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THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH By
G. K. Chesterton Chapter 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 premonitions 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 high bridged 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 carrying 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 sea beasts 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 ***.
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. As 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 *** 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 *** 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 weather stained; 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! 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 ***, 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 ***
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 something new. They gravely rearmed themselves from
the 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 dotted 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 *** 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."
End of chapter Chapter 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 most 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 depositions, 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 he 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. "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 ***-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 ***." "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
red-haired 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 *** 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 *** 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 ***." 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, *** 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 ***, and yet your sin
might be forgiven you. But I, who am innocent, I was to be slain with ceremony. There would
be long 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 ***; 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 Piccadilly.
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. "*** 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.
End of chapter Chapter 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 Bays water 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, 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 ***: "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
*** 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. End of chapter
Chapter 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 a 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 *** 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 semi military 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 and 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. "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 easily 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 ***, 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. End of chapter