whole blessed night away. I'm jolly lonesome."
Young Raynor went on snoring serenely, and neither answered nor moved.
Still Cleek was taking no chances. He repeated the operation with
greater force and louder spoken words, and finding it produced no
effect, finally shook the man so hard that his head lolled over on one
arm and let the hidden face come into sight.
The jaw hung loose, the scooped cheeks and pendulous lip gleamed pale as
ivory, and the whites of his eyes shone like narrow bands of silver
through the slits of their half-closed lids.
There was no question whatsoever regarding the man's condition.
Satisfied now, Cleek felt his pulse, pushed up one of his eyelids and
examined the eye itself. The pupil was largely dilated, the white
suffused considerably, and both were slightly filmed.
"Hum-m-m!" he breathed conclusively, then turned from the man and looked
at the decanters and glasses on the littered table. "Port, Brandy,
Benedictine, Scotch. To be sure! to be sure! Who is to know the taste of
a mere guest in the matter of his after-dinner drink? So, if it is put
in _all_----" He took up the decanters one by one, sampled their
contents in turn, and smiled one of his queer crooked smiles when he set
the last one down.
"Clever, very clever, my friend," he said. "And who was to tell you that
the guest would not drink at all?"
Then he turned on his heel suddenly and left the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE OPEN WINDOW
He had scarcely taken a dozen steps down the hallway, however, before he
encountered General Raynor, who had just then reentered the house by the
front door.
His rugged old face wore a look of deep anxiety, as though the exciting
scene through which he had so recently passed bore heavily upon his
spirits, despite Cleek's attempt to allay his distress by branding
Dollops as a possible sneak thief; but he brightened perceptibly and
made a valiant effort to appear quite at his ease when he looked up and
saw Cleek.
"Get your call over the telephone all right, Mr. Barch?" he inquired
pleasantly.
"Yes, thanks," said Cleek serenely, still keeping up his "Johnnie" air.
"Awfully obliged to you, I'm sure. Dickens of an important message.
Should have been in no end of a hole if I hadn't received it. But I say,
General, you ought to be more careful, you know, especially with sneak
thieves about."
"As how, Mr. Barch?"
"Why, that blessed swing window in the library. I found the thing
unfastened, don't you know."
He hadn't, of course, for he had not been near it. But his statement
undeniably agitated the General, though he made a brave effort to
disguise it.
"Did you?" he said. "That's peculiar. I never noticed it. I must speak
to Johnston about it; it's his duty to see that it is locked, and I
supposed he had done so. Still, it's of no great consequence as it
happens. The sneak thief didn't enter by that way, I am sure."
"No, but he might easily have done so; and if he had come in there while
you were alone you might have had a warm time of it; don't you think so,
eh, what?"
"I fancy _he_ would have had a warm time of it, as you express it, Mr.
Barch. I'm not so old but I know how to take care of myself, believe
me."
"No, I suppose not," said Cleek. "Had a jolly lot of practice in your
young days--with the gloves and all that. Forty-fifth Queen's Own used
to have a national reputation for the best boxers and wrestlers in the
service, I'm told. Suppose it was the same in your day; and you got a
lot of practice out there in Simla in your subaltern days."
"You are wrong in both particulars. I did not belong to the Forty-fifth
Queen's Own, Mr. Barch, and I was not billeted to India. I passed out of
Sandhurst into the Imperial Blues, and from the time I was twenty-two
until I was twenty-six I was stationed at Malta."
Cleek made a mental tally of those two statements.
"Oh, I see; mistake on my part," he said serenely. "Malta was it? And
the Imperial Blues? Thought Harry said the other. I've got a rotten
memory. But it doesn't matter which, does it, so long as you learned the
trick, and are able to put up a stiff fight and floor a burglar still?
I'll lay you could floor one in short order, too, when I come to look at
you," he went on, glancing the General up and down with apparent
admiration. "Lord! shouldn't like to run foul of you when your temper's
up. Built like a blessed gladiator. Shoulders on you like a giant; arms
like--mind if I feel what they're like?"
Impudently taking hold of him before he could reply or resent the
familiarity, Cleek moved the General's forearm up as if to see the
swelling of the biceps.
"That's what I call muscle!" he exclaimed. "What a wrist! What a fist to
floor a man or---- Hullo! been flooring some one since I left you,
General? Big green smudge on your cuff, as if you'd been up against a
mossy wall? Didn't get into a scrap with Sir Philip after I left you,
did you, eh?"
There was no gainsaying it, the General's face grew absolutely white as
he looked down and saw that green smudge on the white cuff which
protruded beyond the sleeve of his evening coat. It was evident he had
not noticed it before.
"No, certainly I have _not_!" he rapped out sharply as he plucked away
his arm. "Sir Philip Clavering has gone home. And if you will pardon my
saying it, Mr. Barch, I object to being handled."
"Awful sorry; did it before I thought," said Cleek vacantly. "No
offence, eh? Because, you know, none was meant. Ought to have
remembered; ought to have remembered half a dozen things when I come to
think of it. One of 'em is that you and Sir Philip weren't likely to
scrap like a couple of drunken navvies; and t'other is that you couldn't
have got wall-moss on your cuff if you had, when there wasn't any wall
where I left you. So you couldn't have got it there, of course."
"And as that settles it, I think we can abandon the subject with profit
to both, Mr. Barch," said the General stiffly. "As a matter of fact, I
don't know where nor how I did get the smudge; and it's of no
consequence anyway. And now, if you will pardon me, I'll ring for
Johnston to lock up the house--we always retire to bed early at the
Grange, Mr. Barch--and have a wee drappie o' whisky and turn in. The
evening has been unpleasantly eventful, and I feel the need of something
in the way of stimulant."
"So do I, by Jove! Never drank a blessed drop to-night, didn't feel up
to it, don't you know; but if you don't mind my toddling into the
dining-room and helping myself----"
"By all means do so, Mr. Barch, by all means!" interposed the General
with something akin to eagerness. "You will find plenty there. Help
yourself."
"Thanks very much. But come to think of it, you haven't had a drink
to-night, either. Told Hawkins you didn't feel like it, I recollect."
"No, I didn't at the time, but I certainly require it now; so if----"
"Good business!" interjected Cleek airily. "Come in and let's have one
together. Harry's asleep, so I shan't have any company; and as I never
like to drink alone, and you are my host, and there's plenty in the
dining-room----"
"Pray don't think me discourteous, Mr. Barch," interposed the General
blandly, "but I think I will take my whisky hot this evening; and as I
make a practice of never taking a hot whisky until I am safely between
the sheets, will you pardon me if I do not join you, but have mine
served in my bedroom to-night?"
"Yes, certainly," said Cleek. "Only if I'm left to drink alone I'm apt
to take two or three instead of one, and my doctor says I oughtn't to,
don't you know."
"Doctors are not infallible, Mr. Barch; they often make errors.
Good-night."
"Good-night," said Cleek. "But if I have a headache in the morning--oh,
well, I can't help it. If I have one I'll have it I suppose. Here goes!"
He walked back along the hall and went into the dining-room and shut the
door, leaning heavily against it and breathing through his shut teeth
the one word, "God!"
The footsteps of the General clicked off down the hall, but Cleek never
stirred, never moved a muscle, until their dwindling sound dropped off
into sudden silence and all was still. Then, as softly as any cat, he
twitched round, opened the door, closed it after him, and stood alone in
the hall.
He moved on tiptoe to the library. The door was closed. He stopped and
listened.
The faint rustling sound of papers told its own story. The General had
not gone to his bedroom, he was in there!
With fleet, unsounding steps Cleek moved from that closed door to the
open one of the drawing-room, remembering what Ailsa had said of how
Mrs. Raynor had dozed over her coffee while they waited for him to come,
and of how, after Hamer had carried in his note, the good lady had
rallied the girl, and then gone off to bed because, she said, she was
sleepy--sleepy at half-past eight o'clock!
Taking into consideration the events of the evening, he had counted upon
the possibility of something happening; and the moment he entered that
room and looked round him he knew that it had done so.
The butler's evening off; the excitement and distraction occasioned by
that screaming police whistle sounding from the grounds and sending all
the servants flocking out. These things had conspired to upset the
routine of things as they should be in a well-regulated house; and lo!
the silver tray and the coffee service and the cups, used and unused
alike, had been overlooked, and there they still were, awaiting removal.
And beside them stood a liqueur stand with Chartreuse, Benedictine,
Creme de Menthe, and a half-dozen tiny Venetian glasses.
Liqueurs with coffee! He went over and looked at the glasses; so much,
so very much, depended upon that. If more than one had been used; if
Ailsa, too, had taken liqueur---- No, she had not! Only one glass had
been used, and Mrs. Raynor had gone to bed!
He rubbed the tip of his finger round the inner side of that one used
glass, and put it to his tongue.
The wine and the spirits in the decanters on the table of the
dining-room had all tasted alike. This liqueur tasted like them.
He made no comment, wasted no time. The instant he had decided that
point he left the room and went back to the hall and to the gardens
beyond the entrance.
Ailsa Lorne waited for him at the shrubbery; but it was not to the
shrubbery he went! His way lay round the angle of the house, past the
path to the ruin, past the windows of the dining-room where a drugged
man lay, and on through the darkness, until he stood in the shelter of
the trees directly opposite a broad stone terrace, upon which the
swinging French window of the library gave.
It was bright with inner light, when first he came in sight of it; but
he had barely halted before that light went out--and left it as black as
pitch.
But a moment later Cleek drew farther back in the shadow of the trees.
He had warned General Raynor to be careful to lock that window, and now
here he was not only disregarding that warning, but pushing the sashes
wide apart.
"Coming again, is she, General?" said Cleek in the soundless words of
thought. "A bad move, my friend, a very bad move. One may not recognize
a man's voice from a simple 'Sh-h-h!' but when he steps out of a library
with a black mud-spot on the toe of his house shoes and a green smudge
on his cuff----"
He stopped and crouched back under the trees, and was very, very still.
Through the darkness a faint rustling sound had suddenly risen, the soft
falling of a foot, the careful passage of a body between lines of
leaves.
Some one was advancing cautiously toward that darkened and opened
window.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE VIEW HALLOO
That the nocturnal visitor would prove to be Lady Clavering Cleek had
not the smallest shadow of a doubt, although he marvelled much at her
temerity in venturing into the grounds of the Grange after that
experience at the wall door so short a time previously, and he therefore
remained as breathless and as still as the shadows surrounding him, and
waited the coming of events. Not, however, without some slight feeling
of disappointment at the thought that, intricate and puzzling as this
case had been, it now promised to be solved in such a tame and paltry
manner; for if the newcomer should prove to be Lady Clavering, as,
naturally, he had every reason for supposing, the affair would resolve
itself into simply playing the part of eavesdropper at her interview
with the General, and then making capital of the information thus
obtained.
The intruder was advancing with extreme caution, but lacking his own
peculiar gift of soundless stepping and noiseless movement, did not
succeed in passing between hedge and coppice without the betraying
rustle of disturbed leaves; and it was out of this circumstance the
mischief which followed was formed.
The shrubbery where Ailsa was waiting lay but a rope's cast distant from
the spot where Cleek now crouched; and as if the ill-luck which had
balked him once before to-night was intent upon flooring him at all
quarters, he had no sooner grasped the unwelcome fact--made manifest by
the clearer sound of the approaching body as it came into closer
range--that the steps were advancing in a direct line with that
shrubbery than a thin, eager whisper pierced the stillness.
It was the voice of Miss Lorne, saying cautiously, yet distinctly:
"Goodness gracious! Why, Purviss! You don't mean to tell me it's you?"
Purviss! Not Lady Clavering, but Geoff Clavering's old valet, Purviss?
Here was a facer to be sure. Well, well, you never can tell which way a
cat will jump, and that's a fact.
Purviss, eh? So he, too, was in the know, was he? Of course he must be,
to be playing the role of Mercury and carrying messages between them in
this secret manner. Cleek decided to have a look at Mr. Purviss, and a
word or two as well, by George! For now, of course, he would make no
attempt to go near that window.
The thought had no sooner presented itself to him than he acted upon it.
With the speed of a hound, but with no more noise than a moving shadow,
he left his hiding-place, skirted the house, got round to the front of
it, crawled up the steps, then, rising suddenly, appeared to come out of
the doorway and down the steps whistling, as he descended to the gardens
and moved leisurely along in the direction of the shrubbery.
When he was within a foot of it he suddenly stopped, pulled out his
cigarette case, struck a match as if for the purpose of smoking, and by
the aid of that light saw standing within a yard of him Miss Ailsa Lorne
in close conversation with a mild-mannered, mild-faced elderly person,
upon whom the word "valet" was clearly written.
"Hullo, Miss Lorne, enjoying an evening ramble, too? May I be allowed to
join you?"
"With pleasure, Mr. Barch," said Ailsa. Then she motioned toward the
valet, who had stepped meekly back.
"Purviss has just come over from Lady Clavering to inquire for Mr.
Geoffrey----"
"Ah, yes," said Cleek, smiling to himself unnoticed in the dark. "He
left this afternoon, did he not? You have evidently just missed Sir
Philip, who was himself here."
"Yes," added Ailsa, "I was just telling him, but it seems he has a
message for General Raynor from Lady Clavering----"
"I thought as much," said Cleek to himself triumphantly, though aloud he
remarked, calmly enough: "Ah! but the General has gone to bed. I heard
him say that he was not to be disturbed, but if you care to give any
message or letter, I'll go and knock him up."
"Oh, no, there's no need to do that, sir," replied Purviss hurriedly.
"It's only a request for a gardening book if I happened to see General
Raynor; of no importance at all, sir."
"I quite understand," said Cleek, the smile on his face hidden in the
screening darkness.
"As for Mr. Geoffrey," put in Ailsa kindly, "he is quite safe. He went
up to town on an errand for Lady Katharine----"
"Thank you, Miss," returned Purviss respectfully. "That will be a relief
to her ladyship to know that. She was very anxious. Good-night, Miss!
Good-night, sir!" With a deferential salute, the man turned and
disappeared swiftly into the night.
"You see now," said Ailsa, "that I was right, that Geoff's absence would
create such a panic at the Close that they would scour the place for
news of him. First his father, and now Purviss. I thought you would be
satisfied as to the truth of his mission directly I spoke."
"Yes," said Cleek quietly, "but he did not come here to seek Geoff
Clavering. That was a lie. He came for the purpose of having an
interview with some one else, and for the second time this night, Miss
Lorne, you have unfortunately prevented me from hearing something which
might have cleared this mystery up without any further search on my
part. You remember how I rushed past you at the time when Dollops had
set me on the track of the lady in pink? She came and she had an
interview, or, at least, she had the beginning of an interview, with the
man she was there to see. What's that? No, she was not Margot. She was
Lady Clavering. Sh-h-h! Quiet! Quiet! Yes, she was Lady Clavering. And
she had just accused the man she came to meet of having murdered De
Louvisan, when your approach startled the pair of them and made them
separate hurriedly. Miss Lorne, can you stand a shock? Good! Then hold
your nerves under tight control. The man Lady Clavering met at the wall
door to-night was the master of this house, General Raynor!"
She all but collapsed when she heard that.
"General Raynor?" she breathed in a horrified voice. "General Raynor?
And Lady Clavering? Oh, but why, but how? Dear Mr. Cleek, it--it is like
some horrible dream! What possible connection could there be between
those two people of all others?"
"I don't know. I have a suspicion--it is my business to have that, you
know--but I want something stronger. I shall have it soon. My work here
in this house is pretty well finished, I fancy. Maybe to-morrow, maybe
the next day, but this week certain, I shall be off to Malta. I am going
to hunt up a man's army record there."
"The General's?"
"Yes. His and--well, possibly, some one's else. When I come back I
promise you that I will have the solution to this riddle in my hands.
What's that? Oh, yes, Margot is in it."
"Then why--then how can Lady Clavering----"
"Lady Clavering, it appears, knows Margot. So does the General,
evidently, for she mentioned her name to him."
"Dear heaven! And you say that she accused him of the murder? Accused
him? How could she?"
"She was there--at Gleer Cottage--_last_ night. She went there to meet
him. But she was not, however, the first to direct my suspicions against
the General. That was done hours before and by a totally different
person."
"Whom?"
"His son," said Cleek, and forthwith told her of that memorable
interview with Harry Raynor after dinner, and of the typewritten letter
he had abstracted from the young wastrel's coat pocket. "Miss Lorne, I
waste no sympathy upon that worm," he went on. "From the top of his
empty head to the toe of his worthless foot there's not one ounce of
manhood in him. But he spoke the truth! His father did type that forged
letter and for the purpose he declared."
"To get him out of the neighbourhood for the night?"
"Yes. And but for the mere accident of the fellow's having discovered
that the typist girl was out of England, he would have succeeded
without having to resort to other means."
"How do you know that the General typed the letter?" asked Miss Lorne.
"I didn't in the beginning," returned Cleek. "I did know, however, that
it had been typed by somebody in this house; for I stole the letter,
then tricked Hamer into getting me an unused sheet of the typing paper
that was left over from the manuscript of the General's book. A glance
at the watermark showed them to be identical; in other words, that the
letter had been typed upon one of those left-over sheets. Well, that was
one thing; the other was that the General, having failed to get his son
out of the way for to-night by that means, took steps to accomplish it
by drugging him."
"Drugging him?"
"Yes. Earlier in the day Purviss had brought him a note from Lady
Clavering, and it was imperative that he should go out to-night to meet
her in secret. He didn't want his son prowling about, and he didn't want
me prowling about, either. Still less did he want you prowling about, or
that his wife should know of his leaving the house after she had gone to
bed. To make sure of having no such risk to run, he put a sleeping
draught into every drop of spirit or liqueur that was served in this
house to-night. What he had not reckoned upon, however, was the fact
that neither you nor I tasted either. But at this moment his son lies
drugged and unconscious in the dining-room, and it would be a safe
hazard to stake one's life that his wife is lying unconscious in bed."
"But--but--are you _sure_ there is no mistake?"
"No, Miss Lorne, there is no mistake. It was the General who did the
drugging. I found the paper in which the sleeping draught had come from
the chemist's in the waste basket in the library; and when I wanted to
clench the belief and make it absolutely positive, I tricked the General
into confessing that he stood in need of a stimulant after the stress of
the night, then invited him to join me in one from the decanters in the
dining-room. He knew what was in that liqueur and--he declined. I knew
then that there was no mistake about his being the hand that had done
the drugging, just as I had known previously that he was the man Lady
Clavering had met at the wall door.
"When I rushed past you that time and raced through these grounds, I had
no more idea than a child unborn who the man I was pursuing would prove
to be. He might have been Harry Raynor; he might have been Lord St.
Ulmer. I even said to myself that he might be any male member of this
household from the General down; and my one idea was to get to the house
and to find which man was missing. I found no one absent! St. Ulmer was
in his bedroom; Harry Raynor was sleeping over the table in the
dining-room; and as I came clattering down the stairs the General
stepped out of the library to inquire into the cause of the
disturbance. To all intents and purposes he had been in there reading
the whole evening long. But it was a significant fact that as he opened
the door and came out, I was able to see past him into the room and to
discern that the curtains drawn over the swinging window were bellying
inward, showing that the opening of the door had started a current of
air which could be created only by the window behind them being likewise
open.
"That gave me the first suspicion of a clue. I looked at the man himself
for further evidence to back it up and, in the first glance, found it.
There was black soil on the toes of his house shoes and a smudge of
green wall-moss on his shirt cuff! I knew then just what he had done,
and how I had failed to overhaul him in that hot race. He had simply
ducked down out of sight, lain still in the bushes and allowed me to run
past him. For me there was, of course, no other means of entering the
house but by the door; for him there was the library window! He waited
to give me time to get into the house, then rose, ran across the
intervening space and back into the library by means of that window, and
had had just about sufficient time to get there when I came rushing down
the stairs. You will remember, will you not, that I spoke of those two
things: the spot of black and smudge of green? You know now to what I
alluded."
"It is wonderful and--yes, it is horrible also!" she said with a faint
shudder. "What a day of horror this has been! I think the shadow of it
will weigh upon me forever."
"Not if I can help it," said Cleek very gently, very tenderly. "And I
count very, very much indeed, Miss Lorne, upon the possibility of making
you bless it before the whole twenty-four hours of it have been rounded
out. Don't you remember what I said to you about my hopes for the
clearing of all shadows from the path of Geoff Clavering and Lady
Katharine, about the theory of Loisette?"
"Loisette? That is the great French scientist, is it not? The first man
who actually did establish a standard rule for the training of the
memory and schools for the teaching of his system all over the world?"