VI. THE HOLE IN THE WALL
Two men, the one an architect and the other an archaeologist,
met on the steps of the great house at Prior's Park; and their host,
Lord Bulmer, in his breezy way, thought it natural to introduce them.
It must be confessed that he was hazy as well as breezy, and had no
very clear connection in his mind, beyond the sense that an architect
and an archaeologist begin with the same series of letters.
The world must remain in a reverent doubt as to whether he would,
on the same principles, have presented a diplomatist to a dipsomaniac or a
ratiocinator to a rat catcher. He was a big, fair, bull-necked young man,
abounding in outward gestures, unconsciously flapping his gloves
and flourishing his stick.
"You two ought to have something to talk about," he said, cheerfully.
"Old buildings and all that sort of thing; this is rather
an old building, by the way, though I say it who shouldn't.
I must ask you to excuse me a moment; I've got to go and see
about the cards for this Christmas romp my sister's arranging.
We hope to see you all there, of course. Juliet wants it
to be a fancy-dress affair--abbots and crusaders and all that.
My ancestors, I suppose, after all."
"I trust the abbot was not an ancestor," said the archaeological
gentleman, with a smile.
"Only a sort of great-uncle, I imagine," answered the other, laughing;
then his rather rambling eye rolled round the ordered landscape in front
of the house; an artificial sheet of water ornamented with an antiquated
nymph in the center and surrounded by a park of tall trees now gray
and black and frosty, for it was in the depth of a severe winter.
"It's getting jolly cold," his lordship continued.
"My sister hopes we shall have some skating as well as dancing."
"If the crusaders come in full armor," said the other, "you must
be careful not to drown your ancestors."
"Oh, there's no fear of that," answered Bulmer;
"this precious lake of ours is not two feet deep anywhere."
And with one of his flourishing gestures he stuck his
stick into the water to demonstrate its shallowness.
They could see the short end bent in the water, so that he seemed
for a moment to lean his large weight on a breaking staff.
"The worst you can expect is to see an abbot sit down rather suddenly,"
he added, turning away. "Well, au revoir; I'll let you know
about it later."
The archaeologist and the architect were left on the great stone
steps smiling at each other; but whatever their common interests,
they presented a considerable personal contrast, and the fanciful might
even have found some contradiction in each considered individually.
The former, a Mr. James Haddow, came from a drowsy den in
the Inns of Court, full of leather and parchment, for the law
was his profession and history only his hobby; he was indeed,
among other things, the solicitor and agent of the Prior's Park estate.
But he himself was far from drowsy and seemed remarkably wide awake,
with shrewd and prominent blue eyes, and red hair brushed
as neatly as his very neat costume. The latter, whose name
was Leonard Crane, came straight from a crude and almost cockney
office of builders and house agents in the neighboring suburb,
sunning itself at the end of a new row of jerry-built houses with
plans in very bright colors and notices in very large letters.
But a serious observer, at a second glance, might have seen
in his eyes something of that shining sleep that is called vision;
and his yellow hair, while not affectedly long, was unaffectedly untidy.
It was a manifest if melancholy truth that the architect was an artist.
But the artistic temperament was far from explaining him;
there was something else about him that was not definable,
but which some even felt to be dangerous. Despite his dreaminess,
he would sometimes surprise his friends with arts and even sports apart
from his ordinary life, like memories of some previous existence.
On this occasion, nevertheless, he hastened to disclaim any authority
on the other man's hobby.
"I mustn't appear on false pretences," he said, with a smile.
"I hardly even know what an archaeologist is, except that a rather rusty
remnant of Greek suggests that he is a man who studies old things."
"Yes," replied Haddow, grimly. "An archaeologist is a man who studies
old things and finds they are new."
Crane looked at him steadily for a moment and then smiled again.
"Dare one suggest," he said, "that some of the things we have been
talking about are among the old things that turn out not to be old?"
His companion also was silent for a moment, and the smile on his rugged
face was fainter as he replied, quietly:
"The wall round the park is really old. The one gate in it is Gothic,
and I cannot find any trace of destruction or restoration.
But the house and the estate generally--well the romantic ideas read
into these things are often rather recent romances, things almost
like fashionable novels. For instance, the very name of this place,
Prior's Park, makes everybody think of it as a moonlit mediaeval abbey;
I dare say the spiritualists by this time have discovered the ghost
of a monk there. But, according to the only authoritative study
of the matter I can find, the place was simply called Prior's as any
rural place is called Podger's. It was the house of a Mr. Prior,
a farmhouse, probably, that stood here at some time or other and was
a local landmark. Oh, there are a great many examples of the same thing,
here and everywhere else. This suburb of ours used to be a village,
and because some of the people slurred the name and pronounced
it Holliwell, many a minor poet indulged in fancies about a Holy Well,
with spells and fairies and all the rest of it, filling the suburban
drawing-rooms with the Celtic twilight. Whereas anyone acquainted
with the facts knows that 'Hollinwall' simply means 'the hole
in the wall,' and probably referred to some quite trivial accident.
That's what I mean when I say that we don't so much find old things
as we find new ones."
Crane seemed to have grown somewhat inattentive to the little
lecture on antiquities and novelties, and the cause of his
restlessness was soon apparent, and indeed approaching.
Lord Bulmer's sister, Juliet Bray, was coming slowly across the lawn,
accompanied by one gentleman and followed by two others.
The young architect was in the illogical condition of mind
in which he preferred three to one.
The man walking with the lady was no other than the eminent
Prince Borodino, who was at least as famous as a distinguished
diplomatist ought to be, in the interests of what is called
secret diplomacy. He had been paying a round of visits at various
English country houses, and exactly what he was doing for diplomacy
at Prior's Park was as much a secret as any diplomatist could desire.
The obvious thing to say of his appearance was that he would
have been extremely handsome if he had not been entirely bald.
But, indeed, that would itself be a rather bald way of putting it.
Fantastic as it sounds, it would fit the case better to say that people
would have been surprised to see hair growing on him; as surprised
as if they had found hair growing on the bust of a Roman emperor.
His tall figure was buttoned up in a tight-waisted fashion that
rather accentuated his potential bulk, and he wore a red flower
in his buttonhole. Of the two men walking behind one was also bald,
but in a more partial and also a more premature fashion,
for his drooping mustache was still yellow, and if his eyes
were somewhat heavy it was with languor and not with age.
It was Horne Fisher, and he was talking as easily and idly about
everything as he always did. His always did. His companion
was a more striking, and even more companion was a more striking,
and even more sinister, figure, and he had the added importance
of being Lord Bulmer's oldest and most intimate friend.
He was generally known with a severe simplicity as Mr. Brain;
but it was understood that he had been a judge and police
official in India, and that he had enemies, who had represented
his measures against crime as themselves almost criminal.
He was a brown skeleton of a man with dark, deep, sunken eyes
and a black mustache that hid the meaning of his mouth.
Though he had the look of one wasted by some tropical disease,
his movements were much more alert than those of his lounging companion.
"It's all settled," announced the lady, with great animation,
when they came within hailing distance. "You've all got
to put on masquerade things and very likely skates as well,
though the prince says they don't go with it; but we don't
care about that. It's freezing already, and we don't often
get such a chance in England."
"Even in India we don't exactly skate all the year round,"
observed Mr. Brain.
"And even Italy is not primarily associated with ice,"
said the Italian.
"Italy is primarily associated with ices," remarked Mr. Horne Fisher.
"I mean with ice cream men. Most people in this country imagine that
Italy is entirely populated with ice cream men and organ grinders.
There certainly are a lot of them; perhaps they're an invading
army in disguise."
"How do you know they are not the secret emissaries of our diplomacy?"
asked the prince, with a slightly scornful smile. "An army of organ
grinders might pick up hints, and their monkeys might pick up all
sort of things."
"The organs are organized in fact," said the flippant
Mr. Fisher. "Well, I've known it pretty cold before now in Italy
and even in India, up on the Himalayan slopes. The ice on our
own little round pond will be quite cozy by comparison."
Juliet Bray was an attractive lady with dark hair and eyebrows
and dancing eyes, and there was a geniality and even generosity
in her rather imperious ways. In most matters she could command
her brother, though that nobleman, like many other men of vague ideas,
was not without a touch of the bully when he was at bay. She could
certainly command her guests, even to the extent of decking out the most
respectable and reluctant of them with her mediaeval masquerade.
And it really seemed as if she could command the elements also,
like a witch. For the weather steadily hardened and sharpened;
that night the ice of the lake, glimmering in the moonlight,
was like a marble floor, and they had begun to dance and skate
on it before it was dark.
Prior's Park, or, more properly, the surrounding district of Holinwall,
was a country seat that had become a suburb; having once had only
a dependent village at its doors, it now found outside all its doors
the signals of the expansion of London. Mr. Haddow, who was engaged
in historical researches both in the library and the locality,
could find little assistance in the latter. He had already realized,
from the documents, that Prior's Park had originally been something
like Prior's Farm, named after some local figure, but the new social
conditions were all against his tracing the story by its traditions.
Had any of the real rustics remained, he would probably have found
some lingering legend of Mr. Prior, however remote he might be.
But the new nomadic population of clerks and artisans, constantly
shifting their homes from one suburb to another, or their children
from one school to another, could have no corporate continuity.
They had all that forgetfulness of history that goes everywhere
with the extension of education.
Nevertheless, when he came out of the library next morning and saw
the wintry trees standing round the frozen pond like a black forest,
he felt he might well have been far in the depths of the country.
The old wall running round the park kept that inclosure itself
still entirely rural and romantic, and one could easily imagine
that the depths of that dark forest faded away indefinitely into
distant vales and hills. The gray and black and silver of the wintry
wood were all the more severe or somber as a contrast to the colored
carnival groups that already stood on and around the frozen pool.
For the house party had already flung themselves impatiently into
fancy dress, and the lawyer, with his neat black suit and red hair,
was the only modern figure among them.
"Aren't you going to dress up?" asked Juliet, indignantly shaking
at him a horned and towering blue headdress of the fourteenth
century which framed her face very becomingly, fantastic as it was.
"Everybody here has to be in the Middle Ages. Even Mr. Brain
has put on a sort of brown dressing gown and says he's a monk;
and Mr. Fisher got hold of some old potato sacks in the kitchen
and sewed them together; he's supposed to be a monk, too.
As to the prince, he's perfectly glorious, in great crimson
robes as a cardinal. He looks as if he could poison everybody.
You simply must be something."
"I will be something later in the day," he replied.
"At present I am nothing but an antiquary and an attorney.
I have to see your brother presently, about some legal business
and also some local investigations he asked me to make.
I must look a little like a steward when I give an account
of my stewardship."
"Oh, but my brother has dressed up!" cried the girl. "Very much so.
No end, if I may say so. Why he's bearing down on you now in
all his glory."
The noble lord was indeed marching toward them in a magnificent
sixteenth-century costume of purple and gold, with a gold-hilted
sword and a plumed cap, and manners to match. Indeed, there was
something more than his usual expansiveness of bodily
action in his appearance at that moment. It almost seemed,
so to speak, that the plumes on his hat had gone to his head.
He flapped his great, gold-lined cloak like the wings of a fairy
king in a pantomime; he even drew his sword with a flourish
and waved it about as he did his walking stick. In the light
of after events there seemed to be something monstrous and ominous
about that exuberance, something of the spirit that is called fey.
At the time it merely crossed a few people's minds that he might
possibly be drunk.
As he strode toward his sister the first figure he passed
was that of Leonard Crane, clad in Lincoln green,
with the horn and baldrick and sword appropriate to Robin Hood;
for he was standing nearest to the lady, where, indeed, he might
have been found during a disproportionate part of the time.
He had displayed one of his buried talents in the matter of skating,
and now that the skating was over seemed disposed to prolong
the partnership. The boisterous Bulmer playfully made a pass
at him with his drawn sword, going forward with the lunge in
the proper fencing fashion, and making a somewhat too familiar
Shakespearean quotation about a rodent and a Venetian coin.
Probably in Crane also there was a subdued excitement just then;
anyhow, in one flash he had drawn his own sword and parried;
and then suddenly, to the surprise of everyone, Bulmer's weapon
seemed to spring out of his hand into the air and rolled away
on the ringing ice.
"Well, I never!" said the lady, as if with justifiable indignation.
"You never told me you could fence, too."
Bulmer put up his sword with an air rather bewildered than annoyed,
which increased the impression of something irresponsible in his mood
at the moment; then he turned rather abruptly to his lawyer, saying:
"We can settle up about the estate after dinner; I've missed
nearly all the skating as it is, and I doubt if the ice will hold
till to-morrow night. I think I shall get up early and have
a spin by myself."
"You won't be disturbed with my company," said Horne Fisher,
in his weary fashion. "If I have to begin the day with ice,
in the American fashion, I prefer it in smaller quantities.
But no early hours for me in December. The early bird
catches the cold."
"Oh, I sha'n't die of catching a cold," answered Bulmer, and laughed.
A considerable group of the skating party had consisted of the guests
staying at the house, and the rest had tailed off in twos and threes
some time before most of the guests began to retire for the night.
Neighbors, always invited to Prior's Park on such occasions,
went back to their own houses in motors or on foot; the legal
and archeoological gentleman had returned to the Inns of Court
by a late train, to get a paper called for during his consultation
with his client; and most of the other guests were drifting
and lingering at various stages on their way up to bed.
Horne Fisher, as if to deprive himself of any excuse for
his refusal of early rising, had been the first to retire
to his room; but, sleepy as he looked, he could not sleep.
He had picked up from a table the book of antiquarian topography,
in which Haddow had found his first hints about the origin of
the local name, and, being a man with a quiet and quaint capacity
for being interested in anything, he began to read it steadily,
making notes now and then of details on which his previous reading
left him with a certain doubt about his present conclusions.
His room was the one nearest to the lake in the center
of the woods, and was therefore the quietest, and none of
the last echoes of the evening's festivity could reach him.
He had followed carefully the argument which established
the derivation from Mr. Prior's farm and the hole in the wall,
and disposed of any fashionable fancy about monks and magic wells,
when he began to be conscious of a noise audible in the frozen
silence of the night. It was not a particularly loud noise,
but it seemed to consist of a series of thuds or heavy blows,
such as might be struck on a wooden door by a man seeking to enter.
They were followed by something like a faint creak or crack,
as if the obstacle had either been opened or had given way.
He opened his own bedroom door and listened, but as he heard
talk and laughter all over the lower floors, he had no reason
to fear that a summons would be neglected or the house left
without protection. He went to his open window, looking out
over the frozen pond and the moonlit statue in the middle
of their circle of darkling woods, and listened again.
But silence had returned to that silent place, and, after
straining his ears for a considerable time, he could hear
nothing but the solitary hoot of a distant departing train.
Then he reminded himself how many nameless noises can be heard
by the wakeful during the most ordinary night, and shrugging
his shoulders, went wearily to bed.
He awoke suddenly and sat up in bed with his ears filled,
as with thunder, with the throbbing echoes of a rending cry.
He remained rigid for a moment, and then sprang out of bed,
throwing on the loose gown of sacking he had worn all day.
He went first to the window, which was open, but covered with
a thick curtain, so that his room was still completely dark;
but when he tossed the curtain aside and put his head out,
he saw that a gray and silver daybreak had already appeared
behind the black woods that surrounded the little lake,
and that was all that he did see. Though the sound had
certainly come in through the open window from this direction,
the whole scene was still and empty under the morning light
as under the moonlight. Then the long, rather lackadaisical hand
he had laid on a window sill gripped it tighter, as if to master
a tremor, and his peering blue eyes grew bleak with fear.
It may seem that his emotion was exaggerated and needless,
considering the effort of common sense by which he had conquered
his nervousness about the noise on the previous night.
But that had been a very different sort of noise.
It might have been made by half a hundred things,
from the chopping of wood to the breaking of bottles.
There was only one thing in nature from which could come
the sound that echoed through the dark house at daybreak.
It was the awful articulate voice of man; and it was something worse,
for he knew what man.
He knew also that it had been a shout for help.
It seemed to him that he had heard the very word; but the word,
short as it was, had been swallowed up, as if the man
had been stifled or snatched away even as he spoke.
Only the mocking reverberations of it remained even in his memory,
but he had no doubt of the original voice. He had no doubt
that the great bull's voice of Francis Bray, Baron Bulmer,
had been heard for the last time between the darkness and
the lifting dawn.
How long he stood there he never knew, but he was startled
into life by the first living thing that he saw stirring
in that half-frozen landscape. Along the path beside the lake,
and immediately under his window, a figure was walking slowly
and softly, but with great composure--a stately figure in robes
of a splendid scarlet; it was the Italian prince, still in his
cardinal's costume. Most of the company had indeed lived
in their costumes for the last day or two, and Fisher himself
had assumed his frock of sacking as a convenient dressing gown;
but there seemed, nevertheless, something unusually finished and formal,
in the way of an early bird, about this magnificent red cockatoo.
It was as if the early bird had been up all night.
"What is the matter?" he called, sharply, leaning out of the window,
and the Italian turned up his great yellow face like a mask of brass.
"We had better discuss it downstairs," said Prince Borodino.
Fisher ran downstairs, and encountered the great, red-robed figure
entering the doorway and blocking the entrance with his bulk.
"Did you hear that cry?" demanded Fisher.
"I heard a noise and I came out," answered the diplomatist,
and his face was too dark in the shadow for its expression
to be read.
"It was Bulmer's voice," insisted Fisher. "I'll swear it
was Bulmer's voice."
"Did you know him well?" asked the other.
The question seemed irrelevant, though it was not illogical,
and Fisher could only answer in a, random fashion that he knew
Lord Bulmer only slightly.
"Nobody seems to have known him well," continued the Italian,
in level tones. "Nobody except that man Brain. Brain is rather
older than Bulmer, but I fancy they shared a good many secrets."
Fisher moved abruptly, as if waking from a momentary trance,
and said, in a new and more vigorous voice, "But look here,
hadn't we better get outside and see if anything has happened."
"The ice seems to be thawing," said the other, almost with indifference.
When they emerged from the house, dark stains and stars in the gray
field of ice did indeed indicate that the frost was breaking up,
as their host had prophesied the day before, and the very memory
of yesterday brought back the mystery of to-day.
"He knew there would be a thaw," observed the prince.
"He went out skating quite early on purpose. Did he call out
because he landed in the water, do you think?"
Fisher looked puzzled. "Bulmer was the last man to bellow like that
because he got his boots wet. And that's all he could do here;
the water would hardly come up to the calf of a man of his size.
You can see the flat weeds on the floor of the lake, as if it were through
a thin pane of glass. No, if Bulmer had only broken the ice he wouldn't
have said much at the moment, though possibly a good deal afterward.
We should have found him stamping and damning up and down this path,
and calling for clean boots."
"Let us hope we shall find him as happily employed,"
remarked the diplomatist. "In that case the voice must have
come out of the wood."
"I'll swear it didn't come out of the house," said Fisher;
and the two disappeared together into the twilight of wintry trees.
The plantation stood dark against the fiery colors of sunrise,
a black fringe having that feathery appearance which makes
trees when they are bare the very reverse of rugged.
Hours and hours afterward, when the same dense, but delicate,
margin was dark against the greenish colors opposite the sunset,
the search thus begun at sunrise had not come to an end.
By successive stages, and to slowly gathering groups of the company,
it became apparent that the most extraordinary of all gaps
had appeared in the party; the guests could find no trace
of their host anywhere. The servants reported that his bed had
been slept in and his skates and his fancy costume were gone,
as if he had risen early for the purpose he had himself avowed.
But from the top of the house to the bottom, from the walls round
the park to the pond in the center, there was no trace of Lord Bulmer,
dead or alive. Horne Fisher realized that a chilling premonition
had already prevented him from expecting to find the man alive.
But his bald brow was wrinkled over an entirely new and
unnatural problem, in not finding the man at all.
He considered the possibility of Bulmer having gone off of his own accord,
for some reason; but after fully weighing it he finally dismissed it.
It was inconsistent with the unmistakable voice heard at daybreak,
and with many other practical obstacles. There was only one
gateway in the ancient and lofty wall round the small park;
the lodge keeper kept it locked till late in the morning,
and the lodge keeper had seen no one pass. Fisher was fairly sure
that he had before him a mathematical problem in an inclosed space.
His instinct had been from the first so attuned to the tragedy
that it would have been almost a relief to him to find the corpse.
He would have been grieved, but not horrified, to come on
the nobleman's body dangling from one of his own trees as from
a gibbet, or floating in his own pool like a pallid weed.
What horrified him was to find nothing.
He soon become conscious that he was not alone even in his most
individual and isolated experiments. He often found a figure
following him like his shadow, in silent and almost secret clearings
in the plantation or outlying nooks and corners of the old wall.
The dark-mustached mouth was as mute as the deep eyes were mobile,
darting incessantly hither and thither, but it was clear that Brain of the
Indian police had taken up the trail like an old hunter after a tiger.
Seeing that he was the only personal friend of the vanished man,
this seemed natural enough, and Fisher resolved to deal frankly with him.
"This silence is rather a social strain," he said. "May I
break the ice by talking about the weather?--which, by the way,
has already broken the ice. I know that breaking the ice
might be a rather melancholy metaphor in this case."
"I don't think so," replied Brain, shortly. "I don't fancy the ice
had much to do with it. I don't see how it could."
"What would you propose doing?" asked Fisher.
"Well, we've sent for the authorities, of course, but I hope to find
something out before they come," replied the Anglo-Indian. "I
can't say I have much hope from police methods in this country.
Too much red tape, habeas corpus and that sort of thing.
What we want is to see that nobody bolts; the nearest we could get
to it would be to collect the company and count them, so to speak.
Nobody's left lately, except that lawyer who was poking
about for antiquities."
"Oh, he's out of it; he left last night," answered the other.
"Eight hours after Bulmer's chauffeur saw his lawyer off by the train
I heard Bulmer's own voice as plain as I hear yours now."
"I suppose you don't believe in spirits?" said the man
from India. After a pause he added: "There's somebody else I
should like to find, before we go after a fellow with an alibi
in the Inner Temple. What's become of that fellow in green--
the architect dressed up as a forester? I haven't seem him about."
Mr. Brain managed to secure his assembly of all the distracted company
before the arrival of the police. But when he first began to coment
once more on the young architect's delay in putting in an appearance,
he found himself in the presence of a minor mystery, and a psychological
development of an entirely unexpected kind.
Juliet Bray had confronted the catastrophe of her brother's disappearance
with a somber stoicism in which there was, perhaps, more paralysis
than pain; but when the other question came to the surface she was both
agitated and angry.
"We don't want to jump to any conclusions about anybody," Brain was saying
in his staccato style. "But we should like to know a little more about
Mr. Crane. Nobody seems to know much about him, or where he comes from.
And it seems a sort of coincidence that yesterday he actually
crossed swords with poor Bulmer, and could have stuck him, too,
since he showed himself the better swordsman. Of course, that may be
an accident and couldn't possibly be called a case against anybody;
but then we haven't the means to make a real case against anybody.
Till the police come we are only a pack of very amateur sleuthhounds."
"And I think you're a pack of snobs," said Juliet. "Because Mr. Crane
is a genius who's made his own way, you try to suggest he's
a murderer without daring to say so. Because he wore a toy
sword and happened to know how to use it, you want us to believe
he used it like a bloodthirsty maniac for no reason in the world.
And because he could have hit my brother and didn't, you
deduce that he did. That's the sort of way you argue.
And as for his having disappeared, you're wrong in that as you
are in everything else, for here he comes."
And, indeed, the green figure of the fictitious Robin Hood
slowly detached itself from the gray background of the trees,
and came toward them as she spoke.
He approached the group slowly, but with composure; but he was
decidedly pale, and the eyes of Brain and Fisher had already taken
in one detail of the green-clad figure more clearly than all the rest.
The horn still swung from his baldrick, but the sword was gone.
Rather to the surprise of the company, Brain did not follow up
the question thus suggested; but, while retaining an air of leading
the inquiry, had also an appearance of changing the subject.
"Now we're all assembled," he observed, quietly, "there is a
question I want to ask to begin with. Did anybody here actually
see Lord Bulmer this morning?"
Leonard Crane turned his pale face round the circle of faces till
he came to Juliet's; then he compressed his lips a little and said:
"Yes, I saw him."
"Was he alive and well?" asked Brain, quickly. "How was he dressed?"
"He appeared exceedingly well," replied Crane, with a curious intonation.
"He was dressed as he was yesterday, in that purple costume copied
from the portrait of his ancestor in the sixteenth century.
He had his skates in his hand."
"And his sword at his side, I suppose," added the questioner.
"Where is your own sword, Mr. Crane?"
"I threw it away."
In the singular silence that ensued, the train of thought in many minds
became involuntarily a series of colored pictures.
They had grown used to their fanciful garments looking more gay
and gorgeous against the dark gray and streaky silver of the forest,
so that the moving figures glowed like stained-glass saints walking.
The effect had been more fitting because so many of them had idly
parodied pontifical or monastic dress. But the most arresting attitude
that remained in their memories had been anything but merely monastic;
that of the moment when the figure in bright green and the other in vivid
violet had for a moment made a silver cross of their crossing swords.
Even when it was a jest it had been something of a drama; and it was
a strange and sinister thought that in the gray daybreak the same figures
in the same posture might have been repeated as a tragedy.
"Did you quarrel with him?" asked Brain, suddenly.
"Yes," replied the immovable man in green. "Or he quarreled with me."
"Why did he quarrel with you?" asked the investigator;
and Leonard Crane made no reply.
Horne Fisher, curiously enough, had only given half his attention to this
crucial cross-examination. His heavy-lidded eyes had languidly followed
the figure of Prince Borodino, who at this stage had strolled away
toward the fringe of the wood; and, after a pause, as of meditation,
had disappeared into the darkness of the trees.
He was recalled from his irrelevance by the voice of Juliet Bray,
which rang out with an altogether new note of decision:
"If that is the difficulty, it had best be cleared up.
I am engaged to Mr. Crane, and when we told my brother he did
not approve of it; that is all."
Neither Brain nor Fisher exhibited any surprise, but the
former added, quietly:
"Except, I suppose, that he and your brother went off into
the wood to discuss it, where Mr. Crane mislaid his sword,
not to mention his companion."
"And may I ask," inquired Crane, with a certain flicker of mockery
passing over his pallid features, "what I am supposed to have done
with either of them? Let us adopt the cheerful thesis that I am
a murderer; it has yet to be shown that I am a magician. If I ran
your unfortunate friend through the body, what did I do with the body?
Did I have it carried away by seven flying dragons, or was it merely
a trifling matter of turning it into a milk-white hind?"
"It is no occasion for sneering," said the Anglo-Indian judge,
with abrupt authority. "It doesn't make it look better for you
that you can joke about the loss."
Fisher's dreamy, and even dreary, eye was still on the edge
of the wood behind, and he became conscious of masses of dark red,
like a stormy sunset cloud, glowing through the gray network
of the thin trees, and the prince in his cardinal's robes
reemerged on to the pathway. Brain had had half a notion
that the prince might have gone to look for the lost rapier.
But when he reappeared he was carrying in his hand, not a sword,
but an ax.
The incongruity between the masquerade and the mystery had created
a curious psychological atmosphere. At first they had all felt horribly
ashamed at being caught in the foolish disguises of a festival,
by an event that had only too much the character of a funeral.
Many of them would have already gone back and dressed
in clothes that were more funereal or at least more formal.
But somehow at the moment this seemed like a second masquerade,
more artificial and frivolous than the first. And as they reconciled
themselves to their ridiculous trappings, a curious sensation had
come over some of them, notably over the more sensitive, like Crane
and Fisher and Juliet, but in some degree over everybody except
the practical Mr. Brain. It was almost as if they were the ghosts
of their own ancestors haunting that dark wood and dismal lake,
and playing some old part that they only half remembered.
The movements of those colored figures seemed to mean something
that had been settled long before, like a silent heraldry.
Acts, attitudes, external objects, were accepted as an allegory
even without the key; and they knew when a crisis had come,
when they did not know what it was. And somehow they knew
subconsciously that the whole tale had taken a new and terrible turn,
when they saw the prince stand in the gap of the gaunt trees,
in his robes of angry crimson and with his lowering face of bronze,
bearing in his hand a new shape of death. They could not have named
a reason, but the two swords seemed indeed to have become toy swords
and the whole tale of them broken and tossed away like a toy.
Borodino looked like the Old World headsman, clad in terrible red,
and carrying the ax for the execution of the criminal.
And the criminal was not Crane.
Mr. Brain of the Indian police was glaring at the new object, and it
was a moment or two before he spoke, harshly and almost hoarsely.
"What are you doing with that?" he asked. "Seems to be
a woodman's chopper."
"A natural association of ideas," observed Horne Fisher. "If you meet
a cat in a wood you think it's a wildcat, though it may have just strolled
from the drawing-room sofa. As a matter of fact, I happen to know
that is not the woodman's chopper. It's the kitchen chopper, or meat ax,
or something like that, that somebody has thrown away in the wood.
I saw it in the kitchen myself when I was getting the potato sacks
with which I reconstructed a mediaeval hermit."
"All the same, it is not without interest," remarked the prince, holding
out the instrument to Fisher, who took it and examined it carefully.
"A butcher's cleaver that has done butcher's work."
"It was certainly the instrument of the crime," assented Fisher,
in a low voice.
Brain was staring at the dull blue gleam of the ax head with
fierce and fascinated eyes. "I don't understand you," he said.
"There is no--there are no marks on it."
"It has shed no blood," answered Fisher, "but for all that it
has committed a crime. This is as near as the criminal came
to the crime when he committed it."
"What do you mean?"
"He was not there when he did it," explained Fisher. "It's a poor
sort of murderer who can't murder people when he isn't there."
"You seem to be talking merely for the sake of mystification,"
said Brain. "If you have any practical advice to give you
might as well make it intelligible."
"The only practical advice I can suggest," said Fisher, thoughtfully,
"is a little research into local topography and nomenclature. They say
there used to be a Mr. Prior, who had a farm in this neighborhood.
I think some details about the domestic life of the late Mr. Prior
would throw a light on this terrible business."
"And you have nothing more immediate than your topography to offer,"
said Brain, with a sneer, "to help me avenge my friend?"
"Well," said Fisher, "I should find out the truth about the Hole
in the Wall."
That night, at the close of a stormy twilight and under a strong
west wind that followed the breaking of the frost, Leonard Crane
was wending his way in a wild rotatory walk round and round
the high, continuous wall that inclosed the little wood.
He was driven by a desperate idea of solving for himself
the riddle that had clouded his reputation and already even
threatened his liberty. The police authorities, now in charge
of the inquiry, had not arrested him, but he knew well enough
that if he tried to move far afield he would be instantly arrested.
Horne Fisher's fragmentary hints, though he had refused to expand
them as yet, had stirred the artistic temperament of the architect
to a sort of wild analysis, and he was resolved to read
the hieroglyph upside down and every way until it made sense.
If it was something connected with a hole in the wall
he would find the hole in the wall; but, as a matter of fact,
he was unable to find the faintest crack in the wall.
His professional knowledge told him that the masonry was all of one
workmanship and one date, and, except for the regular entrance,
which threw no light on the mystery, he found nothing
suggesting any sort of hiding place or means of escape.
Walking a narrow path between the winding wall and the wild
eastward bend and sweep of the gray and feathery trees,
seeing shifting gleams of a lost sunset winking almost like lightning
as the clouds of tempest scudded across the sky and mingling
with the first faint blue light from a slowly strengthened
moon behind him, he began to feel his head going round as his
heels were going round and round the blind recurrent barrier.
He had thoughts on the border of thought; fancies about a fourth
dimension which was itself a hole to hide anything, of seeing
everything from a new angle out of a new window in the senses;
or of some mystical light and transparency, like the new rays
of chemistry, in which he could see Bulmer's body, horrible and
glaring, floating in a lurid halo over the woods and the wall.
He was haunted also with the hint, which somehow seemed
to be equally horrifying, that it all had something to do with
Mr. Prior. There seemed even to be something creepy in the fact
that he was always respectfully referred to as Mr. Prior,
and that it was in the domestic life of the dead farmer that
he had been bidden to seek the seed of these dreadful things.
As a matter of fact, he had found that no local inquiries had
revealed anything at all about the Prior family.
The moonlight had broadened and brightened, the wind had driven
off the clouds and itself died fitfully away, when he came
round again to the artificial lake in front of the house.
For some reason it looked a very artificial lake; indeed, the whole
scene was like a classical landscape with a touch of Watteau;
the Palladian facade of the house pale in the moon,
and the same silver touching the very pagan and naked marble
nymph in the middle of the pond. Rather to his surprise,
he found another figure there beside the statue, sitting almost
equally motionless; and the same silver pencil traced the wrinkled
brow and patient face of Horne Fisher, still dressed as a hermit
and apparently practicing something of the solitude of a hermit.
Nevertheless, he looked up at Leonard Crane and smiled,
almost as if he had expected him.
"Look here," said Crane, planting himself in front of him,
"can you tell me anything about this business?"
"I shall soon have to tell everybody everything about it,"
replied Fisher, "but I've no objection to telling you
something first. But, to begin with, will you tell me something?
What really happened when you met Bulmer this morning?
You did throw away your sword, but you didn't kill him."
"I didn't kill him because I threw away my sword," said the other.
"I did it on purpose--or I'm not sure what might have happened."
After a pause he went on, quietly: "The late Lord Bulmer was
a very breezy gentleman, extremely breezy. He was very genial
with his inferiors, and would have his lawyer and his architect
staying in his house for all sorts of holidays and amusements.
But there was another side to him, which they found out when
they tried to be his equals. When I told him that his sister
and I were engaged, something happened which I simply can't
and won't describe. It seemed to me like some monstrous upheaval
of madness. But I suppose the truth is painfully simple.
There is such a thing as the coarseness of a gentleman.
And it is the most horrible thing in humanity."
"I know," said Fisher. "The Renaissance nobles of the Tudor time
were like that."
"It is odd that you should say that," Crane went on.
"For while we were talking there came on me a curious feeling
that we were repeating some scene of the past, and that I
was really some outlaw, found in the woods like Robin Hood,
and that he had really stepped in all his plumes and purple
out of the picture frame of the ancestral portrait.
Anyhow, he was the man in possession, and he neither feared God
nor regarded man. I defied him, of course, and walked away.
I might really have killed him if I had not walked away."
"Yes," said Fisher, nodding, "his ancestor was in possession
and he was in possession, and this is the end of the story.
It all fits in."
"Fits in with what?" cried his companion, with sudden impatience.
"I can't make head or tail of it. You tell me to look for the secret
in the hole in the wall, but I can't find any hole in the wall."
"There isn't any," said Fisher. "That's the secret."
After reflecting a moment, he added: "Unless you call it
a hole in the wall of the world. Look here; I'll tell you
if you like, but I'm afraid it involves an introduction.
You've got to understand one of the tricks of the modern mind,
a tendency that most people obey without noticing it.
In the village or suburb outside there's an inn with the sign
of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose I went about telling
everybody that this was only a corruption of King George and
the Dragoon. Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry,
from a vague feeling that it's probable because it's prosaic.
It turns something romantic and legendary into something recent
and ordinary. And that somehow makes it sound rational, though it
is unsupported by reason. Of course some people would have the sense
to remember having seen St. George in old Italian pictures and
French romances, but a good many wouldn't think about it at all.
They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism.
Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority.
But it will accept anything without authority. That's exactly
what has happened here.
"When some critic or other chose to say that Prior's Park
was not a priory, but was named after some quite modern
man named Prior, nobody really tested the theory at all.
It never occurred to anybody repeating the story to ask if there
WAS any Mr. Prior, if anybody had ever seen him or heard of him.
As a matter of fact, it was a priory, and shared the fate
of most priories--that is, the Tudor gentleman with the plumes
simply stole it by brute force and turned it into his own
private house; he did worse things, as you shall hear.
But the point here is that this is how the trick works,
and the trick works in the same way in the other part of the tale.
The name of this district is printed Holinwall in all the best
maps produced by the scholars; and they allude lightly,
not without a smile, to the fact that it was pronounced
Holiwell by the most ignorant and old-fashioned of the poor.
But it is spelled wrong and pronounced right."
"Do you mean to say," asked Crane, quickly, "that there really
was a well?"
"There is a well," said Fisher, "and the truth lies at the bottom of it."
As he spoke he stretched out his hand and pointed toward the sheet
of water in front of him.
"The well is under that water somewhere," he said,
"and this is not the first tragedy connected with it.
The founder of this house did something which his fellow
ruffians very seldom did; something that had to be hushed
up even in the anarchy of the pillage of the monasteries.
The well was connected with the miracles of some saint,
and the last prior that guarded it was something like a
saint himself; certainly he was something very like a martyr.
He defied the new owner and dared him to pollute the place,
till the noble, in a fury, stabbed him and flung his body
into the well, whither, after four hundred years, it has been
followed by an heir of the usurper, clad in the same purple
and walking the world with the same pride."
"But how did it happen," demanded Crane, "that for the first time
Bulmer fell in at that particular spot?"
"Because the ice was only loosened at that particular spot,
by the only man who knew it," answered Horne Fisher. "It was
cracked deliberately, with the kitchen chopper, at that special place;
and I myself heard the hammering and did not understand it.
The place had been covered with an artificial lake, if only because
the whole truth had to be covered with an artificial legend. But don't
you see that it is exactly what those pagan nobles would have done,
to desecrate it with a sort of heathen goddess, as the Roman Emperor
built a temple to Venus on the Holy Sepulchre. But the truth could
still be traced out, by any scholarly man determined to trace it.
And this man was determined to trace it."
"What man?" asked the other, with a shadow of the answer in his mind.
"The only man who has an alibi," replied Fisher. "James Haddow,
the antiquarian lawyer, left the night before the fatality,
but he left that black star of death on the ice. He left abruptly,
having previously proposed to stay; probably, I think,
after an ugly scene with Bulmer, at their legal interview.
As you know yourself, Bulmer could make a man feel pretty murderous,
and I rather fancy the lawyer had himself irregularities
to confess, and was in danger of exposure by his client.
But it's my reading of human nature that a man will cheat
in his trade, but not in his hobby. Haddow may have been a
dishonest lawyer, but he couldn't help being an honest antiquary.
When he got on the track of the truth about the Holy Well
he had to follow it up; he was not to be bamboozled with
newspaper anecdotes about Mr. Prior and a hole in the wall;
he found out everything, even to the exact location of the well,
and he was rewarded, if being a successful assassin can be
regarded as a reward."
"And how did you get on the track of all this hidden history?"
asked the young architect.
A cloud came across the brow of Horne Fisher. "I knew only too much
about it already," he said, "and, after all, it's shameful for me
to be speaking lightly of poor Bulmer, who has paid his penalty;
but the rest of us haven't. I dare say every cigar I smoke and every
liqueur I drink comes directly or indirectly from the harrying
of the holy places and the persecution of the poor. After all,
it needs very little poking about in the past to find that hole
in the wall, that great breach in the defenses of English history.
It lies just under the surface of a thin sheet of sham information
and instruction, just as the black and blood-stained well
lies just under that floor of shallow water and flat weeds.
Oh, the ice is thin, but it bears; it is strong enough to support us
when we dress up as monks and dance on it, in mockery of the dear,
quaint old Middle Ages. They told me I must put on fancy dress;
so I did put on fancy dress, according to my own taste and fancy.
I put on the only costume I think fit for a man who has inherited
the position of a gentleman, and yet has not entirely lost
the feelings of one."
In answer to a look of inquiry, he rose with a sweeping
and downward gesture.
"Sackcloth," he said; "and I would wear the ashes as well if they
would stay on my bald head."
