Henry Lennox suffered as he had not suffered even during the horrors
of war. For the first time in his life he felt fear. He lowered the
unconscious man to the ground, and knew that he was dead, for he had
looked on sudden death too often to feel in any doubt. Others, however,
were not so ready to credit this, and after he hastened downstairs with
his evil message, both Sir Walter and Masters found it hard to believe
him.
When he descended, his uncle and May were standing at the dining room
door, waiting for him and Peter Hardcastle. Mary had just joined them.
"He's dead!" was all the youth could say; then, thoroughly unnerved, he
fell into a chair and buried his face in his hands.
Again through his agency had a dead man been discovered in the Grey
Room. In each case his had been the eyes first to confront a tragedy,
and his the voice to report it. The fact persisted in his mind with a
dark obstinacy, as though some great personal tribulation had befallen
him.
Mary stopped with her cousin and asked terrified questions, while Sir
Walter, calling to Masters, hastened upstairs, followed by Septimus May.
The clergyman was also agitated, yet in his concern there persisted a
note almost of triumph.
"It is there!" he cried. "It is close to us, watching us, powerless to
touch either you or me. But this unhappy sceptic proved an easy victim."
"Would to God I had listened to you yesterday," said Sir Walter. "Then
this innocent man had not perhaps been snatched from life."
"You were directed not to listen. Your heart was hardened. His hour had
come."
"I cannot believe it. We may restore him. It is impossible that he can
be dead in a moment."
They stood over the detective, and Masters and Fred Caunter, with
courage and presence of mind, carried him out into the corridor.
The butler spoke.
"Run for the brandy, Fred," he said. "We must get some down his neck if
we can. I don't feel the gentleman's heart, but it may not have stopped.
He's warm enough."
The footman obeyed, and Hardcastle was laid upon his back. Then Sir
Walter directed Masters.
"Hold his head up. It may be better for him."
They waited, and, during the few moments before Caunter returned, Sir
Walter spoke again. His mind wandered backward and seemed for the moment
incapable of grasping the fact before him.
"Almost the last thing the man said was to ask me why ghosts haunted the
night rather than the day."
"Poor fool--poor fool! He is answered," replied the priest.
All attempts to restore the vanished life proved useless, and they
carried Hardcastle downstairs presently. Henry Lennox was already gone
for the doctor, and when, within an hour, Mannering joined them, he
could only pronounce that the man was dead. No sign of life rewarded
their protracted efforts to restore circulation. How he had come by his
end, how death had broken into his frame, it was impossible to
determine. Not an unusual sign marked the body. It revealed neither
wound nor outward evidence of shock. The case seemed parallel with that
of Thomas May. Death had struck the man like a flash of lightning and
dropped him, where he stood, making his notes by the fireplace.
Whereupon a complication faced Dr. Mannering. Mary came to him, where he
spoke in the library with Sir Walter and Henry Lennox. She implored him
to use his influence with her father-in-law; for they had forgotten
Septimus May, while hastily deliberating as to what telegrams should be
dispatched; but now they learned that Mr. May was in the Grey Boom and
refused to leave it.
"He is very excited," she said. "He is walking up and down, speaking
aloud, quoting texts from Scripture, addressing the spirit that he
believes to be listening to him. It would be grotesque were it not so
horrible. He must be made to come away."
"He is justified of his faith," declared Sir Walter. "I have withstood
him until now, but I can do so no longer."
"Indeed you must. He is playing with death," said Mannering.
They sought Tom's father, to find him, as Mary had said, walking up and
down, with fierce joy of battle on his thin, stern face and in his
shining eyes.
"Now shall the powers of Light triumph and the will of God be done!" he
said to them.
He made no demur, however, when they drew him away.
"The future is mine," he declared, and grew calm. "You cannot stand
between me and my duty again, Sir Walter. You have gravely erred, and
this is the result of your error. But you will not err a second time."
His excitation ceased, and it was he who proposed that they should
return to their forgotten meal. In the matter of the man just dead, he
revealed an indifference almost callous.
"His God will justly judge him according to his deserving," he declared.
"If he sinned through ignorance and false teaching, his punishment will
not be heavy; if he hardened his heart against truth and rejected the
faith from pride--but even then the Father of Mercy may pardon him. He
has failed, even as I knew he must, and paid a terrible penalty for
failure."
Sir Walter, sorely stricken, hardly heard the other. He ate a little at
Mary's entreaty, then, driven by some impulse to leave his
fellow-creatures and court solitude, excused himself, begged Lennox and
Mannering to bring him news when the telegram dispatched to Scotland
Yard was answered, and prepared to leave them.
As he rose, he marked his old spaniel standing whimpering by his side.
"What is the matter with Prince?" he asked.
"He has not had his dinner," said Mary.
"Let him be fed at once," answered her father, and went out alone.
She rose to follow him immediately, but Mannering, who had stopped and
was with them, begged her not to do so.
"Leave him to himself," he said. "This has shaken your father, as well
it may. He's all right. Make him take his bromide to-night, and let
nobody do anything to worry him."
The master of Chadlands meantime went afield, walked half a mile to a
favorite spot, and sat down upon a seat that he had there erected. A
storm was blowing up from the south-west, and the weather of his mind
welcomed it. He alternated between bewilderment and indignation. His
own life-long philosophy and trust in the ordered foundations of human
existence threatened to fail him entirely before this second stroke. It
seemed that the punctual universe was suddenly turned upside down, and
had emptied a vial of horror upon his innocent head.
Reality was a thing of the past. A nightmare had taken its place, a
nightmare from which there was no waking. He considered the stability
of his days--a lifetime followed upon high principles and founded on
religious convictions that had comforted his sorrows and countenanced
his joys. It seemed a trial undeserved, that in his old age he should be
thrust upon a pinnacle of publicity, forced into the public eye,
robbed of dignity, denied the privacy he esteemed as the most precious
privilege that wealth could command. Stability was destroyed; to
count upon the morrow seemed impossible. His thought, strung to a new
morbidity, unknown till now, ran on and pictured, with painful, vivid
stroke upon stroke, the insufferable series of events that lay before
him.
Life was become a bizarre and brutal business for a man of fine feeling.
He would be thrust into the pitiless mouth of sensation-mongers,
called to appear before tribunals, subjected to an inquisition of
his fellow-men, made to endure a notoriety infinitely odious even
in anticipation. Indeed, Sir Walter's simple intellect wallowed in
anticipation, and so suffered much that, given exercise of restraint, he
might have escaped altogether. He was brave enough, but personal bravery
would not be called for. He sat now staring dumbly at an imaginary
series of events abominable and unseemly in every particular to his
order of mind. He was so concerned with what the future must hold in
store for him that for a time the present quite escaped his thoughts.
He returned to it, however, and it was almost with the shock of a new
surprise he remembered that Peter Hardcastle, a man of European repute,
had just died in his house. But he could not in the least realize the
new tragedy. He had as yet barely grasped the truth of his son-in-law's
end, and still often found himself expecting Tom's footfall and his
jolly voice. That such an abundant vitality was stilled, that such an
infectious laugh would never sound again on mortal ear he yet sometimes
found it hard to believe.
But now it seemed that the impact of this second blow rammed home the
first. He brooded upon his dead son-in-law, and it was long before he
returned to the event of that day. A thought struck him, and though
elementary enough, it seemed to Sir Walter an important conclusion.
There could be no shadow of doubt that Tom May and Peter Hardcastle had
died by the same secret force. He felt that he must remember this.
Again he puzzled, and then decided with himself that, if he meant to
keep sane, he must practice faith and trust in God. Septimus May had
said that such unparalleled things sometimes happened in the world to
try man's faith. Doubtless he was right.
Henceforth the old man determined to stand firmly on the side of
the supernatural with the priest. He went further, and blamed his
scepticism. It had cost the world a valuable life. He could not, indeed,
be censured for that in any court of inquiry. Sceptical men would
doubtless say that he had done rightly in refusing Mr. May his
experiment. But Sir Walter now convinced himself that he had done
wrongly. At such a time, with landmarks vanishing and all accepted laws
of matter resolved into chaos, there remained only God to trust. Such
a burden as this was not to be borne by any mortal, and Sir Walter
determined that he would not bear it.
Were we not told to cast our tribulations before the Almighty? Here, if
ever, was a situation beyond the power of human mind to approach, unless
a man walked humbly with his hand in his Maker's. Septimus May had been
emphatically right. Sir Walter repeated this conviction to himself again
and again, like a child.
He descended to details presently. The hidden being, that it had been
implicitly agreed could only operate by night in the Grey Room, proved
equally potent under noonday sun. But why should it be otherwise? To
limit its activities was to limit its powers, and the Almighty alone
knew what powers had been granted to it. He shrank from further
inquiries or investigations on any but a religious basis. He was now
convinced that no natural explanation would exist for what had happened
in the Grey Room, and he believed that only through the paths of
Christian faith would peace return to him or his house.
Then the present dropped out of his thoughts. They wandered into the
past, and he concerned himself with his wife. She it was who had taught
him to care for foreign travel. Until his marriage he had hardly left
England, save when yachting with friends, and an occasional glimpse of a
Mediterranean port was all that Sir Walter knew of the earth outside his
own country. But he remembered with gratitude the opportunities won from
her. He had taken her round the world, and found himself much the richer
in great memories for that experience.
He was still thinking when Mary found him, with his old dog asleep at
his feet. She brought him a coat and umbrella, for the threatened storm
advanced swiftly under clouds laden with rain. Reluctantly enough he
returned to the present. A telegram had been received from London,
directing Dr. Mannering to reach the nearest telephone and communicate
direct. The doctor was gone to Newton Abbot, and nothing could be done
until he came back. Not knowing what had occupied Sir Walter's mind,
Mary urged him to leave Chadlands without delay.
"Put the place into the hands of the police and take me with you," she
said. "Nothing can be gained by our stopping, and, after this, it is
certain the authorities will not rest until they have made a far more
searching examination than has ever yet been carried out. They will feel
this disaster a challenge."
"Thankfully I would go," he answered. "Most thankfully I would avoid
what is hanging over my head. It was terrible enough when your dear
husband died; but now we shall be the centre of interest to half
England. Every instinct cries to me to get out of it, but obviously that
is impossible, even were I permitted to do so. It is the duty of the
police to suspect every man and woman under my roof--myself with the
rest. These appalling things have occurred in my home, and I must bear
the brunt of them and stand up to all that they mean. No Lennox ever ran
from his duty, however painful it might be. The death of this man--so
eminent in his calling--will attract tremendous attention and be, as you
say, a sort of direct challenge to the authorities for whom he worked.
They will resent this second tragedy, and with good reason. The poor
man, though I cannot pretend that I admired him, was a force for good in
the world, and his peculiar genius was devoted to the detection of crime
and punishment of criminals--a very worthy occupation, however painful
to our ideas."
They sat in the library now, and Henry Lennox spoke to his uncle, with
his eye on the window, waiting for the sight of the doctor's car.
"They'll want to tear the place down, very likely. They'll certainly
have no mercy on the stones and mortar, any more than they will on us."
"They can spare themselves that trouble, and you your fears," declared
Septimus May, who had joined them. "It is impossible that they will be
here until to-morrow. Meantime--"
"It is easy to see what they will do," proceeded young Lennox, "and what
they will think also. Nor can we prevent them, even if we wanted to. I
image their theory will be this. They will suppose that Mr. Hardcastle,
left in that room alone, was actually on the track of those responsible
for Tom's death. They will guess that, in some way, or by some accident,
he surprised the author of the tragedy, and the assassin, seeing his
danger, resorted to the same unknown means of murder as before. They may
imagine some hidden lunatic concealed here, whose presence is only known
to some of us. They may suspect a homicidal maniac in me, or my uncle,
or Masters, or anybody. Certainly they will seek a natural explanation
and flout the idea of any other."
The clergyman protested, but Henry was not prepared to traverse the old
ground again.
"I have as much right to my opinions as you to yours," he said. "And I
am positive this is man's work."
Then Mary announced that Mannering's car was in sight. The library
windows opened on the western side of the house and afforded a view of
the main drive, along which the doctor's little hooded car came flying,
like a dead leaf in a storm. But it was not alone. A hospital motor
ambulance followed behind it.
They soon learned of curious things, and the house was first thrown into
a great bustle and then restored to peace.
Mannering had spoken for half an hour with London, and received
directions that puzzled him not a little by their implication. For a
moment he seemed unwilling to speak before Mary. Then he begged her
bluntly to leave them for a while.
"It's this way," he said when she was gone. "They're harboring a mad
idea in London, though, of course, the facts will presently convince
them to the contrary. Surely I must know death when I see it? But a
divisional surgeon, or some other medical official, directs me to bring
this poor fellow's body to London to-night. Every care must be taken,
warmth and air applied, and so on. They've evidently got a notion
that, since life appears to go so easily in the Grey Room, and leave
no scratch or wound, either life has not gone at all, or that it may be
within the power of science to bring it back again. In a sense this is
a reflection upon me--as though it were possible that I could make any
mistake between death and suspended animation; but I must do as I'm
ordered. I travel to town with the dead man to-night, and if they find
he is anything but dead as a doornail, I'll--"
The doctor was writing his reminiscences, "The Recollections of a
Country Physician," and he could not fail to welcome these events,
for they were destined to lend extraordinary attraction to a volume
otherwise not destined to be much out of the common.
He spoke again.
"I should be very glad if you would accompany me, Lennox. I shall have
a police inspector from Plymouth; but it would be a satisfaction if you
could come. Moreover, you would help me in London."
"I'll come up, certainly. You don't mind, Uncle Walter?"
"Not if Mannering wishes it. We owe him more than we can ever repay.
Anything that we can do to lessen his labors ought to be done."
"I should certainly welcome your company. A small saloon carriage is
to be put on to the Plymouth train that leaves Newton for London before
midnight. We shall be met at Paddington by some of their doctors. And as
to Chadlands, four men arrive to-morrow morning by the same train that
Peter Hardcastle came down in last night. We shall pass them on the way.
They will take charge both of the Grey Room and the house as soon as
they arrive."
"And they will be welcome. I would myself willingly pull down Chadlands
to the foundations if by so doing I could discover the truth."
"It demands no such sacrifice," declared May, who had listened to these
facts. "Bricks and mortar, stone and timber are innocent things. One
might as soon dissect a thunder-cloud to find the lightning as destroy
material substances to discover what is hidden in this house. The
unknown being, about his Master's business here, will no more yield its
secret to four detectives, or an army of them, than it did to one. 'What
I do thou knowest not now.' It is all summed up in that."
He turned to Mannering and asked a sudden question.
"Why did you object to Mary hearing these facts? In what way should they
distress her particularly?"
"Can you not see? Indeed, one might fairly have objected to your
presence also. But you are a man. There is an implied horror of the
darkest sort for poor Mary in the suggestion that Hardcastle may still
live. If he can be brought back to life, then she would surely think
that perhaps her husband and your son might have been. Imagine the agony
of that. I speak plainly; indeed, there is no rational or sentimental
reason why I should not, for the truth is, of course, that the signs of
death were clearly evident on your poor boy before what we had to do was
done. But the bare thought must have shocked Mary. We know emphatically
that Hardcastle is dead, and we need not mention to her this fantastic
theory from London."
"I appreciate your consideration," said Sir Walter; and the clergyman
also acknowledged it.
"There can be no shadow of doubt concerning my son," he said; "nor is
there any in the matter of this unfortunate man."
Henry Lennox went to prepare for the journey. Then, obeying the
doctor's directions and treating the dead man as though he were merely
unconscious, they carried him to the ambulance car. It was an unseemly
farce in Mannering's opinion, and he only realized the painful nature
of his task when he came to undertake it; but he carried it through in
every particular as directed, conveyed the corpse to Newton after dark,
and had the ambulance bed, in which it reposed, borne to the saloon
carriage when the night mail arrived from Plymouth, between eleven and
twelve. He was able to regulate the temperature with hot steam, and kept
hot bottles to the feet and sides of the dead.
He felt impatient and resentful; he poured scorn on the superior
authority for the benefit of the inspector and Henry Lennox, who
accompanied him; but in secret he experienced emotions of undoubted
satisfaction that life had broken from its customary monotonous round
to furnish him with an adventure so unique. He pointed out a fact to the
policeman before they had started.
"You will observe," he said, with satire, "that, despite the heat we
are directed to apply to this unfortunate man, rigor mortis has set in.
Whether the authority in London regards that as an evidence of death, of
course I cannot pretend to say. Perhaps not. I may be behind the times."
Neither Mannering nor Lennox had spared much thought for those left
behind them at Chadlands. The extraordinary character of the task put
upon them sufficed to fill their minds, and it was not until the small
hours, when they sat with their hands in their pockets and the train
ran steadily through darkness and storm, that the younger spoke of his
cousin.
"I hope those old men won't bully Mary to-night," he said. "I'd meant to
ask you to give Uncle Walter a caution. May's not quite all there, in my
opinion, and very likely, now you're out of the way, he'll get round Sir
Walter about that infernal room."
Mannering became interested.
"D'you mean for an instant he wants to try his luck after what's
happened?"
"You forget. Your day has been so full that you forget what did happen."
"I do not, Lennox. Mary begged me to tackle the man. I calmed him, and
he came down to his luncheon. He must have thought over the matter since
then, and seen that he was playing with death."
"Far from it, 'The future is mine!' That's what he said. And that means
he'll try and be in the Grey Room alone to-night."
"I wish to Heaven you'd made this clear before we'd started. But
surely we can trust Sir Walter; he knows what this means, even if that
superstitious lunatic doesn't."
"I don't want to bother you," answered Henry; "but, looking back, I'm
none so sure that we can trust my uncle. He's been pretty wild to-day,
and who shall blame him? Things like this crashing into his life leave
him guessing. He's very shaken, and has lost his mental grip, too.
Reality's played him such ugly tricks that he may be tempted to fall
back on unreality now."
"You don't mean he'll let May go into that room to-night?"
"I hope not. He was firm enough last night when the clergyman clamored
to do so. In fact, he made me keep watch to see he didn't. But I think
he's weakened a lot since Hardcastle came to grief in broad daylight.
And I sha'n't be there to do anything."
"All this comes too late," answered the other. "If harm has happened--it
has happened. We can only pray they've preserved some sanity among
them."
"That's why I say I hope they're not bullying Mary," answered Lennox.
"Of course, she'd be dead against her father-in-law's idea. But she
won't count. She can't control him if Sir Walter goes over to his side."
"Let us not imagine anything so unreasonable. We'll telegraph to hear if
all's well at the first moment we can."
The storm sent a heavy wash of rain against the side of the carriage. It
was a famous tempest, that punished the South of England from Land's End
to the North Foreland.
They were distracted from their thoughts by the terrific impact of the
wind.
"Wonder we can stop on the rails," said Mannering. "This is a fifty-knot
gale, or I'm mistaken."
"I'm thinking of the Chadlands trees," answered the other. "It's rum
how, in the middle of such an awful business as this, the mind switches
off to trifles. Does it on purpose, I suppose, to relieve the strain.
Yes, the trees will catch it to-night. I expect I shall hear a grim tale
of fallen timber from Sir Walter by the time I get back to-morrow."
"If nothing's fallen but timber, I sha'n't mind," answered Mannering;
"but you've made me devilish uneasy now. If anything further went
wrong--well, to put it mildly, they would say your uncle ought to have
known a great deal better."
"He does know a great deal better. It's only that temporarily he's
knocked off his balance. But I hardly feel as anxious as you do. There's
Mary against May; and even if my uncle were for him, on a general, vague
theory of something esoteric and outside nature, which you can't fairly
call unreasonable any more, Mannering, seeing what's happened--even if
Sir Walter felt tempted to let him have his way, I don't believe he'd
really consent when it came to the point."
"I hope not--I hope not," answered the other. "Such a concession would
take a lot of explanation if the result were another of these disasters.
There ought to be an official guard over the room."
"After to-morrow there certainly will be," replied Henry. "You may be
sure the police won't leave it again till they've satisfied themselves.
All the same, I don't see how a dozen of them will be any safer than
one--even if it's some material and physical thing that happens, as
we must suppose. And for that matter, if it's really supernatural, why
should a dozen be safer than one? Obviously they wouldn't. Whatever it
is, it can strike as it likes and without being struck back."
But Dr. Mannering did not answer these questions. He was considering
a little book in his pocket, which he would hand over to the police in
London next morning.
"Poor chap--if he could have begun by taking the problem by the throat,
as he has written here. But, instead, it took him by the throat!"
He took Hardcastle's notebook from his pocket and read again the last
few pages.
"He was dreaming of his theories to the last, when he should surely
have been girt up in every limb to face facts," said Lennox. "He never
realized the horrible danger."
Perusal of the detective's data had revealed an interesting fact. It
was known by his colleagues that he designed a book on the theory and
practice of criminal investigations, and in many of his pocket-books,
subsequently examined, were found memoranda and jottings, doubtless
destined to be worked out at another time. It was clear that he had, for
a few moments, drifted away from the Grey Room in thought when his
death overtook him. Past events, not present problems, were apparently
responsible for the reflections that occupied his mind. He was not
concentrating on the material phenomena actually under his observation
when he died, but following some private meditations provoked by his
experiences.
"Elimination embraces the secret of success," he had written. "Exercise
the full force of your intelligence and spare no pains to eliminate from
every case all matter not bearing directly upon the actual problem. Nine
times out of ten the issue is direct, and once permit side issues to
draw their tracks across it, once admit metaphysical lines of reasoning,
the result will be confusion and a problem increasing in complexity
at every stage. Only in romances, where a plot is invented and then
complicated by deliberate art, shall we find the truth ultimately
permitted to appear in some subordinate incident, or individual,
studiously kept in the background--that is the craft of telling
detective stories. But, in truth, one needs to lay hold of the problem
by the throat at the outset. Deception is too much the province of the
criminal and too little the business of the investigator; and where it
may be possible to creep, like a snake, into a case, unknown for what
you truly are, then your opportunities and chances of success are
enormously increased. It is, however, the exception when one can start
without the knowledge of anybody involved, and the Scotland Yard of the
future will pursue its business under very different circumstances from
the present. The detective's work should be made easier and not
more difficult. None should know who is working on a case. The law's
representatives should be disguised and move among the characters
surrounding the crime as something other than they really are. They
will--"
Here Hardcastle's reflections came to an end. Some previous notes there
were of superficial accidents in the Grey Room and a rough ground plan
of it; but nothing more. He had evidently, for the time being, broken
away from his environment and was merely thinking, with a pen on paper,
when he died.