Part 13

"No," he protested violently--too violently unless the accusation were true.

"Yes," she repeated, nodding her head quietly. "You, too, believe that Mildmay Channing is here."

And before her horror-stricken face the protest which was on the tip of his tongue remained unuttered. His eyes sought the floor. With a sudden movement of despair Linda turned aside. Even the earthliness of Mr. Glynn had brought her no comfort or security. He had fallen under the spell, as she had done. It seemed that they had no more words to speak to one another. They stood and waited helplessly until Thresk should return.

But that return was delayed.

"He has been a long time speaking to the keeper," said Linda listlessly, and rather to break a silence which was becoming intolerable, than with any intention in the words. But they struck a chord of terror in Glynn's thoughts. He walked quickly to the window, and hastily tore the curtain aside.

The flurry of his movements aroused Linda's attention. She followed him with her eyes. She saw him curve his hands about his forehead and press his face against the pane, even as Thresk had done an hour before. She started forward from the fireplace and Glynn swung round with his arms extended, barring the window. His face was white, his lips shook. The one important statement of Thresk's he now recalled.

"Don't look!" he cried, and as he spoke, Linda pushed past him. She flung up the window. Outside the fog curled and smoked upon the marsh breast high. The moonlight played upon it; above it the air was clear and pure, and in the sky stars shone faintly. Above the mist the bare sapling stood like a pointing finger, and halfway between the sapling and the house Thresk's head and shoulders showed plain to see. But they were turned away from the house.

"Jim! Jim!" cried Linda, shaking the window-frame with her hand. Her voice rang loudly out on the still air. But Thresk never so much as turned his head. He moved slowly towards the sapling, feeling the unstable ground beneath him with his feet.

"Jim! Jim!" again she cried. And behind her she heard a strange, unsteady whispering voice.

"'On equal terms!' That's what he said--I did not understand. He said, 'On equal terms.'"

And even as Glynn spoke, both Linda and he saw Thresk throw up his arms and sink suddenly beneath the bog. Linda ran to the door, stumbling as she ran, and with a queer, sobbing noise in her throat.

Glynn caught her by the arm.

"It is of no use. You know. Round the sapling--there is no chance of rescue. It is my fault, I should have understood. He had no fear of Channing--if only he could meet him on equal terms."

Linda stared at Glynn. For a little while the meaning of the words did not sink into her mind.

"He said that!" she cried. "And you did not tell me." She crept back to the fireplace and cowered in front of it, shivering.

"But he said he would come back to me," she said in the voice of a child who has been deceived. "Yes, Jim said he would come back to me."

Of course it was a chance, accident, coincidence, a breath of wind--call it what you will, except what Linda Thresk and Glynn called it. But even as she uttered her complaint, "He said he would come back to me," the latch of the door clicked loudly. There was a rush of cold air into the room. The door swung slowly inwards and stood wide open.

Linda sprang to her feet. Both she and Glynn turned to the open door. The white fog billowed into the room. Glynn felt the hair stir and move upon his scalp. He stood transfixed. Was it possible? he asked himself. Had Thresk indeed come back to fight for Linda once more, and to fight now as he had fought the first time--on equal terms? He stood expecting the white fog to shape itself into the likeness of a man. And then he heard a wild scream of laughter behind him. He turned in time to catch Linda as she fell.

THE BROWN BOOK

THE BROWN BOOK

A few friends of Murgatroyd, the physician, sat about his dinner-table, discussing that perplexing question, "How much of the truth should a doctor tell?" In the middle of the discussion a quiet voice spoke up from a corner, and all turned towards a middle-aged man of European reputation who sat fingering the stem of his wine-glass.

"It is dangerous to lay down a general rule," said Sir James Kelsey. "But I should say, if you want to keep a secret tell half the truth. People accept it and pass on to their own affairs." He hesitated for a moment and continued, rather slowly: "I am thinking of a tremendous secret which has been kept that way for a good number of years. I call it the story of the Brown Book."

At once the discussion ceased. It was so seldom that Kelsey indulged in anything like a confidence. Now on this one evening amongst his brethren it seemed that he was in the mood to talk.

"All of you will remember the name of John Rymer, and some of you his meteoric career and the tragic circumstances of his death. There was no doubt that he was a master of surgery. Yet at the age of thirty-seven, at eleven o'clock on a July morning, after performing three operations with all his accustomed skill, he walked into his consulting-room and blew his brains out."

Here and there a voice was raised.

"Yes, I remember."

"It was overwork, I think."

Sir James Kelsey smiled.

"Exactly," he said. "That's the half-truth. Overwork there was. I am familiar with the details of the inquest, for I married John Rymer's niece. It was proved, for instance, that during the last week of his life he had been curtailing his operations and spending more time over his dressings--a definite policy of his when the strain became too heavy. Moreover, there was some mention made of a sudden reasonless fear which had attacked him, a fear that his practice was dropping away, and that he would be left with a wife and young family to support, and no means to do it with. Well, we all know round this table that that particular terror is one of the commonest results of overwork. So overwork there undoubtedly was. A spell of tropical heat no doubt, too, had its effect. Anyway, here was enough for a quite acceptable verdict, and so the world thought. The usual platitudes about the tension of modern life made their appearance. The public read, accepted, and passed on to its own affairs. But behind John Rymer's death there lay a tremendous secret."

Once more he hesitated. Then he took a cigar from the box which his host held out to him, and said, in a kind of rush: "No one could make any use of it now. For there's no longer any evidence but my word, and I should deny it. It's overwork John Rymer died of. Let us not forget it."

And then he told the story of the Brown Book. At the end of it his cigar was still alight, for he smoked while he talked. But it was the only cigar alight in that room.

I was twenty-five, and I had bought a practice at Chailsey, a village deep amongst tall, dark trees in the very heart of the Berkshire Downs. You'll hardly find a place more pastoral and remote in all that country of remote villages. But a couple of training stables were established there, and, what with kicks and jumping accidents, there was a good deal of work at times. I quite liked the spot, and I liked it still more when Bradley Rymer and his daughter took the big house on the slope of the Down above the village.

John Rymer, the surgeon, had then been dead eight months, and Bradley Rymer was his brother, a shortish, broad man of forty-five with a big, pleasant face. Gossip had it that he had been very poor, so poor, indeed, that his daughter had made her living at a typewriting machine. There was no doubt, however, that he was rich now. "Canada's the country," he used to say. "I made my money out of Canadian land," and when he fell into conversation of a morning with any of the stable-boys on the gallops he was always urging them to better themselves in that country.

His daughter Violet--a good many of you know her as my wife--had little of his fore-gathering disposition. She was an extremely pretty girl of nineteen, with eyes which matched her name. But she held herself apart. She seldom came down into the village, and even when one met her in her own house there was a constraint in her manner and a look upon her face which I was at a loss to understand. It wasn't merely trouble. It was a kind of perplexity, as though she did not know where to turn. For the rest, the couple did not entertain.

"We have had hard lives," Bradley Rymer said to me one rare evening when I dined there, "and a year or two of quiet is what we want beyond everything." And never did man speak a truer word.

Bradley Rymer had lived for three months at Chailsey when Queen Victoria died, and all the great kings and the little kings flocked from Europe to her funeral. We at Chailsey--like the rest of Great Britain--determined to set up a memorial, and a committee of five was appointed to determine the form it was to take.

"It must be a drinking-fountain," said I.

"No; a stained-glass window," the vicar interrupted; and there we were, Grayly the trainer and I on one side, the vicar and Hollams the grocer on the other. The fifth member of the committee was absent.

"Well, I shall go up and see Mr. Bradley Rymer this afternoon," I said. "He has the casting vote."

"You may do just as you please," said the vicar, with some acerbity--Bradley Rymer did not go to church; "but until Mr. Bradley Rymer condescends to be present at our committee meetings, I shall pay not the slightest attention to his opinion."

Thereupon the committee broke up. I had a good many visits to pay to patients, and it was close upon eight o'clock when I set out upon my walk, and darker than it usually is at that time of the year. Bradley Rymer, I knew, did not dine until late, and I hoped to catch him just before he and Violet sat down.

The house stood a good half-mile from the village, even by the short cut which I took up the side of the Down. It was a big, square Georgian house with rows of high, flat windows; a large garden of lawns and flowers and beech trees surrounded it; and the whole property was enclosed in high red-brick walls. I was kept for a little while at the great wrought-iron gates. That always happened. You rang the big bell, the corner of a white curtain was cautiously lifted in the window of the lodge, you were inspected, and at last the gates swung open. Berkshire people were slow in those days, and, like most country-folk, curious. I walked up the drive to the house. The front door stood open. I rang the bell. A big mastiff came out from the hall and sniffed at me. But we were good friends, and he retired again to the corner. Finally a maid-servant appeared. It was perhaps a curious fact that Bradley Rymer had no man-servant living in the house.

"A butler is a spy you set upon yourself," he once said to me. Another case of the half-truth, you see. I accepted it, and passed on to my own affairs. So when only a maid answered the bell I was not surprised.

"Can I see Mr. Rymer?" I asked.

"He is in the library, I think, sir," she answered.

"Very well. I know my way." And, putting down my hat, I climbed the stairs.

The library was a long, comfortably-furnished room upon the first floor, lighted by a row of windows upon one side and lined to the ceiling with bookshelves upon the other. Rymer had a wonderful collection of books bound in vellum and calf, but he had bought the lot at a sale, and I don't think he ever read one of them. However, he liked the room, and it was the one which he usually used.

I opened the door and went into the library. But the servant had been mistaken. The library was empty. I waited, however, and while I waited a noise in the next room attracted my attention. I don't think that I was conscious of it at first, for when I did notice it, It seemed to me that the room had perceptibly darkened. It was so familiar a noise, too, that one wouldn't notice it unless there were some special unsuitability of time and place to provoke one's curiosity. For a busy man walks through life to the sound of it. It was the sharp tack-tack-tack of a typewriting machine, with the little clang and break when the end of a line is reached. I listened to it first of all surprised at the relentless rapidity with which the machine was worked, and then, wondering why at this hour, in this house of leisure and wealth, so tremendous an assiduity was being employed. Then in a rush the gossip of the village came back to me. Violet Rymer, in the days of her father's poverty, had made her living in a typewriting office. Yes; but why should she continue so monotonous a practice now? I couldn't think that she, if it were she, was keeping up her proficiency for amusement. You can always tell whether the typist is interested or whether she is working against time from the sound of the machine. In the former case it becomes alive, one is conscious of a personality; in the latter one thinks of an absent-minded clergyman gabbling through the Lessons in church.

Well, it was just that last note which was being struck. The machine was racing to the end of a wearisome task, and, since already Violet Rymer was very much to me, I thought with a real discomfort of her bending over the keys. Moreover, I seemed to be stumbling upon a secret which I was not meant to know. Was this tack-tack-tacking the explanation of why Chailsey saw so little of her?

While I was asking myself this question a door opened and shut violently. It was the door into that next room, and as it was banged the typewriting ceased altogether. There was a moment's pause, and then a voice was raised in passion. It was Bradley Rymer's voice, but I hardly recognised it.

"What is it now?" he cried, bitterly. "A novel, a volume of sermons, a pamphlet? Am I never to see you, Violet? You remain hidden in this room, breaking your back for sixpence an hour. Why, I bought this house for you. My one aim was to get rich for you." And the girl interrupted him with an agonised cry.

"Oh, don't say that, father!"

"But I do say it." And suddenly his voice softened. "It's true, Vi. You know it's true. The one thing I hated was that you should lose all the fun of your youth at that grinding work. And now you're still at it. Why? Why?"

And through the door came her voice, in a passionate, broken reply:

"Because--because--I feel--that not even the clothes I am wearing really belong to me."

The dispute suddenly ceased. A third voice spoke so low that I could not hear the words, but I heard Bradley Rymer's startled reply:

"In the library?"

I had just time to get away into the farthest window before he entered the room. It was almost dark now, and he peered about in search of me. I moved from the window towards him.

"Oh, you are there, Kelsey," he said, suavely. "We'll have a light. It's so confoundedly dark that I can hardly see you."

He rang a bell and a lamp was brought, which he took from the hands of the servant and set down on the corner of his writing-table between us.

"How long have you been here?" he asked, and--I can't account for it--he stood facing me in his dinner-jacket, with his usual pleasant, friendly smile; but I suddenly became quite sure that he was dangerous. Yes, that's the word--dangerous.

"Just a minute or so," I answered, as indifferently as I could, and then, with a strangely swift movement, he crossed the room again to the fireplace and rang the bell. "Will you tell Miss Violet that Dr. Kelsey is here?" he said to the parlourmaid, as soon as she appeared. "You will find her in the next room."

He came softly back and seated himself at the writing-table.

"And why do you want to see me?" he asked, in a queer voice.

I spoke about the memorial, and he answered at random. He was listening, but he was not listening to me. In a sort of abstraction he drew open a drawer in his writing-table on a level with his hand, and every now and then he shut it, and every now and then he drew it open again.

I cannot hope to make you realise the uncanny feeling of discomfort which crept over me. Most of us at this table, I imagine, have some knowledge of photography and its processes. We have placed a gaslight paper in the developing-dish, and seen the face of our portrait flash out in a second on the white surface. I can never get accustomed to it. I can never quite look upon it as not a miracle. Well, just that miracle seemed to me to be happening now. Bradley Rymer suddenly became visible to me, a rogue, a murderous rogue, and I watched with an increasing fear that drawer in his table. I waited for his hand to slip into it.

But while I waited the door of the next room was opened, and Rymer and I both ceased to talk. We pretended no more. We listened, and, _although we heard voices, we could not distinguish words_. Both Violet and the servant were speaking in their ordinary tones, and Rymer and I were now on the far side of the room. An expression of immense relief shone upon Bradley Rymer's face for a moment, and he rose up with the smile and the friendliness I knew.

"Will you stay to dinner?" he asked. "Do!" But I dared not. I should have betrayed the trouble I was in. I made a lame excuse and left the house.

It was now quite dark, and in the cool night air I began, before I had reached the lodge, to wonder whether I had not been misled altogether by some hallucination. Bradley Rymer brought to my memory the tragic case of his brother, and I asked myself for a moment if the long and late hours of a country practice were unbalancing me. But I looked back towards the house as I took the track over the turf, and the scene through which I had passed returned too vividly to leave me in any doubt. I could see Bradley Rymer clearly as he opened and shut the drawer of his writing-table. I could hear his voice raised in bitter reproach to Violet and the click of the typewriting machine. No, I had not been dreaming.

I had walked about a hundred yards down the slope when a sharp whistle of two notes sounded a little way off upon my right, and almost before I had stopped a man sprang from the grass at my very feet with a guttural cry like a man awakened from a doze. Had I taken another step I should have trodden upon him. The next moment the light from an electric torch flashed upon my face, blinding me. I stepped back and put up my hand to my eyes. But even while I raised my hand the button of the torch was released and the light went out. I stood for a moment in utter blackness, then dimly I became aware of some one moving away from in front of me.

"What do you want?" I cried.

"Nothing," was the word spoken in answer.

I should have put the fellow down for one of the gipsies who infest those Downs in the summer, and thought no more about him, but for one reason. He had spoken with a pronounced German accent. Besides, there was the warning whistle, the flash of the torch. I could not resist the conviction that Bradley Rymer's house was being watched.

I walked on without quickening my pace, for perhaps a hundred yards. Then I ran, and as fast as I could, down to the village. I did not stop to reason things out. I was in a panic. Violet was in that house, and it was being watched by strangers. We had one policeman in the village, and he not the brainiest of men. I got out my bicycle and rode fourteen miles, walking up the hills and coasting down them until I reached the town of Reading. I rode to the house of the Chief Constable, whom I happened to know.

"Is Captain Bowyer in?" I asked of the servant.

"No, sir; he's dining out to-night."

"In the town?"

"Yes, sir."

I was white with dust and wet through with sweat. The girl looked me over and said:

"I have orders to telephone for him if he is wanted."

"He is," I replied, and she went off to the telephone at once.

I began to cool down in more ways than one while I waited. It seemed to me very likely that I had come upon a fool's errand. After all, what had I got to go upon but a German accent, a low, sharp whistle, and an electric torch? I waited about half an hour before Bowyer came in. He was a big man, with a strong face and a fair moustache, capable, but not imaginative; and I began my story with a good deal of diffidence. But I had not got far before his face became serious, though he said not a word until I had done.

"Bradley Rymer's house," he then remarked. "I know it." He went out into the passage, and I heard his voice at the telephone. He came back in a moment.

"I have sent for some men," he said, "and a car. Will you wait here while I change?"

"Yes."

I glanced at the clock. For now that he took the affair seriously all my fears had returned.

"What time did you leave the house?" he asked.

"Nine."

"And it's now eleven. Yes, we must hurry. Bradley Rymer's house! So that's where they are."

He hurried away. But before he had changed his clothes a great touring motor-car whirred and stopped in front of the door. When we went out on to the steps of the house there were four constables waiting. We climbed into the car, and the hilly road to Streatley, which had taken me so long and painful a time to traverse, now rose and fell beneath the broad wheels like the waves of a sea. At Streatley we turned uphill along the Aldworth Road, and felt the fresh wind of the downland upon our faces. Then for the first time upon the journey I spoke.

"You know these men?" I asked of Captain Bowyer.

"I know of them," he answered, and he bent forwards to me. "With all these kings and emperors in London for the funeral, of course a great many precautions were taken on the Continent. All the known Anarchists were marked down; most of them on some excuse or another were arrested. But three slipped through the net and reached England."

"But they would be in London," I urged.

"So you would think. We were warned to-day, however, that they had been traced into Berkshire and there lost sight of."

A hundred questions rose to my lips, but I did not put them. We were all in the dark together.

"That's the house," I said at length, and Captain Bowyer touched the chauffeur on the shoulder.

"We'll stop, then, by the road."

Very quietly we got out of the car and crept up the hill. The night was dark; only here and there in a chink of the clouds a star shone feebly. Down in the village a dog barked and the wind whistled amongst the grasses under our feet. We met no one. The lodge at the gates was dark; we could not see the house itself, but a glare striking upon the higher branches of the trees in the garden showed that a room was brightly lit.

"Do you know which room that is?" Bowyer asked of me in a whisper.

"The library."

We spread out then and made a circuit of the garden wall. There was no one any longer watching, and we heard no whistle.

"They have gone," I said to Bowyer.

"Or they are inside," he replied, and as he spoke we heard feet brushing upon the grass and a constable loomed up in front of us.

"This way, sir," he whispered. "They are inside."

We followed him round to the back of the garden. Just about the middle of that back wall the men stood in a cluster. We joined them, and saw that an upright ladder rose to the parapet. On the other side of the wall a thick coppice of trees grew, dark and high. Without a word, one after another we mounted the ladder and let ourselves down by the trees into the garden. A few paces took us to the edge of the coppice, and the house stood in the open before us. Standing in the shadow of the branches, we looked up. The house was in complete darkness but for the long row of library windows upon the first floor. In these, however, the curtains were not drawn, and the light blazed out upon the green foliage. There was no sound, no sign of any disorder. Once more I began to think that I had brought Bowyer and his men here upon a fool's errand. I said as much to him in a whisper.