What Logan might have done had he truly been the fictitious bank-clerk,

he did not know. But as an experienced lawyer, he was disturbed by this

offer. It was too much money for no real service. If once he had been

inclined to mistake Dr. Jackman for a thorough scoundrel, it would

not do now to make a model philanthropist of him. Of course he could

not really take the money, being Hugh Logan; yet he could accept the

cheque as the fictitious Logan and destroy it later. What he said was,

“If you’ll allow me, sir, I’ll sleep on your offer and give you my

answer tomorrow.”

“A sound policy.” Jackman lightly tapped his shoulder again. “And

I believe I know already what your decision will be, Logan. Ah:

checkmate.” Jackman had won the match with the thousand-year-old

chessmen, despite his handicap.

Dr. Jackman rose. “We dine at seven, here in my study, Mr. Logan. In

the Old House we have neither electricity nor running hot water--Lady

MacAskival does not care for modern comfort--but old Agnes will bring

hot water and a lamp to your room. I’ll show you there in a moment. But

before the sun goes down, shall we enjoy the view from the battlements?

I think the mist has lifted a trifle, though you come to us in a

clouded month. By the way, Miss MacAskival will be at dinner with us.

I ask you to say as little as possible to her about my observations,

should you talk with her alone before dinner, or later--for her own

interest, you understand, Logan. A personality as unbalanced as hers

might be permanently affected by imprudent reproaches. I trust to your

Scottish discretion. Just up the stair, now.”

They emerged upon the lead of the roof from under the conical-capped

turret. A narrow walk led round the gabled cap of the great tower,

between the stone slabs of the gable itself and the machicolations

of the battlements. Before them was Askival harbor, the sunken yacht

black against the pier; and beyond, across the foggy ocean, the sun was

descending in a diffused glory. Despite its climate, Carnglass was a

beautiful island. A corncrake flew low above the tower. Far below, in

the policies, a jungle of rhododendrons was in bloom. And five armed

men were walking up to the gate in the Edwardian block of the Old House

of Fear.

“Mr. Royall!” Jackman called. The five looked up, and the leader,

that “walking cadaver,” formed his thin hands into a trumpet. Even at

this distance, his pallid face and protruding teeth were ugly in the

extreme: a queer sort of secretary, this skeleton-like man with a rifle

slung over his shoulder. “Mr. Royall!” Jackman cried out. “What luck?”

The five men below stared in astonishment at Logan, beside Jackman at

the battlements. The four hangdog faces behind Royall aroused a vague

discomfort at the back of Logan’s mind.

“Rab and Carruthers have strayed, Dr. Jackman,” Royall called back.

“Can you see them from the tower?” Though Jackman and Logan looked to

north and east, there was not a sign of the other two men.

“Is there no trace of Donley?” Jackman shouted. Gesturing dispiritedly,

Royall shouted back, “I’ll explain when I come up.”

“I doubt whether we can give you a decent dinner, Mr. Logan,”

Jackman said as they turned back to the turret-stair. “Our cook, you

understand, has been out with the searching-party, and we have had to

press the butler into service in the kitchen. Have you ever lived in a

state of siege? A mad island, this Carnglass.”

“Fish and chips would do nicely, thank you,” Logan told him. “I’ve not

had a bite these twenty hours.” He still was the bank-clerk; it might

be difficult to abandon this play-acting.

“Really, I scarcely think Miss MacAskival would care for fish and chips

week in and week out, Logan.” Dr. Jackman said it drily. The man, after

all, was doing no more than his duty in sheltering his friend’s ward

from an unpromising suitor. Suppose, Logan thought, I were to tell

him what I really am: how would he act then? Yet an impulse cautioned

Logan to play this little deception according to its rules until he had

talked with Miss Mary MacAskival, the girl of fifteen with the green

eyes, the red hair, and the spotted past.

8

On those cold and dark stairs, Miss Mary MacAskival met them, her quick

and rounded little body, her rosy cheeks and lively eyes defying the

barbarous spell of the old tower. She sent Logan a darting, inquiring

glance, but it was to Jackman she spoke. “I heard the men outside,” she

said. “Really, you ought to let me lead the search. I know every bush

and cranny of Carnglass, but they’re stupid townfolk.”

Jackman frowned. “I may have to lead them myself, Miss MacAskival:

Rab and Carruthers seem to have lost their way. I’ll have a word

with Royall. Will you be good enough to take Mr. Logan to see Lady

MacAskival for a moment? And then bring him to the study for dinner.

Don’t be long.” He sent out a hand as if to touch her lightly

on the shoulder, but the girl drew back cleverly, almost as if

unintentionally, against the curving stair-wall, and Jackman passed by

her, ignoring the repulse. “Don’t forget the advice I gave you, Mr.

Logan,” he said softly, disappearing down the spiral of the stair.

At that instant, a most unpleasant recollection came into Logan’s head.

An hour earlier, in the painted study, he had given his rucksack to

Tompkins to be carried to his room. And in that pack were his passport

and other papers. That man Tompkins, by the look of him, would pry

into everything, even had he been only butler in a normal country

house; and this was no normal place. The moment Jackman talked with

Tompkins, Logan’s real identity would be known; and then there would be

trouble--though just what sort of trouble, Logan was not quite sure.

His dismay showed in his face.

Mary MacAskival was looking at him in concern. “What is it, Hugh?” (So

it was “Hugh” even in private now, Logan thought, and on very short

acquaintance, which seemed to confirm Dr. Jackman’s account of this

odd little girl’s very forward ways with men.) Whatever else she was,

she had a quick mind, though; for she added, after a moment’s pause,

“Are you thinking of your rucksack? You needn’t. I met Tompkins on the

stair and took it from him before he had any chance of a look into it.

And I took your papers and put them into a hidie-hole--the Old House is

mostly hidie-holes--where only I could possibly find them again. Then I

put the rest of your things into your room. Do you mind? I can get the

papers for you whenever you like, but we mustn’t let Dr. Jackman know

you’re from America. You’d not be safe then. You’re not particularly

safe even now. I’m sorry.” Those mobile red lips framed the “sorry”

with a pathetic beauty. Indeed, it was a pity that Mary MacAskival was

what she was.

“Thank you, Miss MacAskival,” Logan said. “Probably I’ll need the

papers after dinner. Shall we go down to Lady MacAskival now?” His

voice sounded cold even to himself. He needed a little time to think.

The girl’s charm--her glamour, literally--was too near to him on this

clammy sepulchral stair. How did those rosy little feet of hers endure

the damp, attractively bare as they were? But he must get his mind off

the girl: she was only fifteen, and bad medicine.

“Hugh!” Mary MacAskival spoke his name reproachfully, and now a little

haughtily. “Hugh! It’s not only your papers you’re thinking of. What is

it? This is a house of secrets, but you and I mustn’t have secrets from

each other. You weren’t sent to me to keep secrets from me. What is

it?” Logan hesitated, and the girl’s mind leaped swiftly to the usual

conclusion any woman reaches when two men have been talking seriously

in her absence. “What is it? Were you and Dr. Jackman talking of me?”

In this instance, the woman’s instinct spoke truly.

Logan looked her full in the face. “Yes, we were.”

Over the girl’s delicious heart-shaped face, with its high cheek-bones

and rather deep-set green eyes, spread a crimson flush, suffusing all

the delicate white skin. It would have been a beautiful thing to watch,

Logan thought, if it had not been a mark of guilt. The finely-moulded

nose and chin went up. “Then you heard nothing good,” said Mary

MacAskival, deliberately. She turned, as if to avert her telltale young

face, and led the way down the stairs. “Dr. Jackman is the father of

lies. But now I will take you to my aunt.”

A doorway in the immense thickness of the medieval tower-wall led into

the Renaissance range of the Old House. Here the plaster ceiling of a

great book-lined corridor was moulded into baroque shells and swags and

Lord knows what fantastic designs. An odor of damp and musty leather

came from the shelves; this library could have been used little since

Sir Alastair’s time. The little barefoot beauty walked beside him,

still a trifle flushed and defiant, but apparently not hopeless of

winning him over; Logan thought for a moment she actually meant to

take his hand; but if she did have that impulse, she thought better

of it. “After dinner,” she murmured, “if we can be alone, there are

things that must be told you. Not here: there’s not enough time, and we

could be overheard.” She noticed his glance at her exquisitely narrow

bare feet, which here trod upon Oriental carpet, in utter silence; she

smiled a trifle coquettishly, and said, “I was reared barefoot, and

don’t like shoes and stockings in the house. Besides, when I’m this

way, I can scamper all over the house, and _they_ don’t know where I

am--nor when I’m listening to them. Do you mind? I know it’s not the

way to receive foreign guests; but you are our first foreign guest,

and I don’t think you stand on ceremony. Here’s my aunt’s bedroom; she

never leaves it now. Only Agnes will be with her.” The girl pushed open

a heavy carven door, and they entered an immense gloomy room.

There the walls were hung from cornice to floor with square panels of

leather, stamped in gold leaf with some intricate pattern of dancing

figures; Logan thought he made out the figure of a capering goat

in this design, but could not be sure in the twilight of the room.

These hangings must have been long neglected, for splotches of white

water-stain showed here and there, and some of the panels had pulled

almost loose from the stitching that held them one to another, so that

the stone of the walls showed through the gaps. Nearly in the middle

of the room stood a vast ancient canopied bed, the curtains drawn

back. Beside it, huddled on a stool, an old serving-woman looked with

lacklustre eyes at Logan, cringing aside to let him approach the bed:

this would be Agnes, the shawlie. Certainly she was timid--could she be

trembling, or was it a slight palsy? Then he made out the shape under

the rich covers upon the bed.

Lady MacAskival lay with closed eyes, and she was very nearly a corpse:

almost bloodless, and her face and hands grotesquely wrinkled. Could

this pallid immobile thing once have been a beautiful woman of fashion,

no better than she should have been--like little Mary MacAskival,

perhaps? At their best, Logan suspected, the features must have been

slightly vulgar. Mary MacAskival slid between him and the bed-rail.

“Aunt!” she whispered, very low. “Aunt, Mr. Logan has come.”

The wrinkled eyelids slid back, snakelike. The fingers of the

desiccated left hand stirred slightly. The withered lips writhed,

almost as if the ancient creature would have burst into a scream, but

no sound came forth.

“Aunt,” said Mary MacAskival, “he may be trusted.”

Those purblind eyes of the failing woman flickered, for a moment or

two, with intelligence. But Logan could not have meant much to her;

possibly he was but a dream within a dream, drifting through limbo,

less unpleasant than the terrors that often clustered round the

bedstead. For either this old woman was drugged, Logan thought, or

else she existed, tortoise-like and impotent, in a realm of perpetual

terror. In those weary eyes was frozen fright, fright grown so familiar

that it was almost identical with consciousness. What kept her alive?

Surely she would have been happy to escape from this terror--unless she

fancied that worse horrors lay in wait for her beyond the grave.

Now her lips moved, and very faint sounds came forth. “Not Alastair,”

Lady MacAskival whispered. “Not Alastair. Good. Go--go with him, Mary.

When I am done. He is not the goat, no. Is he Askival? Is he flesh?

In Carnglass it is all mist.” The lids slid back again; the left hand

ceased to claw at the covers; one would have thought the woman dead,

had not nostrils and chest stirred ever so slightly with her labored

breathing. Mary MacAskival drew Logan through the still room to the

door.

They were back in the book-lined corridor. “Is she under drugs?” Logan

asked.

“No,” said the girl, calmly enough, “only hypnotism--and terror. If

you had seen the chairs rise up of themselves in this house, and eyes

glowing in the dark where no living thing could be, and heard the

footsteps in this hall, and if you were very old--why, I think even

you would lie there like my aunt, Hugh.”

“Who did these things?”

“Dr. Jackman and Mr. Royall--who else? They have come near to putting

me out of my wits. And now and then they put Dr. Jackman himself out of

his wits. He believes, in part at least, though Mr. Royall does not, I

think. Dr. Jackman has said he will call old Sir Alastair from under

the stone by St. Merin’s Chapel. He has said he has made Sir Alastair

walk down this very passage where you and I stand.”

Logan looked involuntarily over his shoulder: but of course there was

nothing but mouldy books and hangings and family portraits. In this

strange place, minds might scamper after any vagary. “Does your aunt

wish to see her dead husband?”

“Not she. She feared him while he lived, and she feared him more once

he died; and things lie heavy on her conscience. She will give Dr.

Jackman anything he wants, so long as he keeps Sir Alastair this side

of her bedroom door.” The girl was almost conversational about it all:

surely she was either quite mad, or had a grip upon her nerves stronger

than that of any woman Logan had known. What lay at her heart, Logan

could not even guess; what could be seen was delectable enough, but

Logan put no trust in her. Yet, trollop though she might be, Logan

resolved to play his masquerade a little while yet, so far as Jackman

was concerned, for her sake and his own.

“Now tell me this, Miss MacAskival,” said Logan, “just how old....”

Then he heard something in the passage, toward the tower; and so

did the girl; and they turned simultaneously. Logan felt tempted to

reach for the little gun under his tweed jacket, but refrained. And,

after all, it was only that shifty butler. “Dinner is served. Miss

MacAskival,” Tompkins murmured, quite deferentially, and withdrew back

toward the tower.

“Later,” Mary MacAskival said, very low, as they followed Tompkins.

“Later I’ll tell you everything that can be told. Now you must meet

Mr. Royall.” They went up the ancient stairs again, and passed into

the study. It was dark now, but the study was cheerful enough. Many

candles, in eighteenth-century silver candlesticks, had been lit; a

square table was laid with a cloth and good china; there was soup being

kept warm by a paraffin lamp on a sideboard. Tompkins had gone down

somewhere to the kitchen, assisted by a footman whose grumbling voice

Logan could hear below--Anderson, perhaps; and Jackman and Royall were

not yet in the room: doubtless the two of them were discussing Hugh

Logan thoroughly. Mary MacAskival, leaning gracefully against the piano

which occupied a corner, pointed a little finger toward the painted

ceiling.

“Do you know what _that_ is?” She meant the painted monster called

the Firgower, only dimly visible by the candlelight, away up there in

the shadows. “Oh, Dr. Jackman told you? He should: for he _is_ the

Firgower, you know. Why do you look at me so queerly? Of course Dr.

Jackman is the Firgower; he’d tell you so himself, if he were candid.

He has told me so. You saw the hole in his forehead: that’s his third

eye. He sees Sir Alastair MacAskival with his third eye, and tells my

aunt.” She took a candlestick from the table, and, standing on tiptoe,

lifted it as high toward the ceiling as her little body could reach.

“Now come here, Hugh Logan, and look close.”

The painted horrid goat-face of the Firgower stared down at Logan; it

seemed to smirk and leer and scowl all at once. “Its forehead--look,”

the girl went on.

Now Logan could make out that in the middle of that painted forehead,

with horns sprouting above it, was a third eye, faintly visible. It

was much less distinct than the two normal goat-slit eyes, but it

was very like them. “I don’t know whether it was painted so,” Mary

MacAskival murmured in Logan’s ear, leaning a pretty hand on his

shoulder, “or whether that nasty third eye wore on the nerves of Sir

Alastair or someone else, so that perhaps someone put a trifle of

white paint over it. It’s no less an eye than Dr. Jackman’s. Do you

understand? That’s Dr. Jackman’s portrait, so to speak. I’m ever so

glad _you_ do not have a third eye.”

Logan turned his head to look at this queer little lovely creature. Was

she lunatic, coquette, or infinitely subtle? They two stood so close

together that his nose touched hers. His right arm almost went round

her, as she stood there on tiptoe; but just then boots sounded on the

stair, and Miss MacAskival drew away. “My poor bare feet!” she said.

“I’m forgetting my manners. Whatever would they say at the convent?

They never let young ladies dine there barefoot, you know. I leave you

to Dr. Jackman and his secretary, but I’ll be back before the soup has

gone quite cold.” With a little swirl of her skirt, she sprang, rather

than stepped, through the heavy doorway, and was gone.

She must have passed Jackman and Royall on the stair, for they came in

immediately. “Mr. Logan,” Jackman said, “Mr. Royall, my secretary.”

The death’s-head secretary nodded curtly. Once the man began to speak,

Logan perceived with relief that he was an Englishman, like Jackman,

though probably from Yorkshire; had he been a Scot, he might have seen

through Logan’s masquerade. Logan would talk as little as possible to

the Scots among the servants, lest he give himself away.

Royall made some perfunctory observations about the hunt for Donley,

the weather, and all that. A cold fish, but a keen one, Logan hazarded.

He was well educated, surely; Logan suspected that he might once have

been a fairly high-ranking civil servant; somehow there was the

mark of Winchester school upon him. Yet now he was secretary to this

pseudo-doctor, in an island at the back of beyond. Why? Had Royall been

dismissed from some civil post--for unreliability of sorts? The man was

sick; the signs of a gnawing illness were plain upon his pallid face;

and yet Logan guessed--though perhaps he was becoming fanciful, in this

house of shadows--that the real cause of his trouble was some sickness

not of the body, but of the spirit. Could one trust Royall? If one were

of the same faith, undoubtedly; on the man’s grim features was set

fanaticism, not simple criminality.

“Do you have a taste for letters, Mr. Logan?” Royall inquired abruptly,

in his hoarse voice. Jackman had said very little, but stood back in

the shadows, watching, as if he had agreed to let his secretary do the

prying this night. Tompkins came round with a tray of sherry-glasses,

and Logan sipped before he replied.

“Why, now, Mr. Royall,” Logan said, “I must admit I am fond of Rabbie

Burns. Burns, sir, is the poet of the Scottish nation. No nonsense for

Rabbie Burns. I don’t mind saying, Mr. Royall, that at the British

Linen Bank, Lawnmarket Branch, we know an honest man’s the noblest work

of God. How does Burns express it, sir? ‘The rank is but the guinea’s

stamp....’”

Here Mary MacAskival returned, with neat shoes on her feet, and cotton

stockings. Jackman and Royall bowed to her slightly, and the four of

them sat down to dinner, Tompkins putting the soup before them. Without

bothering to taste his soup, Royall pursued the topic.

“I suppose you know, Mr. Logan, that Burns is perhaps the most popular

English writer in the Soviet Union today.” Royall’s sunken eyes seemed

to expect some significant response to this.

“Indeed, sir?” Logan said, ingenuously. “Why, now, I would have

thought there would be difficulties in doing Rabbie Burns into the

Russian tongue.”

“The Soviet Russians, Mr. Logan, are masters of translation. Yes, they

appreciate Burns. At a conference in the Crimea, not so very long ago,

I had the honor to be asked to read Burns aloud, in English, to a group

of intellectuals. I found they especially enjoyed the final stanza of

‘For a’ That and a’ That.’ How does it go--

‘For a’ that, and a’ that,

It’s comin’ yet, for a’ that,

That man to man, the warld o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that.’

Do I have it quite right, Mr. Logan?” Royall gave him another long

stare.

“Aye, as I mind it, it goes so, Mr. Royall. Very sound

sentiments--brothers the world o’er.” Logan smiled at him.

Royall hesitated; then, “Would you care to give me a gloss on those

lines, Mr. Logan?”

Logan looked puzzled, as indeed he was. “A gloss, sir? Now how do you

mean? A commentary?”

“Mr. Royall thought some remarks might occur to your mind, Mr. Logan,”

Jackman put in. “Concerning international brotherhood, perhaps.”

“Why, no, Dr. Jackman, I do not believe I could add anything.” Logan

turned, simpering, to Mary MacAskival. “Do you think of a proper

commentary, Mary, darling?” The girl shook her head slowly; her eyes,

their lids half lowered, moved uneasily from Jackman to Royall.

“Nevertheless, gentlemen,” Logan went on, still very much the Edinburgh

clerk, “we’ve had many a serious discussion of Rabbie Burns in the West

End Young Men’s Discussion Club. There’s profound meaning in Rabbie

Burns. Profound.”

Royall’s eyes never had ceased to stare at Logan. Now Royall said, “An

acquaintance of mine who sometimes visits Edinburgh is an admirer of

Burns. Possibly you have met him: a Captain Gare.”

Logan’s training as a lawyer served him well at that moment, for his

fatuous smile did not fade, nor did he start. “No, sir,” he told

Royall, “I don’t believe I’ve had the honor of making the gentleman’s

acquaintance.”

“And then,” said Royall, “I think of a commission agent in Glasgow,

a man of the people, who often has Burns on the tip of his tongue.

Perhaps you have encountered him. His name is Dowie, Jim Dowie.”

“Dowie? I know a solicitor’s clerk of that name in Dalkeith; but he

reads only American thrillers, sir.”

“So, Royall,” Dr. Jackman interjected, “it seems that our Mr. Logan

here is not a member, after all, of the little circle you had in mind.

You were quite mistaken, I fear; I told you he wouldn’t be. Mr. Logan

is a very honest and industrious rising young bank-clerk, I’m sure. But

speaking of your national poet Burns, I call to mind a verse you might

take to heart--

‘My love she’s but a lassie yet,

My love she’s but a lassie yet,

We’ll let her stand a year or twa,

She’ll no be half sae saucy yet.’

Apropos, Mr. Logan?”

The butler brought the main course, boiled mutton and potatoes, before

Logan had to reply. Logan noticed, as Tompkins served, that Mary

MacAskival’s face had gone crimson at Jackman’s quotation, and then

white again.

“Tompkins,” Jackman said as the butler served him, “I take it that

Carruthers and Rab have returned by this time?”

“No, Dr. Jackman.” Logan saw that Tompkins’ hands trembled slightly.

“Neither of them, sir. Not hide nor hair.”

Jackman bit his lip. “Royall, where do you suppose they’ve got to? It

has been quite dark for more than an hour.”

“Ah, well, sir,” Royall answered, “so long as the pair of them hang

together, no harm can come to them. They’re both armed with good

rifles, and they weren’t reared in ladies’ boudoirs. Rab knows rough

country well enough, and something of this island. I suppose they may

have been hot on Donley’s scent when the sun set, and bedded down in

one of the farmhouses or keepers’ cottages. I last saw them toward St.

Merin’s Chapel. No doubt they’ll report in the morning.” But Royall

seemed to have no appetite for his mutton.

Jackman shrugged. “No doubt, no doubt.” That unpleasant patch on his

forehead twitched, almost as if he were trying to lift the lid of the

third eye. He turned toward Logan. “As you were about to say...?”

“Why, Dr. Jackman”--but Logan smiled toward Mary MacAskival--“I had

thought of another verse from Rabbie Burns, that I like better than

yours; and it is this, sir--

‘Gaist nor bogle shalt thou fear;

Thou’rt to Love and Heaven sae dear,

Nocht of ill may come thee near,

My bonnie dearie.’”

“I think that’s very pretty, Hugh,” Mary MacAskival told him. She

looked toward Dr. Jackman: “‘Gaist nor bogle....’ A good phrase for the

Old House, is it not, Dr. Jackman? But whatever can have become of Rab

and Carruthers?”

Jackman looked blacker still. “Leave that to us, if you please, my

dear.” He seemed about to add something when Mary MacAskival rose and

walked to the piano.

“How very slow Tompkins is in bringing the sweet tonight! May I play

until he comes? Hugh, will you sing with me?”

“You know I’ve no voice, Mary, darling,” Logan said, also rising, “but

I’ll play to your singing.” He did, indeed, play the piano reasonably

well. Miss MacAskival behaved as if she had always known it: wondrously

clever, that girl, for fifteen years.

“I’ll set you the tune, Hugh,” she told him, seating herself at the

piano, “and then you can take my place here, and I’ll sing you a song

from Burns, if you like. Dr. Jackman, can you endure it? Mr. Royall?”

“Of course,” Jackman told her, somewhat absently. He ran his lean hand

slowly over his forehead. Royall said nothing: he had stalked to a

window, opened it, and was staring uneasily into the night below.

Miss MacAskival played pleasantly--an air Logan knew well, “Charlie

He’s My Darling.” Logan took her place at the piano then, and she stood

and began to sing. Her young voice was full and tolerably trained, and

very sweet.

“An’ Charlie he’s my darling,

My darling, my darling,

Charlie he’s my darling,

The young Chevalier.”

The night air of Carnglass crept into the ancient room through Royall’s

open window. There came the cry of some night bird, winging past the

Old House, and the heavy beat of the sea upon the pier of Askival

harbor. Mary’s voice swelled up:

“Sae light’s he jimped up the stair,

And tirled at the pin;

And wha sae ready as hersel,

To let the laddie in.”

Then, above the noise of the ocean, there came an unnatural sound,

echoing perhaps from the other side of the Old House. It was a burst

of horrid laughter, or so it seemed, ending in a desperate sob; then

silence; then the high dreadful cackle again. “The devil!” cried

Jackman, and leaped to join Royall at the window. Mary MacAskival

shivered, but sang the last verse:

“It’s up yon hethery mountain,

And down yon scroggy glen,

We daur na gang a milking,

For Charlie and his men.”

To Logan, the girl’s relative composure was as strange as the dreadful

yelling outside, but he played loyally on until “Charlie and his men”

died away. Then Mary swept from the piano to the window, and Logan was

right behind her. The laughter, if laughter it was, had ceased; and

nothing at all was to be seen through the mist. But in a moment, a shot

was fired; and then three more shots, in quick succession, seemingly

not far outside the Old House. Jackman and Royall ran for the stairs,

and Mary and Logan after them.

Through that great chill hodgepodge old house, past Lady MacAskival’s

room, through an interior courtyard that had been roofed over, into

the enormous Victorian block they ran, stumbling through passages and

down flights of stairs, until at last the four of them burst into a big

Victorian entrance-hall. About the closed door were clustered Tompkins

and Ferd and Anderson and a fourth man whom Logan took to be Niven.

They all had rifles at the ready, but no one had ventured to open the

door. Jackman dashed among them and flung back the bolts: “See what

it is, you fools.” None of the four seemed eager to investigate, but

they followed Jackman and Royall a little way into the dark, and Mary

MacAskival and Logan tagged after. A massive knob of the great rock on

which the Old House stood jutted up close by the door, and Logan urged

the girl toward it.

“If anyone fires from out there,” he whispered to her, “we’ll be so

many sitting ducks.”

“No one will fire at us,” the girl said; but, obediently, she crouched

behind the rock, peering round in the direction the men were looking.

There came one more screech of hysterical laughter, and then a figure

came into view, reeling, stumbling, slipping, but still holding a

rifle. Only a few yards from the Old House, the man swung round to

face the darkness from which he had emerged, brought his gun to his

shoulder, and fired three more shots, wildly, toward nothing visible.

There was as much chance of his hitting the moon, with the aim he took,

as of winging any living thing in Carnglass. Then the man dropped his

rifle altogether and came lurching on toward the entrance of the Old

House, falling at last in a heap right at Jackman’s feet, giggling,

moaning, choking.

“Rab!” cried Jackman. “What the devil, Rab?” It was a very young man,

thick-set and heavy-featured, with a great shock of hair. He was

covered with little cuts, and his clothes were in rags. To judge by his

gasping and gulping, he had run for miles. And he was quite out of his

head. He squirmed at Jackman’s feet, and mumbled obscenities, and then

burst once more into his screaming and terrified laugh.

“Something has run him like a hare,” Royall said. “The wits are gone

out of the man.” The four servants, hard cases though they looked,

bunched together like so many rabbits. Stooping, Jackman took Rab by

the shoulders and shook him mercilessly.

“Rab!” Jackman hissed. “Rab! Speak, man, or I’ll give you worse than

you’ve had already.” But Rab only sobbed for breath. “Pick up his

rifle, Mr. Royall,” Jackman said, prodding Rab with his foot. Logan

suspected that he gave the order to Royall for fear that none of the

servants would obey it. Stooping, Royall slipped into the heather,

groped for the gun, found it, and hurried back, glancing over his lean

shoulder.

“Anderson and Ferd, lift this lump,” Jackman called out, “and drag

him inside.” The whole party retreated through the wide doorway into

the Victorian courtyard, and then back into the formal entrance-hall,

barring the gates behind them; Anderson was left as sentry inside the

great door. “Now you, Niven and Ferd, hold up this thing before me.”

They supported the muttering Rab between them. Jackman slapped Rab’s

bleeding face with his open palm, terribly hard. The young man ceased

to moan; his eyes rolled. “Rab,” said Jackman, slowly and distinctly,

“where the devil is Carruthers?”

“O, it took him, it took him!” cried Rab, and lapsed into incoherence.

“I’ll have the heart out of you, Rab, if you don’t speak up. What took

Carruthers?” Jackman slapped him again.

Rab’s dull eyes widened. “It took Carruthers! Lagg took him, auld, wet

Lagg! Lagg it was!” With that, Rab sank into a kind of fit, and Ferd

and Niven pushed him down upon the floor.

Dr. Jackman stood rigid. “No,” he said, perhaps to Royall, perhaps

to himself. “No. Not Lagg.” Then he looked round, his face stiff and

white, upon the little ring of men, and upon Logan and Mary MacAskival

beyond them. “Get this creature to bed,” he said to Niven and Ferd.

“Tie him in, if you must. Ignore his ravings. The fellow’s lost his

nerve; Donley must have been after him. Royall, post someone atop the

tower, and tell him to fire at anything that moves. Miss MacAskival,

this is no scene for you. See if your aunt has been disturbed, and then

get to your room. Logan, Tompkins will show you up. Stay in your rooms

until I have you called for breakfast.” Then Jackman went out into the

courtyard again, calling to Anderson.

Tompkins, carrying a petrol lantern, led the girl and Logan through

the passages toward the Renaissance block. Outside Lady MacAskival’s

room, Mary paused. “I’d best look in here, Hugh,” she said, “so I tell

you good-night now.” Tompkins moved discreetly a few feet further down

the passage, but Logan only pressed the girl’s hand. She contrived to

smile at him. “Do you recollect that last stanza I sang?” she asked:

“‘It’s up yon hethery mountain,

And down yon scroggy glen,

We daur na gang a milking,

For Charlie and his men.’

Take care this night, Hugh.” Then she was gone into the bedroom hung

with Spanish leather.

Tompkins led him to a decent smallish chamber on the floor above Lady

MacAskival’s room, wished Logan a civil good-night, and slid away.

There was no key in the lock upon the door, and no bolt. To shove

furniture against the door, Logan felt, might seem unduly suspicious

to Dr. Jackman; but he did it, all the same, jamming a chair-back

under the doorknob, and reinforcing it by a small chest. He looked out

his two windows; they were high and small, and almost impossible for

anyone to reach even with very long ladders, for the rock fell sheer

away below this portion of the Old House. The bed, if rather damp, was

tolerable. He slid his pistol Meg under the pillow, and was dozing off

in short order, with only the wind at the panes to break the stillness,

and the distant growl of the combers. Logan was too tired to think of

Rab, or Lagg, or Jackman, or Royall, or even of the green-eyed girl--to

whom, in a fit of sympathy at the dinner-table, he had promised that

she need fear neither ghost nor bogle while he was near. It was an

unsecured pledge of questionable validity to an insecure girl of

questionable antecedents.

9

Much later--it must have been past three in the morning--Logan was

waked from his troubled sleep by a curious sound. His nerves on

edge, he sat up in bed, scarcely knowing where he was, and befuddled

by finding himself tangled in an old-fangled nightshirt, until he

remembered that Tompkins had laid out for him this antique garment.

The only source of light in the room was the extinguished candle, of

course; and Logan reached for the candlestick, but thought better of

it, and listened.

The noise was the sound of slow sliding. Blinking, he looked toward the

door. So far as he could see anything at all, it seemed to him that

the door was very slightly ajar. And then he knew the source of the

sliding-sound: someone must have dislodged slightly the chair he had

used as barrier, must have got a hand round the edge of the door, and

must be quietly shoving chair and reinforcing chest inward, so that

whoever was outside might squeeze within.

Logan snatched his pistol from under the pillow. It wouldn’t do to use

the gun except in the last extremity, though. He slid silently out of

bed to the floor, and rolled under the bedstead. If someone meant to

cut his throat, there in the blackness, whoever it was would stab an

empty bed.

That sliding-noise had ceased now; what had wanted to enter presumably

had glided in. To Logan, taut on the floor under the bed, came the

thought of Old Askival, who was supposed to walk the narrow passages

of the Old House, and had driven the wastrel Donald to the New House.

Whatever had entered surely made no noise at all: a thrill ran through

Logan’s body. Holding his breath and straining his sight, after

what seemed like a quarter of an hour--really some five seconds,

probably--he made out the dimmest of dim shapes bending over the bed,

its legs right before Logan’s nose. Gripping the pistol in his left

hand, Logan seized an ankle of the intruder and gave a mighty tug.

A stifled cry, and the thing was on the floor beside him, and Logan

flung himself upon it in a tangle of arms and legs, thrusting the

pistol against the thing’s head. The shape made very little resistance.

Shape? The body under Logan was not a man’s shape. And most certainly

it was not Lady MacAskival or old Agnes. “You’ve hurt my head,” the

shape murmured, resentful and panting. In the faintest of whispers--

“Really! Are men always so violent when they’re waked in the middle of

the night?”

It had been a near thing; that little pistol, thrust against the girl’s

temple, might have gone off. “Oh!” said Logan, shocked and embarrassed.

“Did I cut you?” He ran his hand through the mass of her hair,

searching for a wound.

“I think not,” the girl said, brushing aside his hand. “You were good

enough merely to stun me. Now do you mind sitting somewhere else than

on me? I’m rather out of breath. Sit on the bed. How queer you look in

that nightgown! It must have been one of Sir Alastair’s, who was twice

your size; I wonder it hangs together still. And keep your voice low,

for Dr. Jackman walks the passages at all hours, like a wraith, and

he _would_ put an end to Hugh Logan if he found me with you. I’m ever

so sorry to put you in danger--or more danger--and to wake you from

a sound sleep, and to invade your bedroom; but you and I must talk

tonight. There, that’s much better! You do look silly, perched in that

old nightgown on that old bed, but it can’t be helped. Oh, you have a

little gun? That’s clever of you. I wish I had one of my own. I have

keys--although Dr. Jackman doesn’t know it--to nearly every room in

the house except the gunroom, and the cellars where they keep those

explosives: Dr. Jackman put new locks on those. Do you mind if I sit on

the other end of the bed? The floor’s rather hard. Thank you: now we

can make matters clear.”

The minx--Logan’s eyes, adjusted to the dark, could make her out

vaguely--was fully dressed, except that she was barefoot, as usual.

Either she was an idiot, which he doubted, or else she was the bravest

woman he ever had come upon. “Miss MacAskival,” he said, “what is

outside this house? What drove Rab out of his mind? It may be, I

suppose, that Donley was forced back to land, after he took my boat;

but he was a tired man when I saw him last, and I can’t imagine him

knocking Carruthers on the head and chasing Rab right up to the door.”

“Now that you have knocked _me_ on the head,” said Mary MacAskival,

“and have sat on me, you may as well commence calling me Mary, Hugh

Logan. We’ve not time, just now, to talk of what may be outside; for

I must tell you of what’s within. You have no faith in me, have you?

You’ve been talking with Dr. Jackman. What did he tell you of me?”

He had no faith in anyone in the Old House, Logan thought; indeed, he

had begun to doubt his own sanity. But he would be blunt with this

girl, and see if she could make a case for herself. “He told me, Mary

MacAskival,” Logan said, “that you were eccentric.”

There in the dark, the girl laughed softly; she was a cool one.

“Why, that’s true enough, Hugh Logan: all the MacAskivals have their

oddities. I fancy that old Mr. Duncan MacAskival, who sent you to me,

has his peculiarities.”

“That he has. But he’s no girl of fifteen.”

“Fifteen?” She sounded startled. “Whatever do you mean?”

“You are fifteen, aren’t you?”

“Fifteen!” She stifled her merriment. “I’m past twenty, Hugh Logan,

though it’s little I am. Whatever possessed Dr. Jackman to tell you

such a thing?” Her voice rang true.

“And he said you were too fond of men.”

“Fond of men? I’m not fond of Dr. Jackman, I can tell you. I never

see any men to be fond of, here in Carnglass, Dr. Jackman’s crew

are half afraid of me--particularly Niven the tinker, who knows I

am a witch--and I’m thoroughly afraid of them, although I never let

them guess it. With whom am I supposed to be infatuated?” A tone of

suppressed anger had come into her voice.

“When you were thirteen, Jackman said, you--why, you loved a gardener

here in Carnglass.”

At first Logan thought she had begun to sob; but then he realized she

was choking in an endeavor to keep from breaking into imprudent shrieks

of laughter. “Malcolm Mor MacAskival,” she managed, at last. “Malcolm

Mor! Of course I loved him. I do still. He carried messages for me and

contrived to get them posted in Loch Boisdale, and so they discharged

him. And he worships the ground I tread, because I am The MacAskival.

He has a great white beard, and is upward of seventy. Are you jealous

of him?”

It was impossible not to believe her: Jackman was plausible, but Mary

MacAskival was all candor. “What a consummate liar Jackman is!” Logan

played with Donley’s little gun.

“To be sure he is; didn’t I tell you so, Hugh? He lives by lies. But

into nearly every lie he works a tiny grain of truth, for the sake

of appearances. Well, then: what other mischief have I been working,

according to your friend Dr. Jackman?”

“He implied, Mary MacAskival, that you suffer from delusions of

grandeur. He said you must have told me--by ‘me’ he means our

fictitious bank-clerk, of course--that you were to inherit Carnglass

and all the rest from your aunt, while in truth you are a pauper.”

“Would it matter to you if I were a pauper?” She was serious now; he

thought her firm chin went up.

“Not in the least.”

“Well, then, as a matter of fact, Hugh Logan, I have more money than

has Lady MacAskival. She never has loved me, but she has no one else

who signifies; and so, more than five years ago, she gifted Carnglass

to me, and more than half her securities. She told me that would

baffle the Exchequer; for in this country, you know, one can escape

death-duties by giving away one’s property, so long as one does it

five years before one’s death. Five years ago my aunt still had her

wits about her--enough to make a lawful will, at any rate; and she put

Carnglass and the rest into trust for me; and six months from now, when

I am twenty-one, I can do what I like with my own.”

This revelation reminded Logan of his proper business in Carnglass,

which the troubles of the past few days had almost driven out of his

head. “Then Lady MacAskival couldn’t sell Carnglass to my principal

even if she chose? It’s yours? And will you sell?”

“Hugh Logan! Here we sit whispering, with a gang of murderers and

conspirators in the house, and The MacAskival honoring you with a

call at four in the morning in your bedchamber, and you talk of

title-deeds! You _are_ a man of law. But no, I wouldn’t sell: Carnglass

is my world. Yet Duncan MacAskival being an old man, and a kinsman,

and having his heart set on the matter, I might arrange for him a

life-tenure of the Old House. And I, and any husband I might choose to

have, could live at the New House. When I wrote Duncan MacAskival that

last letter--the note that brought you here, Hugh--I made up my mind

that I would not bring him here upon a wild-goose chase altogether. If

a lease of the Old House will satisfy him, he shall have it. But Dr.

Jackman will be a nasty tenant for us to evict, Hugh Logan.”

And then, in part volunteering the story and in part prompted by

Logan’s questions, the girl gave him her account of Dr. Edmund

Jackman. Three years before, when Mary still had been at school,

old Lady MacAskival had gone to London for a month, in winter. For

half a century, Lady MacAskival had been very odd; and now whatever

rationality remained to her was giving way. On her infrequent London

visits, she had tended more and more to surround herself with peculiar

company: Indian pseudo-mystics, and fortune-tellers with pretensions to

decent manners, and mediums of various sorts. Lady MacAskival detested

anything resembling orthodox religion, but rejoiced in any oddity which

flirted with faces that glowered up from the abyss; and she believed,

or half believed. She was ignorant, superstitious, vain, and rich--and

she had a bad conscience. Moreover, she was extremely lonely. To her,

in time, was presented a Dr. Edmund Jackman, “a scholar, my dear, and

a progressive politician, and a diplomat, and a man who knows _all_

about the occult. He has just come back from a trip to Roumania.” Dr.

Edmund Jackman spent a great deal of time in Lady MacAskival’s London

drawing-room, that winter three years gone. In the spring, he was

invited to Carnglass, and came for a visit of two months. And then

there was another visit, lengthier; and another.

By the end of the year of lengthy visits, Edmund Jackman was wholly

master of Lady MacAskival’s mind, or what remained of it; and master,

too, of her money, and of Carnglass. Dr. Jackman was useful in many

ways. He kept her avaricious London kinsfolk from troubling her. He

took her affairs out of the hands of her ineffectual solicitors, and

gave them his personal attention. Gradually he dismissed her feckless

Island servants, even the farmhands, and reduced household costs, and

brought in some hard-featured, but doubtless dependable, men from

London and Glasgow, until only old Agnes remained of the former staff.

He spent much of her income, too, on “schemes for political education.”

This Mary MacAskival had learnt from the mumbling lips of her old aunt,

in that darkened room hung with Spanish leather, listening to the

ramblings of that stricken brain, convinced sometimes that she was near

to madness herself. This she whispered to Hugh Logan, curled at the

other end of the bed. And she had learnt other things from Dr. Jackman

himself, and from Royall, and from scraps of servants’ conversation

overheard in the passages.

Her solitary years with Lady MacAskival had given the girl an insight

into the old woman’s mind and soul, Logan perceived, so complete

that she could speak almost for, rather than of, her dying aunt. She

understood, and nearly shared, the terrors of that room hung with

Spanish leather. And she knew what talents gave Jackman his power over

the old woman.

More than all his other services, what made Dr. Jackman indispensable

to Lady MacAskival was this: he kept Sir Alastair away from the door

of her room. Lady MacAskival always had suspected that Alastair was

lurking outside that door, even though she had buried him under the

great stone in St. Merin’s Chapel so many years ago. Every day she

sent the footman with a message for Alastair to be placed in the tomb

at St. Merin’s Chapel, imploring Alastair to forgive her, and to stay

up there at the top of Carnglass where he belonged. Yet twice she had

glimpsed Alastair, unrelenting, in the narrow passages. He _would_ come

back, and gobble at her bedroom door on windy nights, and she lay in

dread that one night he might cross the threshold.

Dr. Jackman had saved her from that: he had bound Sir Alastair by a

mystical chain, he told Lady MacAskival, and so long as she possessed

the loyalty of Dr. Jackman, no tall stern old man, who ought to be

in his tomb, would cross the threshold. Of course it was essential

to retain the wholehearted loyalty of Dr. Jackman, and that could

be secured by agreeing with him in all things. Once or twice, when

she had demurred from some plan of his, Dr. Jackman had come to her

bedside, with Mr. Royall beside him, and had described in awful detail

what would be the consequences if Sir Alastair made his way in. She

had fallen into a fit, and old Agnes had been too terrified to speak.

At all costs, Dr. Edmund Jackman must be kept in a good humor; and

sometimes the costs ran very high. It was a great pity that willful

girl Mary did not take to Dr. Jackman.

For months now, Dr. Jackman and Mr. Royall had lived at the Old House

all the time, except for brief cruises about the islands. Dr. Jackman

demonstrated to Lady MacAskival his control over the risen dead by

certain seances in her room. Tables rose, and chairs fell over, and

horrid white shapes loomed up--but never, Dr. Jackman promised, the

shape of Alastair. And presently Dr. Jackman revealed to her that he

always had been in Carnglass; and had been there infinitely long before

she, as Miss Ann Robertson, had been married to Colonel Sir Alastair

MacAskival. For Dr. Jackman was not simply human. He was a part of

Carnglass, and its master from time out of mind. He had been there

before the Viking rovers came. He was the Firgower, the Goat-Man.

And he saw all things, past, present, and future, through his Third

Eye, which quivered in the middle of his forehead. By watching Lady

MacAskival with his Third Eye, he could relieve her of all pain, and

put her to sleep at will.

Yet it did not seem quite right that Dr. Jackman should marry her

niece. He had told Lady MacAskival many times that he must do so; that

the thing was ordered by the Presences under the rocks of Carnglass;

that thus Carnglass would be his in the eyes of the puny law of men,

as well as by the decree of nature. Still, it did not seem right. Mary

belonged to the living, not to be a being beyond good and evil. Lady

MacAskival dared not deny Dr. Jackman, however; she said only, in great

fear and pain, “Then you must ask Mary herself.”

Dr. Jackman did not neglect Miss Mary MacAskival. Upon her he bestowed

much valuable time, endeavoring to instruct her in progressive social

views and in a proper understanding of occult lore. He had compelled

her to come to him in his study at least an hour a day, to listen to

his peculiar talk. Almost always he had been quite civil; but once or

twice he had threatened her, and then he had been ghastly. He talked

politics and necromancy to her, a queer mixture. The one, she thought,

was as mad as the other, or perhaps the politics was a little the

madder.

“If I had known the least little bit about politics and economics and

all that,” she said to Hugh, “Dr. Jackman would have converted me.

But I was utterly ignorant, so he could make no impression. I was

altogether too stupid.” The politics, so far as Logan could determine

from Mary’s imperfect exposition, were Marxist, or a variant thereof.

“He has been so eager to have me serve the Party,” she said. “But the

Party, so far as I could make out, meant to destroy a great many

people to bring about peace everywhere, and meant to make everybody

precisely alike so everyone could be perfectly happy, forever and ever.

That’s nonsense. You’re a solicitor--or is it a barrister, Hugh?--and

you know. I don’t at all want to be like Dr. Jackman, or like Niven the

tinker; and I don’t want them to be like me. So after a time I simply

stared at Dr. Jackman, and said ‘Indeed?’ now and then, and he grew

discouraged. My tactics worked like a bomb.”

“Like a bomb?” asked Hugh Logan, startled.

“Oh, you know--that’s one of the things we said at school, ‘like a

bomb.’ Everything good or successful is like a bomb. You know, don’t

you?” Sometimes this astounding girl seemed old as the hills, and at

other times younger than the fifteen years Jackman had assigned to her.

She was a hoyden of sorts, but quite innocent. “Don’t you ever say

‘like a bomb,’ Hugh? But then, I suppose you never attended a girls’

school.”

So Jackman had abandoned his endeavor to enlist Miss MacAskival in

The Cause. Yet he had persisted in his instruction in the occult.

“He really believes in it all, Hugh. Mr. Royall doesn’t believe, or

believes only a little; but Dr. Jackman is stranger than my old aunt.

He was shot in the head in Spain--oh, did he tell you that?--and I

think that he has been more clever and more dangerous in various ways

since he came from the hospital; but also he sees things that no one

else sees, and hears sounds that no one else hears. And he has become

a part of Carnglass. I mean that. He has read everything that may be

read concerning Carnglass; and all the old tales have got into his

brain the way romances got into Don Quixote’s head: but so evilly,

Hugh. He did not say he was the Firgower simply to frighten my aunt;

he believes it. He frightens even Mr. Royall. And then, of a sudden,

he will drop that weird talk and begin discussing politics. Or he may

become quite sensible, and make plans to scout round the islands, and

to keep in touch with people on the mainland, and to send messages to

the Continent, and to set off gelignite when he’s ready.”

“Explosives?”

“Oh, yes, he has a crypt full of it; but I’ll tell you of that

presently. He didn’t mean me to hear about the explosives, but there

are places in my Old House where I can eavesdrop, if I must.” She

seemed to take a schoolgirl satisfaction in that art.

Royall, to judge by Mary MacAskival’s description, was what someone

once called “the humanitarian with the guillotine.” Wholly devoted

to Jackman, he was forever talking of the sufferings of the working

classes. But he spoke of the men who served him and Jackman, and

sometimes of people in general, as “that scum.” Systematic and

humorless, once upon a time he had been a successful civil servant.

Then, however, political fanaticism had swallowed him, and there

remained of the man only an emaciated body and a hatred of life, which

he disguised from himself as hatred of the “expropriating classes.”

Mary MacAskival thought that Royall would have snuffed out her life,

if it had served his interest--or the Party’s interest--with no more

scruple than as if she had been a mouse.

Edmund Jackman was more subtle and interesting. Possibly, Logan thought

as he listened to the girl, Jackman once had known the good and had

deliberately chosen the evil--and ever after had been haunted by that

memory. “Evil, be thou my good.” Fearless and very clever, somewhere

early in life he must have taken the sinister track. And never had he

contrived to turn back.

“When the horror is upon Dr. Jackman,” Mary was whispering, “I think I

would faint, only that he reminds me of Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy

tale, and that makes me laugh inside, even though the rest of me is

shaking.” The horror came upon him once or twice nearly every day, and

then he looked like a damned soul. “I think he is remembering things

he has done. Once, when he meant to break my will, he hinted at what

he had to do in Spain. I think he killed patients in hospitals with

doses of poison, so that they would not tell tales. Perhaps, in the

beginning, the people who gave him his orders saw the streak of good

in him, and so they hardened him by ordering him to do all the worst

things that could be done.” The girl shivered.

After the civil war in Spain, it seemed, Jackman had vanished into

eastern Europe; and had reappeared in England for a time during the

second World War; and next had turned up in Roumania. There, somehow,

he had fallen into disfavor with the people who gave him his orders.

Possibly he had gone too far in his measures, having come to love

terror for its own sake. Or perhaps he had been chosen as a scapegoat,

during a period when there were official pretences of moderation. In

any event, he had fled out of Roumania, four years ago, returning to

London; and then he had come to Carnglass. Royall, it seemed, had been

with Jackman in Roumania, and the two of them had done things there of

which they preferred not to speak even to each other. “Royall is like a

ghost: I mean that he has no conscience left. But Jackman, I think, has

memories of the difference between wrong and right, and so the horror

comes upon him.”

Suddenly the girl leaned closer to Logan, who had been about to speak,

and put her little hand upon his mouth. “Hush!”--this scarcely more

than a hiss. Her ears, attuned to the creaks and echoes of the place,

had detected something his had not. Yes: now there were stealthy

footfalls in the passage. Someone moved outside the door of the room;

seemed to hesitate there; passed on. The girl’s fingers were gripping

Logan’s shoulder, and his hand shook as he held his pistol ready. But

whatever had been outside was gone elsewhere in the labyrinth of the

Old House.

How ever had Mary MacAskival endured, in her solitude, the dread strain

of this perilous ordeal, month on month? “I say,” she asked him,

abruptly, as if she had read his mind, “do you think I’m mad myself?”

He squeezed her little hand for answer. “Sometimes I wonder if I am,”

she went on, “for it seems like one unending nightmare: until you came,

that is.”

Once Jackman had said to her, “Miss MacAskival, I felicitate you on

your strength of mind.” Considering what the man was, he had been

almost gentle with her; probably his admiration was genuine. He

tolerated no rudeness toward her from any of his rough men.

“I don’t think he is interested in women as most men are,” Mary

MacAskival went on. Did she blush in the darkness? “He is in love

with power and terror. He wants me only because with me he could have

Carnglass a while longer, and because I have money. And, I suppose,

because he enjoys crushing other people’s minds. He has tried to crush

mine. Had he not been so busy with other things, I believe he would

have defeated me long ago.”

So long as her aunt continued to live, Jackman had no urgent motive to

compel the girl to marry him: his ascendancy over Lady MacAskival gave

him Carnglass and enough money. But as Lady MacAskival sank, now rarely

rising from her bed, the day grew near when Jackman must marry the

girl, or else run the danger of exposure and ruin.

“Once I was rash,” Mary said. “I told him and Royall that I had

tolerated them only because they held my aunt’s life as security. I

said that when she was gone, I’d tell everything I knew to the police.

“Dr. Jackman smiled a horrid smile. ‘Who would believe a mad girl?’

was what he said. And then he told me that if he should fail to

persuade me to remain loyal to him, he and Royall might do things to

me--‘painful measures, Miss MacAskival, painful for all of us’--that

would make me into a different person, so that I could never be the

same again. There were ‘special mental disciplines,’ he told me, and

‘certain shock treatments.’ It would be ever so much pleasanter if I

simply did as he told me to. And he could be sure that I would do as he

wished if I were to marry him. That was once when the horror came upon

him.”

Here, at last, the girl burst into suppressed sobs. Logan’s arm went

round her shoulders. “Sometimes I have thought,” she mumbled, “that I

ought to give way. So much easier! But I suppose I was too proud.”

The fierce old blood of the chieftains of MacAskival, Logan thought,

was strong in her; she was a sport in more ways than one. It would be

a pleasure for him, if ever he got the chance--which, at the moment,

seemed slim--to settle accounts on her behalf with Edmund Jackman.

Why, until she wrote to Duncan MacAskival, had she made no attempt

to expose Jackman, or to escape? Because it was only gradually she

had come to understand what Jackman and Royall were after; and she

had known, too, that her aunt’s life was in their hands, and that

they would not hesitate to snuff it out if they were pushed. From the

moment Jackman established himself in the Old House, it had become

increasingly difficult to send any message out of the island; a

fortnight ago, it had become virtually impossible; and since Donley’s

flight, she had not been permitted even to leave the house.

And there was another reason: that room in the cellars full of

explosives. She thought that Jackman was eager to use them, if there

were any chance for it, to destroy certain mysterious things that the

government was building in the Outer Isles; but Royall was trying to

restrain him. “Dr. Jackman,” she had overheard him say once, “you know

what exceeding instructions has brought us already. Until word comes

from Bruhl....” Royall was willing, she suspected, to rest content with

gathering what information they could about those mysterious projects,

and transmitting it to someone in London. But in Jackman there was

some terrible compulsion to blow everything apart. “If he could, I do

believe, he would explode all the world into little bits.”

So there was this: if Jackman were brought to bay, and had the

opportunity, very probably he would set off the gelignite in the crypt.

The Old House would go, and everyone in it; and for Mary MacAskival,

the Old House and Carnglass were the center of the universe. “I know

nothing about politics,” she told Logan, rather apologetically. “I

suppose Jackman and Royall are traitors, and might do terrible harm

to the country. But Carnglass is my country. I think of the Old House

first.” Jackman would destroy himself and everyone in the Old House,

almost certainly, if he despaired. “What was it the old Greek said:

‘When I am dead, let earth be mixed with fire’? I learnt that at

school. Well, that is how Dr. Jackman thinks.”

She had lived with the terror, hoping vaguely that Jackman’s plans

might alter and he and his men go away; that the authorities in London

or Glasgow might discover the scheme and descend before Jackman could

act. It was only as her aunt had sunk toward her end that the girl had

been roused to some plan of action, what with her own imminent danger.

And so she had got off the note to Duncan MacAskival, a schoolgirl’s

design; yet it had succeeded so far as to bring Logan to her. “Until

you came, I had no one at all to talk with.” Her sobbing broke out

again.

Jackman and Royall, she was convinced, had no notion of what she had

done or of Logan’s real identity. Once Logan had told her of his

encounters with Dowie and Gare, she said that Duncan MacAskival’s

cablegrams could not have reached Carnglass. The storms, and the

fortunate burning of the boats, had prevented that. There was a

wireless in the Old House, and Jackman sometimes used it, cautiously,

in sending messages in code to people on the mainland; but some ten

days before Lagg and Donley disappeared, part of the wireless set had

slipped out of sight. “They thought Lagg, who was acting strangely,

must have stolen it,” she said. “He didn’t. I did.” This girl was a

paragon. “I do believe that if they knew who you are,” she went on,

“they would make away with you, just as they did with Mr. Lagg”--for

Logan had told her, hurriedly, what Donley had said of Lagg’s end.

In a very little while, Logan realized of a sudden, it would be dawn;

and Mary MacAskival must be gone from his room before then. “Mary,” he

said, “what is this about Lagg? Could he be alive? Could that fellow

Rab really have seen him? Who is outside this house? Is it Donley, or

is it only these fellows’ imagination?”

She hesitated. “I do not know,” she said. Was she concealing something?

“Perhaps I ought to--but there isn’t time now. Listen: someone’s

stirring already, somewhere below. There’s so much more to tell you,

but it must wait. Jackman will keep us apart if he can, but perhaps

he’ll be out with the men today, hunting for Donley. Now I must run.”

There were, indeed, the first faint flushes of the Hebridean spring

dawn visible through the windows. She leaned toward Logan. “You may

kiss my cheek, if you like, for being a brave man.” Logan did that,

but he said, “You seemed to be friendlier yesterday.” She sprang up,

averting her face, and went to the door, and pressed an ear against

it; then she opened it a crack, and peered out; then waved a little

hand, and slipped through, and was gone. With this sudden vanishing,

Logan almost doubted that the strange little creature ever had crouched

sobbing beside him.

* * * * *

Logan lay awake on his bed after that, as the sun came up, full of

dreads--more, perhaps, for the girl than for himself, but sufficiently

concerned for Number One. About seven, there was a rap at his door, and

Tompkins, that pillar of varnished iniquity, brought him morning tea.

Logan would not have been surprised to be knifed as he took the tray,

but Tompkins said only, “Foggy again today, sir,” and closed the door

behind him. Leaving the tea untasted, Logan shaved with the hot water

Tompkins had brought, hurriedly dressed, and found his way downstairs

to the book-lined corridor, where for a few minutes he idled about,

with a feeling of complete helplessness. Then Royall appeared from

somewhere, glancing at him suspiciously; but Royall was civil enough,

in his deathly way, and told him that he could breakfast in the study

in the tower.

He breakfasted alone. Of Mary, there was no sign; and Tompkins told

him that “Dr. Jackman and Mr. Royall and some of the men have gone

out, sir, hunting that Donley person.” The breakfast was meagre,

porridge and a scrambled egg of sorts--powdered egg, Logan thought. In

a besieged house, supplies soon ran low. Outside the small windows,

the mist clung to the gray stone. He would have liked to pry into the

drawers of desk and table, but Tompkins or someone else might enter at

any moment. His pistol was invisible under his heavy tweed jacket; that

was something. How would it all end? He was a pawn in this deep game,

and presently some one would sweep him off the board, unless Donley had

got to the mainland and delivered his note to the police. And even if a

police-launch should put in at Askival harbor, could that devil Jackman

be prevented from sending everyone in the house up in smoke? To ponder

these things, in a deceptive calm, really was the strangest part of the

nightmare into which he had got himself.

About half-past eight, Mary MacAskival ran into the study--shod, for a

change, and her face glowing with excitement. The nerves that girl must

have! Logan put down his pipe, not knowing whether he was expected to

shake hands or to kiss her; but she gave him time for neither. “Hugh,”

she said, “Hugh Logan, I saw them from my window! Jackman and Royall

and the others: they’re bringing something up from the shore, dragging

it. Come down with me, and we’ll go out to meet them.”

Through that immense house they ran, out into the enclosed courtyard

of the Victorian block. By the big door, or rather gate, three of the

men were standing: Tompkins, and Anderson the footman (who looked

unpleasantly like his Gallowgate brother), and a dark grinning man,

supple and compact, who must be Ferd Caggia, the cook. A rifle lay at

an angle against the wall by the door, back of Anderson. Caggia had

just passed an odd green bottle--was it the old rum?--to Anderson,

who took a swig from it. The three men stared at Logan and the girl,

Anderson leering as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Mary MacAskival marched straight up to the door, Logan by her side,

she quite ignoring the men until she stood right before Anderson, who

barred the way. Yes, it was rum Anderson smelt of. “Open the door,” she

said, calmly. “Mr. Logan and I are going out to meet Dr. Jackman.”

“What’ll ye gie me if I do?” Anderson’s words came thickly; the man was

drunk. Anderson winked at Tompkins and Ferd for approval.

“Be good enough to open it.” Mary MacAskival’s green eyes glittered.

“Not for a young hizzie, not me.” Anderson laughed harshly, leaning

against the door. Mary MacAskival reached past him and pulled at the

bolt; it slid back.

Then Anderson took her round the waist, staring defiantly at Logan.

“Ye’ll gie me something, whether I let ye oot or no, ma fine leddie.”

With one raw fist, he pulled at the girl’s jacket. Logan took a step

forward and gave Anderson the back of his hand.

Caught off balance, Anderson crashed against the door. His big head

jerked back, his arm flew away from the girl, and he fell.

The next second, Anderson was up from the flagstones, and everything

happened at once. “Davie, you know what Dr....” Tompkins began, in

mild remonstrance. Ferd Caggia glided to one side, still grinning, as

if he were a spectator at a match for his especial amusement. And tall

Davie Anderson, rising, had grasped the rifle; already its muzzle was

swinging upward, toward Logan, and there was killing in Anderson’s

tipsy eyes.

Logan’s reaction was instinctive and the product of his army years, not

prudential. Very swiftly, he sent his hand into his armpit and flashed

out the little pistol. “Anderson,” he said, distinctly, “don’t move.

Don’t move at all.” The girl stood fixed by the unbolted door, her eyes

wide, very pale.

Anderson’s mouth opened; the rifle in his grip sank toward the ground.

Out of the corner of his eye, Logan saw Caggia glide smoothly toward

his back, and saw Caggia’s hands slip down toward something protruding

just above his belt; but still Caggia smiled. “Caggia,” said Logan,

“bide where you are, man.” Tompkins quivered.

Then, behind Anderson, the big door opened, and Dr. Jackman stepped

softly in, his eyes sweeping across the little tableau. Without

hesitation, Jackman snatched the rifle from Anderson’s hands and dealt

the footman a terrible blow in the jaw with the butt of it. The man

fell, stunned, and a tooth flew out of his mouth as he struck the

flagstones. Behind Jackman, Royall entered; and after him, two more

men, dragging something, and staring at the tableau as they came.

Jackman kicked Anderson in the face. “I told you, you ape, to mind

your manners. Caggia, get this fellow to his quarters. Powert, relieve

Anderson on duty at the door”--this to one of the men behind him. “Mr.

Logan, I was not aware that junior bank-clerks carried revolvers on

their social calls.” Jackman’s words were smooth, but his face was

twisted cruelly. Rumpelstiltskin, Logan thought. “Mr. Logan,” Jackman

went on, even more suavely, “now that I have disposed of Anderson, you

have no more need for that pistol. Be good enough to give it to me.”

Jackman held out his hand.

Royall was beside Jackman now, carrying a rifle; and Caggia was out of

Logan’s line of vision, probably right at his unprotected back; and the

girl, surrounded by men, was exposed to any shooting; and the odds were

too great. Logan extended his palm, with the little pistol lying upon

it, toward Jackman.

Then Royall drew in his breath. “Dr. Jackman,” he said, hoarsely, “see

what gun that is!”

Plucking the pistol deftly out of Logan’s hand, Jackman examined it.

“Quite right, Royall,” he observed. “It’s Donley’s gun Meg, isn’t it?

Mr. Logan, my apologies: I was quite deceived by you--an excellent

performance on your part. You are a young man of talents. After you

took the gun from Donley, did you shoot him or drown him?”

Only then did Logan see what the men had dragged into the courtyard.

It was the battered dead body of Donley, still streaming with water.

“Don’t look, my dear,” said Jackman to Mary, considerately. “A bit of

flotsam, washed up near the pier.”

10

Two more men had come into the courtyard, and stood staring. “Simmons,”

said Dr. Jackman to one of them, “help Niven to get this body into the

cellars, for the time being. Miss MacAskival, be so good as to go to

your rooms and remain there until I send word. Well, Rab! Up and about?

I take it that Donley here wasn’t on your heels last night? No, of

course not. We haven’t yet found your friend Carruthers, but I trust

that we will. Caggia, _do_ get Anderson to his bed, for he’s sprinkling

blood all over the flags, and there’s a lady present.”

The sight of blood seemed to put Edmund Jackman into excellent form.

Shock-headed Rab gazed at him vacantly, as if still dazed by his last

evening’s encounter with shadowy pursuers. “Well,” Jackman went on

cheerfully, “poor Till--he’s lost the sight of one eye forever, I’m

sure--is quits with Seamus Donley now. Go up and tell him the news,

Tompkins.”

Mary, in the midst of this hard crew, was looking at Logan with dismay

in her eyes. “Hugh,” she said, “Hugh ...” and stretched out a hand

toward him. Jackman shot a malign glance at her.

“You’d best go, Mary,” Logan told her, with what assurance he could

summon up. She turned and fled into the Old House.

Logan could conjecture the fate of Donley. Tired and wounded, the old

terrorist must have been flung on the skerries by that cruel sea; the

boat would have broken up; and his body, beaten against the rocks,

had washed round to the harbor at the other end of Carnglass. In this

grim moment, Logan had little time to pity Donley. It could not have

been Donley, then, returned, who hunted Rab and Carruthers through the

night. Rab might have fired only at imaginary stalkers, in this eerie

island. But then what had become of Carruthers? Lagg had taken him, Rab

had screamed in his hysteria last night. Was it possible that, after

all, Lagg had not been killed? But if he had not, how could he have

existed alone and invisible these several days; and how could a sly fat

Galloway factor have made away with one seasoned ruffian and driven

another out of his wits?

Except for Powert, standing sentry at the gate, Logan now was left

alone in the courtyard with Jackman and Royall. “Well, Mr. Logan,”

Jackman was saying to him, “there are few things in this vale of tears

more interesting than an accomplished adversary. I prize you.” He was

playing with that little pistol Meg. “Royall, we’ll take Mr. Logan

up to my study, and there he’ll supply us with valuable information,

I’m sure. He should be able to tell us, for instance, who disposed of

Carruthers. He has done us one service already, in evening our score

with the late lamented Seamus Donley; now we’ll discover just who sent

Mr. Logan to us, and why.”

It might be folly to go on pretending he was an Edinburgh bank-clerk,

Logan thought: Meg had given him away. Under the circumstances, and

considering the habits of Jackman’s gang, naturally Dr. Jackman assumed

that Logan had disposed of Donley. But what new role could Logan play?

To have lapsed into his American speech would have suggested to the

quick mind of Jackman that this young fellow had been sent to manage

the purchase of Carnglass. And, having learnt too much about Jackman

and Company, Logan then would be a candidate for extinction.

He dared not pretend to be an Englishman, for his mastery of English

accents was not up to it, and Jackman would have detected him at once.

Their French, too, might be better than his own. There seemed to be

nothing for it but to keep speaking in a genteel Scots, though he

might expand his vocabulary beyond the usual range of a fictitious

junior clerk. “Well, Dr. Jackman,” Logan said--he made the word almost

“weel”--“I confess I do find myself in a predicament.”

“Really,” said Jackman, “really now, my dear fellow, you needn’t

continue to talk as a Lothians counter-jumper would. You didn’t ring

quite true in that role, but yours was a valiant try. You’re a cut or

two above that sort of thing, eh? I doubt whether you’re a Scot at all.

An Englishman, possibly? Or even a German? A university man, probably.

Just walk on the other side of our Mr. Logan, if you will be so good,

Royall. We shall have Mr. Logan resident in Carnglass for some time

now: permanently, perhaps, depending on his degree of co-operation with

us. Among the many things about you which puzzle me, Logan, is how you

contrived to become acquainted with Miss Mary MacAskival. We shall have

to interrogate the young lady on that point, eh, Royall--unless Mr.

Logan is so gallant as to save us the trouble? I hadn’t guessed that

Miss MacAskival numbered among her friends any person formidable enough

to do in Seamus Donley, late I.R.A. Well, up to my study, if you don’t

mind. On the stair, Mr. Royall, pray walk directly behind Mr. Logan,

with your gun at the ready. We mustn’t underestimate his talents a

second time.”

For all the gravity of this situation, Hugh Logan felt more confidence

in himself than he had known since he landed in Carnglass. He had begun

to understand matters, and to struggle against the tide of events;

his ineffectuality of an hour ago had given way to action of a sort.

And time was running out for Jackman. A few more days of silence from

Carnglass, at most, and someone--the police, or a passing ship or

plane--would suspect that things were amiss in the island, and there

would be investigations highly embarrassing to Jackman. They would not

be so embarrassing, however--sobering thought--if Hugh Logan somehow

should have vanished from Carnglass before any official inquiries

might be made. It was some comfort to reflect that Duncan MacAskival,

if no one else, soon would begin to wonder where he was; and there

was the faint possibility that the Glasgow police, desiring him for a

witness in the affair of Mutto’s Wynd, might commence to look for him.

Everything, conceivably, would depend upon how the next few minutes

with Dr. Jackman happened to go.

In the study, Jackman indicated that, as on the first occasion, Logan

was to sit at the chess-table. “I don’t think you’ll be needed,

Royall,” Jackman said to that cadaverous secretary, “but you might

look in within the hour. We have a very clever guest here: devilish

clever. It’s as well I have Donley’s pistol in _my_ pocket now.” Royall

hesitated, as if to offer some objection; but, at a dark glance from

Jackman, went out.

Once again Jackman poured sherry for Logan, and set out the Table-Men

of Askival. “Really, Logan, I think you were pulling my leg at our

last game of chess, as you were in so many other matters. I’ll not

accept any handicap in this match. It’s rather pleasant to play during

a casual discussion like ours, don’t you think? We never may have an

opportunity for another match. That depends upon you, of course,

Logan.” Jackman showed every sign of being in good spirits, as if he

enjoyed this contest with an able adversary; but well below his urbane

surface, Logan suspected, a gnawing disquietude was at work in Jackman.

He knew the man much better after Mary’s account of him.

As for Logan, he made his first move in the match with seeming

indifference, smiling at Jackman. The only thing that could suffice to

save him, Logan felt, was to dismay Jackman by a show of complacency

and mysterious assurance. He had this sole advantage, that Jackman had

not the faintest glimmer as to who Logan really was. “Oh, no, sir,” he

said to Jackman, still with his assumed Scottish burr, “I fancy that

the question of our future encounters, Dr. Jackman, already is settled

by people from beyond Carnglass.”

Jackman scowled. “I told you you needn’t play at little games with me,

Logan, or whatever your name is. It’s pointless now for you to talk

like a smarmy bank-clerk that never existed. Why not out with it all?

Who are you?” He advanced a rook.

“That, Dr. Jackman, you’ll learn in the fullness of time. Lest you grow

rash, let me remind you of one thing: you may be sure that I’d not have

come to Carnglass, knowing you and your men were here, without having

taken precautions. There are a dozen people who know precisely where I

am, and why, and who will come looking for me if I don’t return when I

ought.” He let that observation sink in as he meditated his next move.

He wished there were any truth in it; but Jackman could not know its

hollowness.

“As for that, Logan”--here Jackman castled--“it would be entirely

possible for you to be lost, accidentally, in these wild waters.

No witnesses would swear to your having met with any harm in

quiet old Carnglass. Not one. You might, for instance, have gone

mackerel-fishing in a small boat with Lagg and Donley; and the three

of you might have been caught in a squall--there are mishaps enough

in these waters--and drowned; and two of the bodies might have been

recovered, Donley’s and yours. A death by drowning is quite natural. A

quarter of a mile off the western shore of Carnglass is a ragged reef

that would offer a wholly convincing explanation.”

Logan extricated a bishop from a tight corner. “But suppose, Dr.

Jackman, that my friends ashore are not the sort to be satisfied by

the formalities of a coroner’s jury, or, indeed, by Scottish courts of

law? Suppose they might hold you privately accountable, and presume you

guilty until proved innocent?”

Jackman stared at him. “Logan, I put it to you bluntly now. Royall was

sounding you out last night, of course, with his bits from Burns, and

our other signals. You evaded him. Now tell me out and out, for I’ve no

time to waste: are you one of us? If you are, why cannot you say so and

have done with it, and transmit your instructions to me, if you’ve any

to give? Perhaps you’re from London; perhaps from Paris; perhaps from

further East. I’ve been expecting some such inquiry, of course. Why

this cat-and-mouse rubbish, if you are one of us?”

Jackman’s nerves were wearing thin. To assume the new role of a member

of Jackman’s conspiratorial circle would be much the safest dodge

for him just now, of course--if only Logan knew how to play it. But,

lacking knowledge of the ring, all he could undertake was to cast out

dark hints from time to time. “Why, I’ll tell you merely this, Dr.

Jackman: I am not authorized to make any regular communication to you

until certain events have taken place, and until a certain time has

elapsed. Until then, consider me simply as your casual guest.” He took

a rook of Jackman’s.

“You _are_ a cool chap, Logan. I needn’t tell you I have ways of

extracting a statement from you. I know all the ways, Logan.”

“Of course you know them. But suppose I am the sort of person I may be:

if you did me any hurt, it might be awkward for you afterward, eh? I

have a long memory, Jackman.”

Jackman bit his lip, and lost another pawn. “There are other ways

of getting round you, Logan. Have you ever heard a lady scream? A

full-throated scream, from exquisite agony, I mean. It’s rather

distressing for a gentleman who happens to like the lady in question.

And it is the ladies, the gently-bred, soft-skinned ladies, who scream

loudest, Logan, and talk soonest and most. Imagine a young lady

accustomed all her life to deference, who hadn’t had a hand laid upon

her in anger since she was a naughty small child; and then think of

her, to her surprise and chagrin, abruptly treated to the worst that

the human body can stand. How she would scream, Logan, and babble all

she knew, and beg to be let off; and you would have the interesting

experience of watching the process, though unable to intervene. Suppose

Miss Mary MacAskival were the young lady? I’m sure she could tell us

a great deal about you.” Jackman’s marvellous eyes glinted. “Torment

is the great leveller, Logan: in torment, the colonel’s lady and Judy

O’Grady are sisters under the skin. There are no class distinctions

in agony; our Miss MacAskival would behave like the lowest trull from

Piccadilly, except that she would scream louder and talk sooner.”

It required a considerable effort, but Logan kept a smiling

countenance. If he protested, or showed any sign of weakness, Jackman

would take precisely this course; he was being sounded. Indifference on

his part, just now, was the chief hope for Mary.

“Ah, well, Dr. Jackman, you and I are playing for higher stakes than

a slip of a girl, aren’t we? If you must, you must; but I may as well

tell you that you’d be wasting the time of both of us. Miss MacAskival

knows only just what I found necessary to tell her, which is precious

little. As for my being racked vicariously by her discomforts--why, you

and I got past that a good time ago, didn’t we, Jackman? ‘O had ye been

where I ha’ been, and seen wha’ I ha’ seen....’ When fellows like us

have supped long on horrors, another squeal or two doesn’t much matter.

Besides, I doubt whether you have much taste for twisting ladies’ arms,

Jackman. I know you did your share of the disagreeable business, that

very sort of business, in Barcelona and Bucharest--oh, I know all about

you, Jackman”--here Jackman grimaced, taken aback--“but really, though

you make such operations sound jolly, they aren’t very good fun, are

they, now? One never quite grows accustomed to them; they stick in the

craw; and what’s worse, they stick at the back of the brain, don’t

they? Even our friend Royall, I suspect, doesn’t relish that business

as he should.”

“Even so, Logan, I wouldn’t have to turn my own hands to the work, you

know. Those strapping fellows downstairs would jump at the chance.

They’ve been somewhat inhibited from their accustomed earthy pleasures

here in Carnglass, poor chaps, and some haven’t had their way with a

woman for months. Your recent little _contretemps_ with Anderson, for

instance--I’m certain Anderson would perform the task with enthusiasm.

They’re a trifle coarse-fibred, my men, and to apply the _peine fort et

dure_ to a young lady would be quite their cup of tea.”

“No doubt, no doubt, old chap.” Here Logan took a knight from Jackman.

“I have limitless confidence in their aptitude for such work, if for no

other. But the powers that be still would tend to hold you personally

responsible, wouldn’t they, now? And suppose the interrogation should

all be in vain--why, however could you explain? Nothing does a

diligent man’s reputation more serious damage than an unauthorized and

unnecessary atrocity. _You_ ought to know that by this time, Jackman.”

“The things I did, others told me to do, Logan.” Jackman’s lips worked.

He lost another pawn.

“Quite. But you went rather beyond specific instructions, didn’t you? I

don’t advise you to exceed instructions here in Carnglass.”

Jackman ran a hand lightly across his forehead, distractedly touching

the little round soft patch in the middle with a forefinger. He

ventured out a rook too far, and lost it to Logan. Then he looked,

silent, into Logan’s eyes. The gaze of those great glowing pupils of

Jackman’s was hard to bear. Into Logan’s mind came the sentence, “And

if thy light be darkness, how great shall be that darkness.” It was

just possible that he might prove a match of Edmund Jackman now, though

the odds were against him. The man’s brain must be damaged, and under

Jackman’s outward imperiousness, Logan suspected, vacillation was

gnawing away. Logan thought also that had he encountered Jackman at the

height of the man’s powers, Mary would have had a sorry knight-errant.

But now the merciless energy and talent which had been Jackman’s were

flickering in the socket, like enough, and Logan had to deal only with

the remnant of a bad man. In Jackman’s ears sounded the wings of the

Furies, and his mind sank further into doubt and dread. Or so Logan

surmised, looking into those splendid, troubling eyes. It was just

barely conceivable that Logan might defeat this failing master of

deceit.

Logan started, and shook his head to rouse his consciousness. Had

Jackman been attempting to mesmerize him? If so, the attempted

paralysis of will had not succeeded, what with Logan’s own mind

being full of plots and stratagems. Yet Jackman might have come near

successful hypnosis; Logan had a feeling that the man had been asking

him questions, in a low, almost friendly voice, to which Logan had

given no answers as yet.

Just now Jackman was saying, ever so softly, “Who _are_ your friends

outside the Old House, out there in the wet and the dark?”

“Friends?” Logan spoke shrilly, alarmed at his own near-slip into

reverie or trance. “Friends? Whose friends? If anyone’s outside,

they’re no people of mine.” Logan regretted this admission as soon as

he had made it; it would have done no harm to keep Jackman wondering

whether he had an accomplice or two hidden in the bracken. Indeed,

perhaps Jackman had begun to extract the truth from him by hypnosis,

and Logan had escaped from the domination of those black eyes only in

the nick of time.

But Jackman shook his head slowly, in disbelief; and his eyes went to

the window of that room high in the tower, almost as if he feared to

see some face pressed against the pane, far above the living rock of

the Old House’s foundation. It was borne in upon Logan that Jackman’s

unease was greater than his own fears.

Jackman licked his thin lips. “Why, Logan, who do you expect me to

believe they are?” If the mystery back there behind the bracken had

shaken Jackman this much, the panic must be worse among the men below

stairs, with Rab’s hysteria to work upon them. “If they were police

or intelligence people,” Jackman said, almost as if he expected to be

overheard by some presence in that dusky painted chamber, “they would

have swooped upon us long ago; they wouldn’t skulk about, picking off

first one man and then another.”

“Rab told you that it was Tam Lagg: old Lagg, Dr. Jackman, that you

sent over the cliffs a thousand feet down to the rocks and the sea,

while he screamed of his wife and his bairns.”

Jackman looked at Logan astonished. “You, Logan--were you watching

then? But no, you’ll have had that from Donley, before you finished

with him. Lagg? What are you talking of? I saw him strike a crag half

way down, and bounce off like a ball, and then fall to the sea. Such a

thing doesn’t walk again.”

“Not alive,” Logan replied. “No, not alive.” Jackman’s eyes dilated.

Yes, he could sound this note, Logan decided: the black beast was upon

Jackman’s shoulders, and the conjuror was bewitched. If ever a man

was haunted, it was Jackman, stalked by Spanish victims and Roumanian

spectres, and now with the wraith of Lagg at his heels. “See here,

Jackman: you raise sham bogles to frighten old women, and you laugh

up your sleeve. But when you play with things from the abyss, you

run risks. In this dead island of Carnglass, all round us things are

ready to stir, if they’re called. I felt them in Dalcruach clachan. In

Carnglass the dead are more than the living. And why shouldn’t Tam Lagg

rise? You gave him the death that he feared most to die. If ever you

set a spirit to walk the night, it was when you tossed that screaming

man from the headland at the back of St. Merin’s Chapel.”

As Logan spoke, a nasty change came over Jackman. His face went a sick

white, and his eyes closed, and he slumped in his chair. The horror

must be on him. His breath came hard. Logan began to think of closing

with him as he sat motionless across the table. But after a moment,

Jackman gasped, blinked, and fumbled for the pistol in his pocket; he

drew the gun and laid it before him, beside the chessboard.

“Then you feel it, too,” Jackman muttered, very low. “All about us, eh?

Oh, this is a damned house, a place of dreams, horrid dreams. Listen:

last night I walked the passages, for I didn’t dare to sleep, until I

was worn out. In the end, I lay on my bed, not closing my eyes. And

then it was not a bed, but a long, close tunnel or cave, and I was

stumbling along it. Away at the end, I could see something standing.

And it came to me that I myself was standing there, even though I

walked toward the thing. The Edmund Jackman at the end of the cave was

the Edmund Jackman that I might have been, if--if I had taken another

turn at the beginning. And as I came up to myself, wanting to see the

face, and the beauty of what I might have been, the thing turned, and

looked at me. Its face was the face of a goat. Ah, the slit eyes! And I

became one with it, and woke, and the horror still was on me.”

Infected by the man’s loathing of himself, and his fright, Logan also

lowered his voice to a whisper. “Would you rather have died in the cave

than have become one with the goat?”

“Yes,” said Jackman, “yes. It would be better to lie dead, dead like

Lagg. I thought then of the gelignite, and I think of it every day and

every night.” At this, Jackman shuddered, seemed to collect his wits,

scowled at Logan, and glanced dully at the Table-Men of Askival on the

board before him.

“Your move,” Logan reminded him. Edmund Jackman moved almost at random.

“So!” Logan shifted his queen. “Checkmate, Dr. Jackman.”

“Hell!” cried Jackman, reaching out his hand as if to sweep the pieces

to the floor.

“Easy!” Logan said, intercepting Jackman’s hand with his own. “There’s

but this one set in the world, you know.”

Once more their eyes met in a long, strange stare; then Jackman, to

Logan’s surprise, glanced down at the table. “Logan, or whatever

you are,” he said, almost pleadingly, “I don’t know whether you can

understand me. You’re a Party intellectual, I think, and the Party

believes it knows all things. Yet in some matters the Party is blind.

Just now I said ‘Hell.’ In Carnglass, I have learned that Hell is real.

That’s heresy in the Party; but I have looked on Hell. There is no

Heaven, but there is Hell.”

Jackman’s eyes were vacant now; he seemed to have forgotten to whom he

spoke. “Hell endures,” he went on. “I have been in Hell always. This

Carnglass is Hell. Don’t you know you were here in Carnglass before,

infinitely long ago? We fought here then--and I lost. In Carnglass

there is no time. Eternity is real here, and change is the delusion.

I know this in the nights, when I walk the corridors. It is only in

the day I can pretend that I am alive, or that what things I do can

possibly save me from the torment. In the nights it is Hell that is

real, and the Party is a sham. Do you understand that? And I know that

you came here to send me to the torment, as you did before.”

Many times, Logan had heard the phrase “possessed of a devil.” But

not until this moment, as he sat opposite Jackman with the chessmen

between them, had he perceived the full and dreadful meaning of the

words. The dark powers had claimed Edmund Jackman long since, and what

sat opposite him was only the husk of a human being. Even the husk

was crumbling now. Yet out of that desiccated scrap of mortality, dry

and empty as the armor of last summer’s locust, there echoed now and

again cries of anguish, the vain contrition of the damned. Whatever

traditionary spectres might throng round the Old House of Fear, here

right before Logan sat the ghost of what once might have been a vessel

for honor.

Again Jackman’s eyes had closed, and the man or devil did not stir in

the chair. What visions came and went behind those fallen eyelids,

Logan preferred not to think. Jackman had drifted somewhere beyond this

world of sense, for the moment. In the middle of that pallid forehead,

the nasty round spot, the Third Eye, seemed to pulsate faintly, as if

keeping night watch upon Logan.

Hugh Logan fought clear of the contagion of madness. Minutes, precious

minutes, were slipping away. By a heap of chessmen lay the little

pistol. Should he make a try for it? Or was this some sort of trap

that Jackman had set? No, the damned man’s trance was genuine. If he

chose, Logan could leap up, snatch the pistol, and make for the stairs.

But that gang of murderers was below. And where might Mary and he run

to? Well, let him get his hands on a rifle, and he might hold the old

tower against them for a time. It might be possible to keep Jackman a

hostage. The scheme was fantastic, but the only probable alternative

was torture and death for Mary MacAskival and himself. Rising silent

from his chair, Logan stretched out a hand toward the gun.

“As you were!” It was Royall’s harsh voice, at Logan’s back. A

revolver-muzzle pressed into his spine. Royall’s long, almost skeletal

arm reached past him and snatched up the little pistol by the chessmen.

“Over to the wall,” Royall said, “and stand there till I tell you to

turn round. I’ve been behind the screen these ten minutes past, Logan.”

11

It would have been a lunatic try anyhow, Logan thought as he faced the

wall. Behind him, Royall was ministering to Dr. Jackman, but Logan felt

sure that if he swung round, Royall would not miss.

“Here, a little brandy,” Royall was saying, rather in the tone of a

nurse. “Come round now, Dr. Jackman. It’s no time for fancies.” There

was a sound as if Royall were gently slapping Jackman’s cheeks. “That’s

it, sir: are you quite awake now, Dr. Jackman?”

Jackman’s voice came choked and faint, but grew in power after the

first few words. “Askival,” Jackman was saying. “Askival--where is he?

And Lagg?”

“Take hold of yourself, Dr. Jackman. We’ve this fellow Logan to deal

with. Very well, Logan: come over here and sit down.”

For the present, Royall had assumed command. With his revolver

he gestured toward the chair in which Logan had sat during the

chess-match, and Logan took it without protest. Royall continued to

stand. On the other side of the table, Jackman seemed in possession of

his faculties again.

“We’d best search this man,” Royall said. He slipped a hand inside

Logan’s jacket, still standing at Logan’s back, and found his wallet.

Logan did not move: Jackman was watching him keenly, his hand on the

pistol. They would find no identification in the wallet, for Logan

had put his passport and anything else with his name on it into the

knapsack.

“No, sir, there’s nothing with a name, worse luck,” Royall murmured.

“Stand up and take off your jacket, Logan.” Logan did as he was told.

In a moment Royall thrust the jacket back to him. “And no labels, Dr.

Jackman. The man must be an old hand at his game.”

“Tompkins searched his room this morning?” Jackman asked.

“Yes; and he found nothing but a razor and the like. No papers--and not

even the canvas sack this man brought with him. I suppose he burnt it

in the fireplace, or else flung it out of the window and down the cliff

to the sea.”

“Have a man look along the rocks at low tide,” Jackman said. “Yes, our

friend Logan undoubtedly has had experience as an agent of some sort.”

“You needn’t bother to have a man risk his bones on those weedy

ledges,” Logan told them. “I burnt the sack on the coals, last night.”

He trusted that Mary had tucked away the pack in some really secure

hidie-hole.

“For your circumstances, Logan,” Royall muttered, “you seem

unreasonably cheerful. I shouldn’t care to find myself in your present

situation.” Royall ran his hands carefully along Logan’s trousers and

into his pockets. “No, Dr. Jackman--no knife, and no papers stitched

into the linings.”

“Why,” said Logan, “I suppose a man might as well laugh as cry. And

then, don’t you know, it’s not I who need to fash--as we true-born

Scots say. It’s you gentlemen who will have to make your peace, if you

can, with the men that will be here all too soon for your comfort.”

“Sit down again, Logan,” Royall ordered. “You needn’t sing that tune

for us. If you had any people at your back, we’d have seen them before

this.”

“Oh?” Logan answered, amicably. “And who do you suppose took

Carruthers? Donley was dead hours before you missed Carruthers,

remember.”

Jackman and Royall stared at each other, silent. In that moment, Logan

almost felt a touch of pity for them. Both must have been reared and

educated well enough--very well, indeed. What flaws of character

or intellectual false turnings had brought them into this ruthless

business, he could not tell. They might have commenced, like others,

full of humanitarian sentimentality. And then, perhaps, demon ideology,

with its imperatives and its inexorable dogmas, its sobersided

caricature of religion, had swept them on to horrors. Ideological

fanaticism had made of Jackman the goat-man, mastered by lust: but not

the lust for women’s bodies. Jackman’s was the _libido dominandi_, the

tormented seeking after power that ceases not until death. And in the

flame of that lust for power, Jackman and Royall would be burnt up,

today or next week or next month: they were at the end of their devil’s

bargain, and the fiend would claim his own.

Now, in this oppressive silent moment, the conviction came to Logan

that these two artists of disintegration were more frightened than

he. He felt surprised to find himself thinking clearly enough, almost

ruminating, in this tension that made electric the ancient room with

the painted ceiling. Because frightened, Jackman and Royall were the

more dangerous; but also their brains were stagnant with dread.

Fear, it crossed Logan’s mind, is the normal condition of man, after

all. Quiet ages and safe lands are the rare exceptions in history.

Nowadays the tides of disorder were gnawing at whatever security and

justice still stood in the world, quite as the swell round Carnglass

sought to bring down that heap of gray stones to the mindless anonymity

of the ocean. With growing speed, the brooding spectre of terror,

almost palpable in Carnglass, was enveloping the world. This island was

the microcosm of modern existence.

And here in the haunted stronghold of the Old House of Fear, Jackman

and Royall and their gang found themselves caught in their own snare.

Even the dull criminals below stairs, huddled tipsily by the kitchen

fire, were unmanned by a dim sense of catastrophe, caught up in a

horror of the empty island, where mist and silence seemed to have made

away with time, so that Glasgow and Liverpool and London were fancies

out of an illusory past.

Jackman himself, with his distraught imagination, his ruined talents

once near to genius, fancied himself snared here by destiny, condemned

to give reality to a myth. And was he wrong? In the Old House, Logan

doubted where the realm of spirit ended and the realm of flesh began.

In this dead island, all Jackman’s cleverness lay frustrated, and the

strange chance or power that had brought Logan to Carnglass on this day

seemed to fill the close air in that forgotten tower-room. For Edmund

Jackman, Logan might be something not quite canny, at once a man and

an occult agent. Even for Royall, Hugh Logan must seem a retributive

figure, from Party or police, mercilessly calm with the knowledge that

others were not far behind him.

For all their effort to behave as if they still were masters of the

island, a tautness almost hysterical had crept into Jackman and Royall,

and their voices were strained. What for years they had dealt out to

others, now waited for them; and they had forgotten the meaning of

mercy. There was no justice to which they could appeal. By fear they

had lived; and now the fear which they and their sort had carried

throughout the world was claiming them also. Having murdered order,

these two at last were cast into the outer darkness.

Jackman was speaking. Had something like a quaver crept into that

urbane and sardonic voice? “Well, Royall,” he was saying, “what will we

do with this Logan?”

Royall shifted uncertainly behind Logan’s chair. This man, it occurred

to Logan, saw the growing madness in his leader, and yet was loyal--his

last link with old-fangled human affections.

“Dr. Jackman,” Royall said, “I have a theory concerning our friend

Logan. I believe he’s one of Vlanarov’s people.”

Jackman now spoke with his old decisiveness, as if another spirit had

entered into that sinister body, and as if what had happened during the

preceding half hour had quite washed away from his memory. “Possibly,”

Jackman commented. “Quite possibly. The thought had crossed my mind,

too. If he should be, perhaps we can arrive at satisfactory terms.

Well, Logan?”

Logan devoutly wished, at this juncture, that he had studied more

attentively the recent history of Eastern Europe. If he had fought in

Europe, rather than in the Pacific, that might have been of some help;

or had he been in intelligence, rather than the infantry. As it was,

the name Vlanarov told him a little, but not enough. If memory served

him aright, Vlanarov was such a one as Jackman, but a much bigger

fish. Logan rather thought that Vlanarov had been at Bela Kun’s side

in Hungary, a generation ago, and in Madrid during the Civil War,

and after 1945 a terror in Poland. Through all the vicissitudes of

Party feuds and all the eddies of ideology in the buffer states, the

shadowy but formidable figure of Vlanarov had glided scatheless. No

one ever saw a photograph of the man. It had been his peculiar talent

to anticipate the triumph of particular factions within the Soviet

states, and to shift masterfully in precisely the proper moment from

one interpretation of Marxist doctrine to the corrected version.

Whenever a vanquished clique fell to its ruin, Vlanarov sorted through

the wreck for such survivors as might still do mischief to the new

Party orthodoxy, and clipped their claws and their wings for them--or

something worse. Certain Trotskyites called Vlanarov “The Vulture.”

This much, Logan recalled. And he could see that conceivably the pose

of being one of Vlanarov’s people, at watch upon Jackman’s schemes,

might save his neck. But the great difficulty was that he knew far

too little of Party intrigues to play this role to the full. For that

matter, he was not precisely sure that Vlanarov still was alive: Royall

might be setting a trap for him.

“Yes,” Royall was saying, “I fancy that he’s a Vlanarovite, sent over

by Bruhl from Brussels, to report on our work. Only one of that sort

could have made away with Donley so efficiently.”

Jackman, now tense and erect in his chair, nodded. “Logan,” he said,

“if you come from Bruhl or Vlanarov, with instructions for us or

perhaps for a survey--why, tell me now. After all, you can’t expect to

remain anonymous much longer, because tomorrow or next day I should

receive word from Glasgow, and perhaps from Paris.”

“No, Jackman, I don’t think you will.” Logan had resolved to sound as

much like a Vlanarovite as possible, without being expected to furnish

proof positive. “You’ve contrived to get your boats burnt for you by a

stupid old Irishman. You’ve had part of your wireless stolen”--Jackman

started at this--“and you’ve no way of sending word to shore. And you

saddled yourself with the clumsiest set of agents that ever I set

eyes upon. Gare, that drunken incompetent; Dowie, who’s fit only for

filching sixpences from slum boys; Jock Anderson, all swagger and no

nerve. We gobbled the lot of them.” Logan opened his right hand wide

and closed it hard, as if crushing something within. “They’re awa’

doon the water, Jackman. An old hand like you! One would think you had

turned to drink. But you’ve turned to old wives’ tales, instead.”

Jackman bit his lip. “Do you mean--do you mean they’ve been taken?”

“Liquidated is our word, Dr. Jackman. They were, after all, depreciated

assets. And were I you, Jackman, I’d look sharp. What have you

accomplished here in Carnglass? The rags and tags of information you’ve

collected in foraging round the islands are next to worthless. We have

better ways of mapping those missile sites. And playing with gelignite,

like a boy with firecrackers! You’d never get the stuff past the guards

at the installations, if you seriously tried: these hangdog fellows

you’ve collected here in Carnglass haven’t the heart or the mind for

it. You drove out your only experienced man, Donley, so that he had to

be liquidated for fear he’d talk. Unauthorized enthusiasm! It will be

your ruin, Jackman.”

“But after all,” Royall put in eagerly, “Bruhl himself gave his consent

to this project.”

“Tentative consent is one thing,” Logan said; “approval of blunders in

operation is another.”

Jackman ran his fingers across his forehead in his old gesture

of incertitude. “Logan,” he said, “I believe you really are from

Vlanarov’s people. You’re a Party intellectual: you’ve the look and

tone of it. In short, you’re a man we can talk with. You must know as

well as we do what has gone wrong with this scheme. The people in the

Continent want action from me, but they’ll take no risks nor spend any

money. For that matter, they’ll give me no men. I am expected to extort

the funds from old women, conscript a set of criminals and hold them

together by blackmail and intimidation, and pay the penalty by myself,

with my own neck, if everything falls in pieces.

“For years those people have used Royall and me in this way. Edmund

Jackman, who ought to be forming policy at the upper levels, set to

leading a gang of banditti at the back of beyond! It’s enough to craze

a man. As one intellectual to another, do you see any justice in that?

Bureaucracy on the one hand, fanatic ideological rigidity on the other;

and the best minds in the Party, like yours and mine, fallen between

the stools. In my situation, what would you have done differently?” He

was almost wheedling.

“I’m not authorized to offer any opinion on that subject, as yet,”

Logan said, with what he hoped was an enigmatic smile.

“Perhaps I had better make it clear, Logan,” Royall put in, “that Dr.

Jackman’s association with Beria arose solely from necessity, and from

his obedience to Party discipline. We regret as much as anyone does

what happened to Vlanarov’s father.”

“Do you have a cigarette?” said Logan. “I suppose lunch will be ready

soon.”

“Logan,” Jackman demanded, intensely, “are you here to supplant me?

If you are, why this shilly-shallying? Can’t you have the decency to

present your instructions?”