
At the same moment, however, he saw something
else, which interested him more. A ring of dense
trees ran round the back of the island temple,
framing the facade of it in dark foliage, and he could
have sworn he saw a stir as of something moving
among the leaves. The next moment his suspicion
was confirmed, for a rather ragged figure came from
under the shadow of the temple and began to move
along the causeway that led to the bank. Even at that
distance the figure was conspicuous by its great
height and Fisher could see that the man carried a gun under
his arm. There came back into his memory at once
the name Long Adam, the poacher.
With a rapid sense of strategy he sometimes
showed, Fisher sprang from the bank and raced
round the lake to the head of the little pier of stones.
If once a man reached the mainland he could easily
vanish into the woods. But when Fisher began to
advance along the stones toward the island, the man
was cornered in a blind alley and could only back
toward the temple. Putting his broad shoulders
against it, he stood as if at bay; he was a
comparatively young man, with fine lines in his lean
face and figure and a mop of ragged red hair. The
look in his eyes might well have been disquieting to
anyone left alone with him on an island in the middle
of a lake.
"Good morning," said Horne Fisher, pleasantly. "I
thought at first you were a murderer. But it seems
unlikely, somehow, that the partridge rushed between
us and died for love of me, like the heroines in the
romances; so I suppose you are a poacher."
"I suppose you would call me a poacher,"
answered the man; and his voice was something of a
surprise coming from such a scarecrow; it had that
hard fastidiousness to be found in those who have
made a fight for their own refinement among rough
surroundings. "I consider I have a perfect right to
shoot game in this place. But I am well aware that people of your
sort take me for
a thief, and I suppose you will try to land me in jail."
"There are preliminary difficulties," replied Fisher.
"To begin with, the mistake is flattering, but I am not
a gamekeeper. Still less am I three gamekeepers,
who would be, I imagine, about your fighting weight.
But I confess I have another reason for not wanting
to jail you."
"And what is that?" asked the other.
"Only that I quite agree with you," answered
Fisher. "I don't exactly say you have a right to poach,
but I never could see that it was as wrong as being a
thief. It seems to me against the whole normal notion
of property that a man should own something
because it flies across his garden. He might as well
own the wind, or think he could write his name on a
morning cloud. Besides, if we want poor people to
respect property we must give them some property
to respect. You ought to have land of your own; and
I'm going to give you some if I can."
"Going to give me some land!" repeated Long
Adam.
"I apologize for addressing you as if you were a
public meeting," said Fisher, "but I am an entirely
new kind of public man who says the same thing in
public and in private. I've said this to a hundred huge
meetings throughout the country, and I say it to you
on this queer little
island in this dismal pond. I would cut up a big estate
like this into small estates for everybody, even for
poachers. I would do in England as they did in
Ireland--buy the big men out, if possible; get them out,
anyhow. A man like you ought to have a little place
of his own. I don't say you could keep pheasants, but
you might keep chickens."
The man stiffened suddenly and he seemed at
once to blanch and flame at the promise as if it were
a threat.
"Chickens!" he repeated, with a passion of
contempt.
"Why do you object?" asked the placid candidate.
"Because keeping hens is rather a mild amusement
for a poacher? What about poaching eggs?"
"Because I am not a poacher," cried Adam, in a
rending voice that rang round the hollow shrines and
urns like the echoes of his gun. "Because the
partridge lying dead over there is my partridge.
Because the land you are standing on is my land.
Because my own land was only taken from me by a
crime, and a worse crime than poaching. This has
been a single estate for hundreds and hundreds of
years, and if you or any meddlesome mountebank
comes here and talks of cutting it up like a cake, if I
ever hear a word more of you and your leveling lies--"
"You seem to be a rather turbulent public,"
observed Horne Fisher, "but do go on. What will
happen if I try to divide this estate decently among
decent people?"
The poacher had recovered a grim composure as
he replied. "There will be no partridge to rush in
between."
With that he turned his back, evidently resolved to
say no more, and walked past the temple to the
extreme end of the islet, where he stood staring into
the water. Fisher followed him, but, when his
repeated questions evoked no answer, turned back
toward the shore. In doing so he took a second and
closer look at the artificial temple, and noted some
curious things about it. Most of these theatrical things
were as thin as theatrical scenery, and he expected
the classic shrine to be a shallow thing, a mere shell
or mask. But there was some substantial bulk of it
behind, buried in the trees, which had a gray,
labyrinthian look, like serpents of stone, and lifted a
load of leafy towers to the sky. But what arrested
Fisher's eye was that in this bulk of gray-white stone
behind there was a single door with great, rusty bolts
outside; the bolts, however, were not shot across so
as to secure it. Then he walked round the small
building, and found no other opening except one small
grating like a ventilator, high up in the wall. He
retraced his steps thoughtfully along the causeway to
the banks of the lake, and sat
down on the stone steps between the two sculptured
funeral urns. Then he lit a cigarette and smoked it in
ruminant manner; eventually he took out a notebook
and wrote down various phrases, numbering and
renumbering them till they stood in the following
order: "(1) Squire Hawker disliked his first wife. (2)
He married his second wife for her money. (3) Long
Adam says the estate is really his. (4) Long Adam
hangs round the island temple, which looks like a
prison. (5) Squire Hawker was not poor when he
gave up the estate. (6) Verner was poor when he got
the estate."
He gazed at these notes with a gravity which
gradually turned to a hard smile, threw away
his cigarette, and resumed his search for a short
cut to the great house. He soon picked up the
path which, winding among clipped hedges and
flower beds, brought him in front of its long
Palladian facade. It had the usual appearance
of being, not a private house, but a sort of public
building sent into exile in the provinces.
He first found himself in the presence of the
butler, who really looked much older than the
building, for the architecture was dated as Georgian;
but the man's face, under a highly unnatural brown
wig, was wrinkled with what might have been
centuries. Only his prominent eyes were alive and
alert, as if with protest. Fisher glanced at him, and
then stopped and said:
"Excuse me. Weren't you with the late squire, Mr.
Hawker?"
'Yes, sir, said the man, gravely. "Usher is my name. What can I
do for you?"
"Only take me into Sir Francis Verner," replied the
visitor.
Sir Francis Verner was sitting in an easy chair beside
a small table in a large room hung with tapestries. On
the table were a small flask and
glass, with the green glimmer of a liqueur and a
cup of black coffee. He was clad in a quiet gray
suit with a moderately harmonious purple tie;
but Fisher saw something about the turn of his
fair mustache and the lie of his flat hair--it suddenly
revealed that his name was Franz Werner.
"You are Mr. Horne Fisher," he said. "Won't you
sit down?"
"No, thank you," replied Fisher. "I fear this is not a
friendly occasion, and I shall remain standing.
Possibly you know that I am already standing--
standing for Parliament, in fact--"
"I am aware we are political opponents," replied
Verner, raising his eyebrows. "But I think it would
be better if we fought in a sporting spirit; in a spirit
of English fair play."
"Much better," assented Fisher. "It would
be much better if you were English and very
much better if you had ever played fair. But
what I've come to say can be said very shortly.
I don't quite know how we stand with the law about
that old Hawker story, but my chief object is to
prevent England being entirely ruled by people like
you. So whatever the law would say, I will say no
more if you will retire from the election at once."
"You are evidently a lunatic," said Verner.
"My psychology may be a little abnormal," replied
Horne Fisher, in a rather hazy manner. "I am subject
to dreams, especially day-dreams. Sometimes what is
happening to me grows vivid in a curious double way,
as if it had happened before. Have you ever had that
mystical feeling that things have happened before?"
"I hope you are a harmless lunatic," said Verner.
But Fisher was still staring in an absent fashion at
the golden gigantic figures and traceries of brown and
red in the tapestries on the walls; then he looked
again at Verner and resumed: "I have a feeling that
this interview has happened before, here in this
tapestried room, and we are two ghosts revisiting a
haunted chamber. But it was Squire Hawker who sat
where you sit and it was you who stood where I
stand." He paused a moment and then added, with
simplicity, "I suppose I am a blackmailer, too."
"If you are," said Sir Francis, "I promise you you
shall go to jail." But his face had a shade on it that
looked like the reflection of the green wine gleaming
on the table. Horne Fisher regarded him steadily and
answered, quietly enough:
"Blackmailers do not always go to jail. Sometimes
they go to Parliament. But, though Parliament is
rotten enough already, you shall not go there if I can
help it. I am not so criminal as you were in bargaining
with crime. You made a squire give up his country
seat. I only ask you to give up your Parliamentary
seat."
Sir Francis Verner sprang to his feet and looked
about for one of the bell ropes of the old-fashioned,
curtained room.
"Where is Usher?" he cried, with a livid face.
"And who is Usher?" said Fisher, softly. "I
wonder how much Usher knows of the truth."
Verner's hand fell from the bell rope and,
after standing for a moment with rolling eyes,
he strode abruptly from the room. Fisher went
but by the other door, by which he had entered,
and, seeing no sign of Usher, let himself out and
betook himself again toward the town.
That night he put an electric torch in his pocket
and set out alone in the darkness to add the last links
to his argument. There was much that he did not
know yet; but he thought he knew where he could
find the knowledge. The night closed dark and stormy
and the black gap in the wall looked blacker than
ever; the wood seemed to have grown thicker and
darker in a
day. If the deserted lake with its black woods and
gray urns and images looked desolate even by
daylight, under the night and the growing storm it
seemed still more kke the pool of Acheron in the land
of lost souls. As he stepped carefully along the jetty
stones he seemed to be traveling farther and farther
into the abyss of night, and to have left behind him the
last points from which it would be possible to signal to
the land of the living. The lake seemed to have grown
larger than a sea, but a sea of black and slimy waters
that slept with abominable serenity, as if they had
washed out the world. There was so much of this
nightmare sense of extension and expansion that he
was strangely surprised to come to his desert island
so soon. But he knew it for a place of inhuman
silence and solitude; and he felt as if he had been
walking for years.
Nerving himself to a more normal mood, he paused
under one of the dark dragon trees that branched out
above him, and, taking out his torch, turned in the
direction of the door at the back of the temple. It was
unbolted as before, and the thought stirred faintly in
him that it was slightly open, though only by a crack.
The more he thought of it, however, the more certain
he grew that this was but one of the common illusions
of light coming from a different angle.He studied in a
more scientific spirit the details of the door, with its
rusty bolts and hinges, when he became conscious of
something very near him--indeed, nearly above his
head. Something was dangling from the tree that was
not a broken branch. For some seconds he stood as
still as a stone, and as cold. What he saw above him
were the legs of a man hanging, presumably a dead
man hanged. But the next moment he knew better.
The man was literally alive and kicking; and an instant
after he had dropped to the ground and turned on the
intruder. Simultaneously three or four other trees
seemed to come to life in the same fashion. Five or
six other figures had fallen on their feet from these
unnatural nests. It was as if the place were an island
of monkeys. But a moment after they had made a
stampede toward him, and when they laid their hands
on him he knew that they were men.
With the electric torch in his hand he struck the
foremost of them so furiously in the face that the
man stumbled and rolled over on the slimy grass; but
the torch was broken and extinguished, leaving
everything in a denser obscurity. He flung another
man flat against the temple wall, so that he slid to the
ground; but a third and fourth carried Fisher off his
feet and began to bear him, struggling, toward the
doorway. Even in the bewilderment of the battle he
was conscious that the door was standing
open. Somebody was summoning the roughs from inside.
The moment they were within they hurled him
upon a sort of bench or bed with violence, but no
damage; for the settee, or whatever it was, seemed
to be comfortably cushioned for his reception. Their
violence had in it a great element of haste, and before
he could rise they had all rushed for the door to
escape. Whatever bandits they were that infested this
desert island, they were obviously uneasy about their
job and very anxious to be quit of it. He had the flying
fancy that regular criminals would hardly be in such a
panic. The next moment the great door crashed to
and he could hear the bolts shriek as they shot into
their place, and the feet of the retreating men
scampering and stumbling along the causeway. But
rapidly as it happened, it did not happen before Fisher
had done something that he wanted to to. Unable to
rise from his sprawling attitude in that flash of time,
he had shot out one of his long legs and hooked it
round the ankle of the last man disappearing through
the door. The man swayed and toppled over inside
the prison chamber, and the door closed between him
and his fleeing companions. Clearly they were in too
much haste to realize that they had left one of their
company behind.
The man sprang to his feet again and hammered
and kicked furiously at the door. Fisher's
sense of humor began to recover from the
struggle and he sat up on his sofa with
something of his native nonchalance. But as he
listened to the captive captor beating on the door
of the prison, a new and curious reflection came to him.
The natural course for a man thus wishing to
attract his friends' attention would be to call out, to
shout as well as kick. This man was making as much
noise as he could with his feet and hands, but not a
sound came from his throat. Why couldn't he speak?
At first he thought the man might be gagged, which
was manifestly absurd. Then his fancy fell back on
the ugly idea that the man was dumb. He hardly knew
why it was so ugly an idea, but it affected his
imagination in a dark and disproportionate fashion.
There seemed to be something creepy about the idea
of being left in a dark room with a deaf mute. It was
almost as if such a defect were a deformity. It was
almost as if it went with other and worse deformities.
It was as if the shape he could not trace in the
darkness were some shape that should not see the sun.
Then he had a flash of sanity and also of insight.
The explanation was very simple, but rather
interesting. Obviously the man did not use his voice
because he did not wish his voice to be recognized.
He hoped to escape from that dark place before
Fisher found out who he was. And who was he? One thing at least
was clear. He was one or other of the four or five men
with whom Fisher had already talked in these parts,
and in the development of that strange story.
"Now I wonder who you are," he said, aloud,
with all his old lazy urbanity. "I suppose it's
no use trying to throttle you in order to find out;
it would be displeasing to pass the night with a
corpse. Besides I might be the corpse. I've
got no matches and I've smashed my torch, so
I can only speculate. Who could you be, now?
Let us think."
The man thus genially addressed had desisted
from drumming on the door and retreated sullenly
into a corner as Fisher continued to address him in a
flowing monologue.
"Probably you are the poacher who says he isn't a
poacher. He says he's a landed proprietor; but he will
permit me to inform him that, whatever he is, he's a
fool. What hope can there ever be of a free
peasantry in England if the peasants themselves are
such snobs as to want to be gentlemen? How can we
make a democracy with no democrats? As it is, you
want to be a landlord and so you consent to be a
criminal. And in that, you know, you are rather like
somebody else. And, now I think of it, perhaps you
are somebody else."
There was a silence broken by breathing from
the corner and the murmur of the rising storm, that
came in through the small grating above the man's
head. Horne Fisher continued:
"Are you only a servant, perhaps, that rather
sinister old servant who was butler to Hawker and
Verner? If so, you are certainly the only link between
the two periods. But if so, why do you degrade
yourself to serve this dirty foreigner, when you at
least saw the last of a genuine national gentry?
People like you are generally at least patriotic.
Doesn't England mean anything to you, Mr. Usher?
All of which eloquence is possibly wasted, as perhaps
you are not Mr. Usher.
"More likely you are Verner himself; and it's no
good wasting eloquence to make you ashamed of
yourself. Nor is it any good to curse you for
corrupting England; nor are you the right person to
curse. It is the English who deserve to be cursed, and
are cursed, because they allowed such vermin to
crawl into the high places of their heroes and their
kings. I won't dwell on the idea that you're Verner, or
the throttling might begin, after all. Is there anyone
else you could be? Surely you're not some servant of
the other rival organization. I can't believe you're
Gryce, the agent; and yet Gryce had a spark of the
fanatic in his eye, too; and men will do extraordinary
things in these paltry feuds of politics. Or if not the
servant, is it the . . . No, I can't believe it . . . not the red
blood of manhood and liberty . . . not the democratic ideal . .
."
He sprang up in excitement, and at the same
moment a growl of thunder came through the grating
beyond. The storm had broken, and with it a new
light broke on his mind. There was something else
that might happen in a moment.
"Do you know what that means?" he cried. "It
means that God himself may hold a candle to show
me your infernal face."
Then next moment came a crash of thunder; but
before the thunder a white light had filled the whole
room for a single split second.
Fisher had seen two things in front of him. One
was the black-and-white pattern of the iron grating
against the sky; the other was the face in the corner.
It was the face of his brother.
Nothing came from Horne Fisher's lips except a
Christian name, which was followed by a silence
more dreadful than the dark. At last the other figure
stirred and sprang up, and the voice of Harry Fisher
was heard for the first time in that horrible room.
"You've seen me, I suppose," he said, "and we
may as well have a light now. You could have turned
it on at any time, if you'd found the switch."
He pressed a button in the wall and all the details
of that room sprang into something stronger than
daylight. Indeed, the details were so unexpected
that for a moment they turned the captive's
rocking mind from the last personal
revelation. The room, so far from being a
dungeon cell, was more like a drawing-room,
even a lady's drawing-room, except for some boxes of
cigars and bottles of wine that were stacked with
books and magazines on a side
table. A second glance showed him that the
more masculine fittings were quite recent, and
that the more feminine background was quite
old. His eye caught a strip of faded tapestry,
which startled him into speech, to the momentary oblivion of
bigger matters.
"This place was furnished from the great house,"
he said.
"Yes," replied the other, "and I think you
know why."
"I think I do," said Horne Fisher, "and before I go
on to more extraordinary things I will, say what I
think. Squire Hawker played both the bigamist and the bandit. His
first wife was not dead when he married the Jewess; she was
imprisoned on this island. She bore him a child here,
who now haunts his birthplace under the name of
Long Adam. A bankruptcy company promoter
named Werner discovered the secret and
blackmailed the squire into surrendering the estate.
That's all quite clear and very easy.
And now let me go on to something more difficult.
And that is for you to explain what the devil you are
doing kidnaping your born brother.
After a pause Henry Fisher answered:
"I suppose you didn't expect to see me," he said.
"But, after all, what could you expect?"'
"I'm afraid I don't follow," said Horne Fisher.
"I mean what else could you expect, after making
such a muck of it?" said his brother, sulkily. "We all
thought you were so clever. How could we know you
were going to be--well, really, such a rotten failure?"
"This is rather curious," said the candidate,
frowning. "Without vanity, I was not under the
impression that my candidature was a failure. All the
big meetings were successful and crowds of people
have promised me votes."
"I should jolly well think they had," said' Henry,
grimly. "You've made a landslide with your
confounded acres and a cow, and Verner can hardly
get a vote anywhere. Oh, it's too rotten for anything!"
"What on earth do you mean?"
"Why, you lunatic," cried Henry, in tones of ringing
sincerity, "you don't suppose you were meant to WIN
the seat, did you? Oh, it's too childish! I tell you
Verner's got to get in. Of course he's got to get in.
He's to have the Exchequer next session, and there's
the Egyptian loan and Lord knows what else. We
only wanted you to split the Reform vote because
accidents might happen after Hughes had made a
score at Barkington."
"I see," said Fisher, "and you, I think, are a pillar
and ornament of the Reform party. As you say, I am
not clever."
The appeal to party loyalty fell on deaf ears; for
the pillar of Reform was brooding on other things. At
last he said, in a more troubled voice:
"I didn't want you to catch me; I knew it would be
a shock. But I tell you what, you never would have
caught me if I hadn't come here myself, to see they
didn't ill treat you and to make sure everything was
as comfortable as it could be." There was even a sort
of break in his voice as he added, "I got those cigars
because I knew you liked them."
Emotions are queer things, and the idiocy of this
concession suddenly softened Horne Fisher like an
unfathomable pathos.
"Never mind, old chap," he said; "we'll say no more
about it. I'll admit that you're really as kind-hearted
and affectionate a scoundrel and hypocrite as ever
sold himself to ruin his country. There, I can't say
handsomer than that. Thank you for the cigars, old
man. I'll have one if you don't mind."
By the time that Horne Fisher had ended his
telling of this story to Harold March they had come
out into one of the public parks and taken a seat on a
rise of ground overlooking wide green spaces under
a blue and empty sky; and there was something
incongruous in the words with which the narration
ended.
"I have been in that room ever since," said Horne
Fisher. "I am in it now. I won the election, but I
never went to the House. My life has been a life in
that little room on that lonely island. Plenty of books
and cigars and luxuries, plenty of knowledge and
interest and information, but never a voice out of that
tomb to reach the world outside. I shall probably die
there." And he smiled as he looked across the vast
green park to the gray horizon.
VIII. THE VENGEANCE OF THE STATUE
It was on the sunny veranda of a seaside hotel,
overlooking a pattern of flower beds and a strip of
blue sea, that Horne Fisher and Harold March had
their final explanation, which might be called an
explosion.
Harold March had come to the little table and sat
down at it with a subdued excitement smoldering in his
somewhat cloudy and dreamy blue eyes. In the
newspapers which he tossed from him on to the table
there was enough to explain some if not all of his
emotion. Public affairs in every department had
reached a crisis. The government which had stood so
long that men were used to it, as they are used to a
hereditary despotism, had begun to be accused Of
blunders and even of financial abuses. Some said that
the experiment of attempting to establish a peasantry
in the west of England, on the lines of an early fancy
of Horne Fisher's, had resulted in nothing but
dangerous quarrels with more industrial neighbors.
There had been particular complaints of the ill
treatment of harmless foreigners, chiefly Asiatics, who
happened to be employed in the new scientific works
constructed on the coast. Indeed, the new Power
which had arisen in Siberia, backed by Japan and
other powerful allies, was inclined to take the matter
up in the interests of its exiled subjects; and there had
been wild talk about ambassadors and ultimatums.
But something much more serious, in its personal
interest for March himself, seemed to fill his meeting
with his friend with a mixture of embarrassment and
indignation.
Perhaps it increased his annoyance that there
was a certain unusual liveliness about the usually
languid figure of Fisher. The ordinary image
of him in March's mind was that of a pallid and
bald-browed gentleman, who seemed to be
prematurely old as well as prematurely bald. He
was remembered as a man who expressed the
opinions of a pessimist in the language of a
lounger. Even now March could not be certain
whether the change was merely a sort of masquerade
of sunshine, or that effect of clear colors
and clean-cut outlines that is always visible on the
parade of a marine resort, relieved against the
blue dado of the sea. But Fisher had a flower
in his buttonhole, and his friend could have
sworn he carried his cane with something almost
like the swagger of a fighter. With such clouds
gathering over England, the pessimist seemed
to be the only man who carried his own sunshine.
"Look here," said Harold March, abruptly, "you've
been no end of a friend to me, and I never was so
proud of a friendship before; but there's something I
must get off my chest. The more I found out, the less
I understood how y ou could stand it. And I tell you
I'm going to stand it no longer."
Horne Fisher gazed across at him gravely and
attentively, but rather as if he were a long way off.
"You know I always liked you," said Fisher, quietly,
"but I also respect you, which is not always the same
thing. You may possibly guess that I like a good many
people I don't respect. Perhaps it is my tragedy,
perhaps it is my fault. But you are very different, and
I promise you this: that I will never try to keep you as
somebody to be liked, at the price of your not being
respected."
"I know you are magnanimous," said March after a
silence, "and yet you tolerate and perpetuate
everything that is mean." Then after another silence
he added: "Do you remember when we first met,
when you were fishing in that brook in the affair of
the target? And do you remember you said that, after
all, it might do no harm if I could blow the whole
tangle of this society to hell with dynamite."
"Yes, and what of that?" asked Fisher.
"Only that I'm going to blow it to hell with
dynamite," said Harold March, "and I think it right to
give you fair warning. For a long time I didn't believe
things were as bad as you said they were. But I
never felt as if I could have bottled up what you
knew, supposing you really knew it. Well, the long
and the short of it is that I've got a conscience; and
now, at last, I've also got a chance. I've been put in
charge of a big independent paper, with a free hand,
and we're going to open a cannonade on corruption."
"That will be--Attwood, I suppose," said Fisher,
reflectively. "Timber merchant. Knows a lot about
China."
"He knows a lot about England," said March,
doggedly, "and now I know it, too, we're not going to
hush it up any longer. The people of this country have
a right to know how they're ruled--or, rather, ruined.
The Chancellor is in the pocket of the money lenders
and has to do as he is told; otherwise he's bankrupt,
and a bad sort of bankruptcy, too, with nothing but
cards and actresses behind it. The Prime Minister
was in the petrol-contract business; and deep in it,
too. The Foreign Minister is a wreck of drink and
drugs. When you say that plainly about a man who
may send thousands of Englishmen to die for nothing,
you're called personal. If a poor engine driver gets
drunk and sends thirty or forty people to death,
nobody complains of the exposure being personal.
The engine driver is not a person."
"I quite agree with you," said Fisher, calmly. "You
are perfectly right."
"If you agree with us,, why the devil don't you act
with us?" demanded his friend. "If you think it's right,
why don't you do what's right? It's awful to think of a
man of your abilities simply blocking the road to
reform."
"We have often talked about that," replied Fisher,
with the same composure. "The Prime Minister is my
father's friend. The Foreign Minister married my
sister. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is my first
cousin. I mention the genealogy in some detail just
now for a particular reason. The truth is I have a
curious kind of cheerfulness at the moment. It isn't
altogether the sun and the sea, sir. I am enjoying an
emotion that is entirely new to me; a happy sensation
I never remember having had before."
"What the devil do you mean?"
"I am feeling proud of my family," said Horne Fisher.
Harold March stared at him with round blue eyes,
and seemed too much mystified even to ask a
question. Fisher leaned back in his chair in his lazy
fashion, and smiled as he continued.
"Look here, my dear fellow. Let me ask a question
in turn. You imply that I have always
known these things about my unfortunate kinsmen.
So I have. Do you suppose that Attwood hasn't
always known them? Do you suppose he hasn't
always known you as an honest man who would say
these things when he got a chance? Why does
Attwood unmuzzle you like a dog at this moment,
after all these years? I know why he does; I know a
good many things, far too many things. And
therefore, as I have the honor to remark, I am proud
of my family at last."
"But why?" repeated March, rather feebly.
"I am proud of the Chancellor because he gambled
and the Foreign Minister because he drank and the
Prime Minister because he took a commission on a
contract," said Fisher, firmly. "I am proud of them
because they did these things, and can be denounced
for them, and know they can be denounced for them,
and are STANDING FIRM FOR ALL THAT. I take off my
hat to them because they are defying blackmail, and
refusing to smash their country to save themselves. I
salute them as if they were going to die on the
battlefield."
After a pause he continued: "And it will be a
battlefield, too, and not a metaphorical one. We have
yielded to foreign financiers so long that now it is war
or ruin, Even the people, even the country people, are
beginning to suspect that they are being ruined. That
is the meaning of the regrettable, incidents in the
newspapers."
"The meaning of the outrages on Orientals?" asked March.
"The meaning of the outrages on Orientals,"
replied Fisher, "is that the financiers have introduced
Chinese labor into this country with the deliberate
intention of reducing workmen and peasants to
starvation. Our unhappy politicians have made
concession after concession; and now they are
asking concessions which amount to our ordering a
massacre of our own poor. If we do not fight now
we shall never fight again. They will have put
England in an economic position of starving in a
week. But we are going to fight now; I shouldn't
wonder if there were an ultimatum in a week and
an.invasion in a fortnight. All the past corruption
and cowardice is hampering us, of course; the West
country is pretty stormy and doubtful even
in a military sense; and the Irish regiments there,
that are supposed to support us by the new
treaty, are pretty well in mutiny; for, of course,
this infernal coolie capitalism is being pushed
in Ireland, too. But it's to stop now; and if the
government message of reassurance gets through
to them in time, they may turn up after all by
the time the enemy lands. For my poor old
gang is going to stand to its guns at last. Of
course it's only natural that when they have been
whitewashed for half a century as paragons, their
sins should come back on them at the very moment
when they are behaving like men for the first time in
their lives. Well, I tell you, March, I know them inside
out; and I know they are behaving like heroes. Every
man of them ought to have a statue, and on the
pedestal words like those of the noblest ruffian of the
Revolution: 'Que mon nom soit fletri; que la France
soit libre.'"
"Good God!" cried March, "shall we never get to
the bottom of your mines and countermines?"
After a silence Fisher answered in a lower voice,
looking his friend in the eyes.
"Did you think there was nothing but evil at the
bottom of them?" he asked, gently. "Did you think I
had found nothing but filth in the deep seas into which
fate has thrown me? Believe me, you never know the
best about men till you know the worst about them. It
does not dispose of their strange human souls to
know that they were exhibited to the world as
impossibly impeccable wax works, who never looked
after a woman or knew the meaning of a bribe. Even
in a palace, life can be lived well; and even in a
Parliament, life can be lived with occasional efforts to
live it well. I tell you it is as true of these rich fools
and rascals as it is true of every poor footpad and
pickpocket; that only God knows how good they have
tried to be. God alone knows what the conscience
can survive, or how a man who has lost his honor will
still try to save his soul."
There was another silence, and March sat staring
at the table and Fisher at the sea. Then Fisher
suddenly sprang to his feet and caught up his hat and
stick with all his new alertness and even pugnacity.
"Look here, old fellow," he cried, "let us
make a bargain. Before you open your campaign for
Attwood come down and stay with us
for one week, to hear what we're really doing.
I mean with the Faithful Few, formerly known
as the Old Gang, occasionally to be described as
the Low Lot. There are really only five of us
that are quite fixed, and organizing the national
defense; and we're living like a garrison in a
sort of broken-down hotel in Kent. Come and
see what we're really doing and what there is to
be done, and do us justice. And after that, with
unalterable love and affection for you, publish
and be damned."
Thus it came about that in the last week before
war, when events moved most rapidly, Harold March
found himself one of a sort of small house party of
the people he was proposing to denounce. They were
living simply enough, for people with their tastes, in
an old brown-brick inn faced with ivy and
surrounded by rather dismal gardens. At the back of the building
the garden ran up very steeply to a road along the
ridge above; and a zigzag path scaled the slope in
sharp angles, turning to and fro amid evergreens so
somber that they might rather be called everblack.
Here and there up the slope were statues having all
the cold monstrosity of such minor ornaments of the
eighteenth century; and a whole row of them ran as
on a terrace along the last bank at the bottom,
opposite the back door. This detail fixed itself first in
March's mind merely because it figured in the first
conversation he had with one of the cabinet
ministers.
The cabinet ministers were rather older than he
had expected to find them. The Prime Minister no
longer looked like a boy, though he still looked a little
like a baby. But it was one of those old and
venerable babies, and the baby had soft gray hair.
Everything about him was soft, to his speech and his
way of walking; but over and above that his chief
function seemed to be sleep. People left alone with
him got so used to his eyes being closed that they
were almost startled when they realized in the
stillness that the eyes were wide open, and even
watching. One thing at least would always make the
old gentleman open his eyes. The one thing he really
cared for in this world was his hobby of armored
weapons, especially Eastern weapons, and he
would talk for hours about Damascus blades and
Arab swordmanship. Lord James Herries, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a short, dark,
sturdy man with a very sallow face and a very sullen
manner, which contrasted with the gorgeous flower
in his buttonhole and his festive trick of being always
slightly overdressed. It was something of a
euphemism to call him a well-known man about
town. There was perhaps more mystery in the
question of how a man who lived for pleasure
seemed to get so little pleasure out of it. Sir David
Archer, the Foreign Secretary, was the only one of
them who was a self-made man, and the only one of
them who looked like an aristocrat. He was tall and
thin and very handsome, with a grizzled beard; his
gray hair was very curly, and even rose in front in
two rebellious ringlets that seemed to the fanciful to
tremble like the antennae of some giant insect, or to
stir sympathetically with the restless tufted eyebrows
over his rather haggard eyes. For the Foreign
Secretary made no secret of his somewhat nervous
condition, whatever might be the cause of it.
"Do you know that mood when one could scream
because a mat is crooked?" he said to March, as they
walked up and down in the back garden below the
line of dingy statues. "Women get into it when they've
worked too hard; and I've been working pretty hard
lately, of course. It drives me mad when Herries will wear his
hat a little crooked--habit of looking like a gay dog.
Sometime I swear I'll knock it off. That statue of
Britannia over there isn't quite straight; it sticks
forward a bit as if the lady were going to topple over.
The damned thing is that it doesn't topple over and be
done with it. See, it's clamped with an iron prop.
Don't be surprised if I get up in the middle of the
night to hike it down."
They paced the path for a few moments in silence
and then he continued. "It's odd those little things
seem specially big when there are bigger things to
worry about. We'd better go in and do some work."
Horne Fisher evidently allowed for all the neurotic
possibilities of Archer and the dissipated habits of
Herries; and whatever his faith in their present
firmness, did not unduly tax their time and attention,
even in the case of the Prime Minister. He had got
the consent of the latter finally to the committing of
the important documents, with the orders to the
Western armies, to the care of a less conspicuous
and more solid person--an uncle of his named Horne
Hewitt, a rather colorless country squire who had
been a good soldier, and was the military adviser of
the committee. He was charged with expediting the
government pledge, along with the concerted military
plans, to the half-mutinous command in the west;
and the still more urgent task of seeing that it did not
fall into the hands of the enemy, who might appear at
any moment from the east. Over and above this
military official, the only other person present was a
police official, a certain Doctor Prince, originally a
police surgeon and now a distinguished detective,
sent to be a bodyguard to the group. He was a
square-faced man with big spectacles and a grimace
that expressed the intention of keeping his mouth
shut. Nobody else shared their captivity except the
hotel proprietor, a crusty Kentish man with a crab-apple face,
one or two of his servants, and another
servant privately attached to Lord James Herries. He
was a young Scotchman named Campbell, who
looked much more distinguished than his bilious-looking master,
having chestnut hair and a long saturnine face with large but
fine features. He was probably the one really efficient person in
the house.
After about four days of the informal council,
March had come to feel a sort of grotesque sublimity
about these dubious figures, defiant in the twilight of
danger, as if they were hunchbacks and cripples left
alone to defend a town. All were working hard; and
he himself looked up from writing a page of
memoranda in a private room to see Horne Fisher
standing in the doorway, accoutered as if for travel.
He fancied that Fisher looked a little pale; and after
a moment that gentleman shut the door behind him
and said, quietly:
"Well, the worst has happened. Or nearly the
worst."
"The enemy has landed," cried March, and sprang
erect out of his chair.
"Oh, I knew the enemy would land," said Fisher,
with composure. "Yes, he's landed; but that's not the
worst that could happen. The worst is that there's a
leak of some sort, even from this fortress of ours. It's
been a bit of a shock to me, I can tell you; though I
suppose it's illogical. After all, I was full of
admiration at finding three honest men in politics. I
ought not to be full of astonishment if I find only
two."
He ruminated a moment and then said, in such a
fashion that March could hardly tell if he were
changing the subject or no:
"It's hard at first to believe that a fellow like
Herries, who had pickled himself in vice like vinegar,
can have any scruple left. But about that I've noticed
a curious thing. Patriotism is not the first virtue.
Patriotism rots into Prussianism when you pretend it
is the first virtue. But patriotism is sometimes the last
virtue. A man will swindle or seduce who will not sell
his country. But who knows?"
"But what is to be done?" cried March,
indignantly.
"My uncle has the papers safe enough," replied
Fisher, "and is sending them
west to-night; but somebody is trying to get at
them from out. side, I fear with the assistance of
somebody in. side. All I can do at present is to try to
head off the man outside; and I must get away now
and do it. I shall be back in about twenty-four hours.
While I'm away I want you to keep an eye on these
people and find out what you can. Au revoir." He
vanished down the stairs; and from the window March
could see him mount a motor cycle and trail away
toward the neighboring town.
On the following morning, March was sitting in the
window seat of the old inn parlor, which was oak-paneled and
ordinarily rather dark; but on that
occasion it was full of the white light of a curiously
clear morning--the moon had shone brilliantly for the
last two or three nights. He was himself somewhat in
shadow in the corner of the window seat; and Lord
James Herries, coming in hastily from the garden
behind, did not see him. Lord James clutched the
back of a chair, as if to steady himself, and, sitting
down abruptly at the table, littered with the last meal,
poured himself out a tumbler of brandy and drank it.
He sat with his back to March, but his yellow face
appeared in a round mirror beyon and the tinge of it
was like that of some horrible malady. As March
moved he started violently and faced round.
"My God!" he cried, "have you seen what's outside?"
"Outside?" repeated the other, glancing over his
shoulder at the garden.
"Oh, go and look for yourself," cried Herries in a
sort of fury. "Hewitt's murdered and his papers
stolen, that's all."
He turned his back again and sat down with a
thud; his square shoulders were shaking. Harold
March darted out of the doorway into the back
garden with its steep slope of statues.
The first thing he saw was Doctor Prince, the
detective, peering through his spectacles at
something on the ground; the second was the thing
he was peering at. Even after the sensational news
he had heard inside, the sight was something of a
sensation.
The monstrous stone image of Britannia was lying
prone and face downward on the garden path; and
there stuck out at random from underneath it, like the
legs of a smashed fly, an arm clad in a white shirt
sleeve and a leg clad in a khaki trouser, and hair of
the unmistakable sandy gray that belonged to Horne
Fisher's unfortunate uncle. There were pools of blood
and the limbs were quite stiff in death.
"Couldn't this have been an accident?" said
March, finding words at last.
"Look for yourself, I say," repeated the harsh
voice of Herries, who had followed him with restless
movements out of the door. "The papers are gone, I
tell you. The fellow tore the coat off the corpse and
cut the papers out of the inner pocket. There's the
coat over there on the bank, with the great slash in
it."
"But wait a minute," said the detective, Prince,
quietly. "In that case there seems to be something of a
mystery. A murderer might somehow have managed
to throw the statue down on him, as he seems to have
done. But I bet he couldn't easily have lifted it up
again. I've tried; and I'm sure it would want three men
at least. Yet we must suppose, on that theory, that the
murderer first knocked him down as he walked past,
using the statue as a stone club, then lifted it up again,
took him out and deprived him of his coat, then put
him back again in the posture of death and neatly
replaced the statue. I tell you it's physically
impossible. And how else could he have unclothed a
man covered with that stone monument? It's worse
than the conjurer's trick, when a man shuffles a coat
off with his wrists tied."
"Could he have thrown down the statue after he'd
stripped the corpse?" asked March.
"And why?" asked Prince, sharply. "If he'd killed
his man and got his papers, he'd be away like the
wind. He wouldn't potter about in a garden
excavating the pedestals of statues. Besides--Hullo,
who's that up there?"
High on the ridge above them, drawn in dark thin
lines against the sky, was a figure looking so long and
lean as to be almost spidery. The dark silhouette of
the head showed two small tufts like horns; and they
could almost have sworn that the horns moved.
"Archer!" shouted Herries, with sudden passion,
and called to him with curses to come down. The
figure drew back at the first cry, with an agitated
movement so abrupt as almost to be called an antic.
The next moment the man seemed to reconsider and
collect himself, and began to come down the zigzag
garden path, but with obvious reluctance, his feet
falling in slower and slower rhythm. Through March's
mind were throbbing the phrases that this man himself
had used, about going mad in the middle of the night
and wrecking the stone figure. just so, he could fancy,
the maniac who had done such a thing might climb
the crest of the hill, in that feverish dancing fashion,
and look down on the wreck he had made. But the
wreck he had made here was not only a wreck of
stone.
When the man emerged at last on to the garden
path, with the full light on his face and figure, he was
walking slowly indeed, but easily, and with no
appearance of fear.
"This is a terrible thing," he said. "I saw it from
above; I was taking a stroll along the ridge."
"Do you mean that you saw the murder?"
demanded March, "or the accident? I mean did you
see the statue fall?"
"No," said Archer, "I mean I saw the statue fallen."
Prince seemed to be paying but little attention; his
eye was riveted on an object lying on the path a yard
or two from the corpse. It seemed to be a rusty iron
bar bent crooked at one end.
"One thing I don't understand,' he said, "is all this
blood. The poor fellow's skull isn't smashed; most
likely his neck is broken; but blood seems to have
spouted as if all his arteries were severed. I was
wondering if some other instrument . . . that iron
thing, for instance; but I don't see that even that is
sharp enough. I suppose nobody knows what it is."
"I know what it is," said Archer in his deep but
somewhat shaky voice. "I've seen it in my
nightmares. It was the iron clamp or prop on the
pedestal, stuck on to keep the wretched image
upright when it began to wabble, I suppose. Anyhow,
it was always stuck in the stonework there; and I
suppose it came out when the thing collapsed."
Doctor Prince nodded, but he continued to look
down at the pools of blood and the bar of iron.
"I'm certain there's something more
underneath all this," he said at last. "Perhaps
something more underneath the statue. I have a huge
sort of hunch that there is. We are four men now
and between us we can lift that great tombstone
there."
They all bent their strength to the business; there
was a silence save for heavy breathing; and then,
after an instant of the tottering and staggering of eight
legs, the great carven column of rock was rolled
away, and the body lying in its shirt and trousers was
fully revealed. The spectacles of Doctor Prince
seemed almost to enlarge with a restrained radiance
like great eyes; for other things were revealed also.
One was that the unfortunate Hewitt had a deep gash
across the jugular, which the triumphant doctor
instantly identified as having been made with a sharp
steel edge like a razor. The other was that
immediately under the bank lay littered three shining
scraps of steel, each nearly a foot long, one pointed
and another fitted into a gorgeously jeweled hilt or
handle. It was evidently a sort of long Oriental knife,
long enough to be called a sword, but with a curious
wavy edge; and there was a touch or two of blood on
the point.
"I should have expected more blood, hardly on the
point," observed Doctor Prince, thoughtfully, "but this
is certainly the instrument. The slash was certainly
made with a weapon shaped like this, and probably
the slashing of the pocket as well. I suppose the
brute threw in the statue, by way of giving him a
public funeral."
March did not answer; he was mesmerized by the
strange stones that glittered on the strange sword hilt;
and their possible significance was broadening upon
him like a dreadful dawn. It was a curious Asiatic
weapon. He knew what name was connected in his
memory with curious Asiatic weapons. Lord James
spoke his secret thought for him, and yet it startled
him like an irrelevance.
"Where is the Prime Minister?" Herries had cried,
suddenly, and somehow like the bark of a dog at
some discovery.
Doctor Prince turned on him his goggles and his
grim face; and it was grimmer than ever.
"I cannot find him anywhere," he said. "I looked
for him at once, as soon as I found the papers were
gone. That servant of yours, Campbell, made a most
efficient search, but there are no traces."
There was a long silence, at the end of which
Herries uttered another cry, but upon an entirely new
note.
"Well, you needn't look for him any longer," he
said, "for here he comes, along with your friend
Fisher. They look as if they'd been for a little walking
tour."
The two figures approaching up the path were indeed those of
Fisher, splashed with the mire of travel and carrying a scratch
like that of a bramble across one side of his bald forehead, and
of the great and gray-haired statesman who looked like a baby and
was interested in Eastern swords and swordmanship. But beyond
this bodily recognition, March could make neither head nor tail
of their presence or demeanor, which seemed to give a final touch
of nonsense to the whole nightmare. The more closely he watched
them, as they stood listening to the revelations of the
detective, the more puzzled he was by their attitude--Fisher
seemed grieved by the death of his uncle, but hardly shocked at
it; the older man seemed almost openly thinking about something
else, and neither had anything to suggest about a further pursuit
of the fugitive spy and murderer, in spite of the prodigious
importance of the documents he had stolen. When the detective had
gone off to busy himself with that department of the business, to
telephone and write his report, when Herries had gone back,
probably to the brandy bottle, and the Prime Minister had blandly
sauntered away toward a comfortable armchair in another part of
the garden, Horne Fisher spoke directly to Harold March.
"My friend," he said, "I want you to come with me at once; there
is no one else I can trust so much as that. The journey will take
us most of the day, and the chief business cannot be done till
nightfall. So we can talk things over thoroughly on the way. But
I want you to be with me; for I rather think it is my hour."
March and Fisher both had motor bicycles; and the first half of
their day's journey consisted in coasting eastward amid the
unconversational noise of those uncomfortable engines. But when
they came out beyond Canterbury into the flats of eastern Kent,
Fisher stopped at a pleasant little public house beside a sleepy
stream; and they sat down to cat and to drink and to speak almost
for the first time. It was a brilliant afternoon, birds were
singing in the wood behind, and the sun shone full on their ale
bench and table; but the face of Fisher in the strong sunlight
had a gravity never seen on it before.
"Before we go any farther," he said, "there is something you
ought to know. You and I have seen some mysterious things and got
to the bottom of them before now; and it's only right that you
should get to the bottom of this one. But in dealing with the
death of my uncle I must begin at the other end from where our
old detective yarns began. I will give you the steps of deduction
presently, if you want to listen to
them; but I did not reach the truth of this by
steps of deduction. I will first of all tell you the
truth itself, because I knew the truth from the
first. The other cases I approached from the
outside, but in this case I was inside. I myself was
the very core and center of everything."
Something in the speaker's pendent eyelids and
grave gray eyes suddenly shook March to his
foundations; and he cried, distractedly, "I don't
understand!" as men do when they fear that they do
understand. There was no sound for a space but the
happy chatter of the birds, and then Horne Fisher
said, calmly:
"It was I who killed my uncle. If you particularly
want more, it was I who stole the state papers from
him."
"Fisher!" cried his friend in a strangled voice.
"Let me tell you the whole thing before we part,"
continued the other, "and let me put it, for the sake of
clearness, as we used to put our old problems. Now
there are two things that are puzzling people about
that problem, aren't there? The first is how the
murderer managed to slip off the dead man's coat,
when he was already pinned to the ground with that
stone incubus. The other, which is much smaller and
less puzzling, is the fact of the sword that cut his
throat being slightly stained at the point, instead of a
good deal more stained at the edge. Well, I can
dispose of the first question easily. Horne Hewitt
took off his own coat before he was killed. I might
say he took off his coat to be killed."
"Do you call that an explanation?" exclaimed
March. "The words seem more meaningless, than the
facts."
"Well, let us go on to the other facts," continued
Fisher, equably. "The reason that particular sword is
not stained at the edge with Hewitt's blood is that it
was not used to kill Hewitt.
"But the doctor," protested March, "declared
distinctly that the wound was made by that particular
sword."
"I beg your pardon," replied Fisher. "He did not
declare that it was made by that particular sword. He
declared it was made by a sword of that particular
pattern."
"But it was quite a queer and exceptional pattern,"
argued March; "surely it is far too fantastic a
coincidence to imagine--"
"It was a fantastic coincidence," reflected
Horne Fisher. "It's extraordinary what coincidences
do sometimes occur. By the oddest
chance in the world, by one chance in a million,
it so happened that another sword of exactly
the same shape was in the same garden at the
same time. It may be partly explained, by the
fact that I brought them both into the garden
myself . . . come, my dear fellow; surely you
can see now what it means. Put those two
things together; there were two duplicate
swords and he took off his coat for himself. It
may assist your speculations to recall the fact that
I am not exactly an assassin."
"A duel!" exclaimed March, recovering himself.
"Of course I ought to have thought of that. But who
was the spy who stole the papers?"
"My uncle was the spy who stole the papers,"
replied Fisher, "or who tried to steal the papers when
I stopped him--in the only way I could. The papers,
that should have gone west to reassure our friends
and give them the plans for repelling the invasion,
would in a few hours have been in the hands of the
invader. What could I do? To have denounced one of
our friends at this moment would have been to play
into the hands of your friend Attwood, and all the
party of panic and slavery. Besides, it may be that a
man over forty has a subconscious desire to die as he
has lived, and that I wanted, in a sense, to carry my
secrets to the grave. Perhaps a hobby hardens with
age; and my hobby has been silence. Perhaps I feel
that I have killed my mother's brother, but I have
saved my mother's name. Anyhow, I chose a time
when I knew you were all asleep, and he was
walking alone in the garden. I saw all the stone
statues standing in the moonlight; and I myself was
like one of those stone statues walking. In a voice
that was not my own, I told him of his treason and
demanded the papers; and when he refused, I forced
him to take one of the two swords. The swords
were among some specimens sent down here for the
Prime Minister's inspection; he is a collector, you
know; they were the only equal weapons I could find.
To cut an ugly tale short, we fought there on the path
in front of the Britannia statue; he was a man of great
strength, but I had somewhat the advantage in skill.
His sword grazed my forehead almost at the moment
when mine sank into the joint in his neck. He fell
against the statue, like Caesar against Pompey's,
hanging on to the iron rail; his sword was already
broken. When I saw the blood from that deadly
wound, everything else went from me; I dropped my
sword and ran as if to lift him up. As I bent toward
him something happened too quick for me to follow. I
do not know whether the iron bar was rotted with rust
and came away in his hand, or whether he rent it out
of the rock with his apelike strength; but the thing
was in his hand, and with his dying energies he swung
it over my head, as I knelt there unarmed beside him.
I looked up wildly to avoid the blow, and saw above
us the great bulk of Britannia leaning outward like the
figurehead of a ship. The next instant I saw it was
leaning an inch or two more than usual, and all the
skies with their outstanding stars seemed to be
leaning with it. For the third second it was as if the
skies fell; and in the fourth I was standing in the quiet garden,
looking down on that flat ruin of stone and bone at
which you were looking to-day. He had plucked out
the last prop that held up the British goddess, and she
had fallen and crushed the traitor in her fall. I turned
and darted for the coat which I knew to contain the
package, ripped it up with my sword, and raced away
up the garden path to where my motor bike was
waiting on the road above. I had every reason for
haste; but I fled without looking back at the statue
and the. body; and I think the thing I fled from was
the sight of that appalling allegory.
"Then I did the rest of what I had to do. All
through the night and into the daybreak and the
daylight I went humming through the villages and
markets of South England like a traveling bullet, till I
came to the headquarters in the West where the
trouble was. I was just in time. I was able to placard
the place, so to speak, with the news that the
government had not betrayed them, and that they
would find supports if they would push eastward
against the enemy. There's no time to tell you all that
happened; but I tell you it was the day of my life. A
triumph like a torchlight procession, with torchlights
that might have been firebrands. The mutinies
simmered down; the men of Somerset and the
western counties came pouring into the market
places; the men who died with Arthur and stood firm
with Alfred. The Irish regiments rallied to them, after
a scene like a riot, and marched eastward out of the
town singing Fenian songs. There was all that is not
understood, about the dark laughter of that people, in
the delight with which, even when marching with the
English to the defense of England, they shouted at the
top of their voices, 'High upon the gallows tree stood
the noble-hearted three . . . With England's cruel cord
about them cast.' However, the chorus was 'God
save Ireland,' and we could all have sung that just
then, in one sense or another.
"But there was another side to my mission. I
carried the plans of the defense; and to a great
extent, luckily, the plans of the invasion also. I won't
worry you with strategics; but we knew where the
enemy had pushed forward the great battery that
covered all his movements; and though our friends
from the West could hardly arrive in time to intercept
the main movement, they might get within long
artillery range of the battery and shell it, if they only
knew exactly where it was. They could hardly tell
that unless somebody round about here sent up some
sort of signal. But, somehow, I rather fancy that
somebody will."
With that he got up from the table, and they
remounted their machines and went eastward
into the advancing twilight of evening. The levels of
the landscape Were repeated in flat strips of floating
cloud and the last colors of day clung to the circle of
the horizon. Reced. ing farther and farther behind
them was the semicircle of the last hills; and it was
quite suddenly that they saw afar off the dim line of
the sea. It was not a strip of bright blue as they had
seen it from the sunny veranda, but of a sinister and
smoky violet, a tint that seemed ominous and dark.
Here Horne Fisher dismounted once more.
"We must walk the rest of the way," he said, "and
the last bit of all I must walk alone."
He bent down and began to unstrap something
from his bicycle. It was something that had puzzled
his companion all the way in spite of what held him to
more interesting riddles; it appeared to be several
lengths of pole strapped together and wrapped up in
paper. Fisher took it under his arm and began to pick
his way across the turf. The ground was growing
more tum. bled and irregular and he was walking
toward a mass of thickets and small woods; night
grew darker every moment. "We must not talk any
more," said Fisher. "I shall whisper to you when you
are to halt. Don't try to follow me then, for it will only
spoil the show; one man can barely crawl safely to
the spot, and two would certainly be caught."
"I would follow you anywhere," replied
March, "but I would halt, too, if that is better."
"I know you would," said his friend in a low voice.
"Perhaps you're the only man I ever quite trusted in
this world."
A few paces farther on they came to the end
of a great ridge or mound looking monstrous
against the dim sky; and Fisher stopped with a
gesture. He caught his companion's hand and
wrung it with a violent tenderness, and then
darted forward into the darkness. March could faintly
see his figure crawling along under the
shadow of the ridge, then he lost sight of it, and then he
saw it again standing on another
mound two hundred yards away. Beside him
stood a singular erection made apparently of
two rods. He bent over it and there was the
flare of a light; all March's schoolboy memories
woke in him, and he knew what it was. It was
the stand of a rocket. The confused, incongruous
memories still possessed him up to the very
moment of a fierce but familiar sound; and an
instant after the rocket left its perch and went
up into endless space like a starry arrow aimed
at the stars.March thought suddenly of the
signs of the last days and knew he was looking
at the apocalyptic meteor of something like a
Day of judgment.
Far up in the infinite heavens the rocket
drooped and sprang into scarlet stars. For a
moment the whole landscape out to the sea and back
to the crescent of the wooded hills was like a lake of
ruby light, of a red strangely rich and glorious, as if
the world were steeped in wine rather than blood, or
the earth were an earthly paradise, over which
paused forever the sanguine moment of morning.
"God save England!" cried Fisher, with a tongue
like the peal of a trumpet. "And now it is for God to
save."
As darkness sank again over land and sea, there
came another sound; far away in the passes of the
hills behind them the guns spoke like the baying of
great hounds. Something that was not a rocket, that
came not hissing but screaming, went over Harold
March's head and expanded beyond the mound into
light and deafening din, staggering the brain with
unbearable brutalities of noise. Another came, and
then another, and the world was full of uproar and
volcanic vapor and chaotic light. The artillery of the
West country and the Irish had located the great
enemy battery, and were pounding it to pieces.
In the mad excitement of that moment March
peered through the storm, looking again for the long
lean figure that stood beside the stand of the rocket.
Then another flash lit up the whole ridge. The figure
was not there.
Before the fires of the rocket had faded from the
sky, long before the first gun had sounded
from the distant hills, a splutter of rifle fire had
flashed and flickered all around from the hidden
trenches of the enemy. Something lay in the shadow
at the foot of the ridge, as stiff as the stick of the
fallen rocket; and the man who knew too much
knew what is worth knowing.
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Man Who Knew Too Much, by GKC