On the following afternoon, having completed all his arrangements,
Westenhanger ushered Rollo Dangerfield and Eileen into the
Corinthian’s Room.
“Mind if I lock the door for a short time?” he asked, turning to his
host. “I’d rather not be interrupted by anyone in the middle of this
affair. You’ll agree with me when you’ve seen what I have to show
you.”
Old Rollo’s face showed more than a trace of suspicion. Westenhanger
had vouchsafed no information about his project; and the old man
evidently felt mistrustful. However, he nodded his consent and waited
while Westenhanger turned the key in the lock.
“What’s the glass of water for?” Eileen demanded, pointing to a
tumbler which Westenhanger had in his hand.
“You’ll see before long,” he assured her, putting the glass down on a
table. “I think we’ll take things one at a time.”
Rollo seemed to think that he had been kept in the dark long enough.
“May I ask why you have brought us here?”
Westenhanger noticed the old man’s glance at Eileen as he spoke, so he
resolved to put matters on a plain footing at once.
“Miss Cressage knows almost as much about this matter as I do myself.
Between us, we seem to have hit upon something which you ought to know
at once. Miss Cressage, I may say, gave me the key to the mystery.
Without her help I don’t think I’d have hit on the thing at all.”
At the word “mystery,” a shadow gathered on Rollo’s face. He glanced
from the engineer to Eileen as though trying to read their thoughts.
Westenhanger hastened to reassure him.
“When you’ve heard the whole story, Mr. Dangerfield, I think you’ll
agree with me that Miss Cressage has done you a very great service.”
The old man again scanned Westenhanger’s face keenly, before making
any reply. Evidently his scrutiny satisfied him; for the distrust
slowly faded out of his expression and he turned to Eileen with a
faint sketch of a bow, as though making acknowledgment and amends.
“I am entirely in your hands,” he said. “It’s quite clear that you
have been acting for the best.”
Eileen broke in as soon as he had finished.
“You mustn’t take what Mr. Westenhanger says as being strictly
accurate. I really did very little to help. In fact, I’m as much in
the dark as you are, just now, Mr. Dangerfield.”
Westenhanger intervened.
“I think it will be best to take the thing step by step and let you
see how we reached the kernel of the affair. You’ve been doing your
grandfather an injustice, all these years, Mr. Dangerfield. He was a
better man than you gave him credit for. I’ve seen enough to know
that. And I think you’ll find that the Corinthian’s Secret is more
important than the Dangerfield Secret.”
The old man winced a little at Westenhanger’s words; but he refrained
from comment.
“Now, to start with, would you mind letting me have the Corinthian’s
document and the leather disc from the safe? We may as well work with
the originals, as far as possible.”
Rollo stepped slowly across the room, unlocked the safe, and took out
of it the two required articles which he handed over to Westenhanger
in silence.
“I think we’ll sit down,” said the engineer. “It’s going to take a
little while to explain the matter.”
He indicated three seats and brought a small table over, so that they
could all see the document which he placed on it.
“In the first place,” he began, “you once told us that your
grandfather had mechanical leanings—he’d invented some kind of geared
bicycle. That didn’t strike me at the time, particularly; but as it
came back to some purpose later on, I mention it first. On the same
evening, by pure chance, I happened to notice these little holes at
the corners of the squares of the Chess-board on the pavement here.
These things, I mean.”
He rose and pointed out one or two of them.
“When you told us that the Talisman was safe, I must confess I thought
of a man-trap. The holes in the pavement suggested some kind of
machinery needing lubrication; and I had some notion of a trap-door
which would open when the Talisman was touched and so trap a thief.
That was an entirely mistaken idea, as you told us yourself. Still, at
the back of my mind I had connected these oil-holes with the presence
of some machinery or other and with the mechanical tastes of your
grandfather.”
The distrust had passed completely away from Rollo’s face. He was now
listening with obvious eagerness to Westenhanger’s explanation.
“The next thing was, of course, your showing us these things from the
safe. They were quite meaningless to me then.”
He lifted them lightly and put them back on the table.
“The next bit’s hard to account for. Somehow I got a feeling that the
document was the key to some problem or other, and I asked you to let
me copy it. It was just an impulse. I really can’t say what I expected
to do with it. It certainly wasn’t mere vulgar curiosity to dig out
the Dangerfield Secret.”
Again a flicker of distrust crossed Rollo’s face. Westenhanger saw it.
“You can take it from me now, Mr. Dangerfield, that the Dangerfield
Secret is of no importance whatever from to-day onwards. Least of all
to you personally. Make your mind quite easy on that score.”
Rollo nodded; but quite evidently he was not altogether relieved from
anxiety. Eileen’s face showed that she was puzzled by Westenhanger’s
words, but she refrained from asking any question.
“We’ll take the document next,” Westenhanger continued, picking it up
from the table as he spoke. “You know its contents, two texts and a
chess-position. The chess-position is a dud affair. There’s a mate in
one move staring one in the face as soon as one looks at it. Obviously
the thing isn’t a problem, and no one would trouble to write down an
end-game so simple as this. I made nothing of it.”
He looked across at the old man. Rollo’s face had taken on its old
mask of inscrutability. Quite evidently he could not see whither all
this was leading.
“I come now to Miss Cressage’s part in the affair,” Westenhanger
proceeded. “So far as I was concerned there was nothing confidential
in the matter. You hadn’t pledged me to secrecy—because you had told
me nothing. Still, before speaking to Miss Cressage about it, I asked
her to promise she would say nothing. We know that she can keep her
promises.”
Rollo’s glance at the girl made it quite clear that he had full
confidence in her.
“Between us,” Westenhanger went on, “we hit on the key to the first
text. _Nox nocti_—night unto night. Spell the word with a K, and you
get Knight—the chess-piece.”
Old Dangerfield sat up sharply.
“Do you know, Mr. Westenhanger, two generations of us have puzzled
over that scrawl, and not one of us saw it. I congratulate you on your
acuteness, both of you. That was very clever indeed.”
“Just a chance,” Westenhanger had to admit. “It’s a thing one could
only hit upon in the course of talk, and even then it would be only by
accident.”
Rollo’s indifference had slipped from him completely.
“And next?” he demanded.
“I think we’ll set up the position on the big Chess-board before we go
any further,” Westenhanger suggested. “I have a reason for that, as
you’ll see.”
He went to the case holding the chessmen and set up the pieces one by
one on the pavement squares. Then he returned to his seat and took up
the document again.
“You see two white knights? Knight unto knight sheweth knowledge. That
means, as I read it, that one knight can do something which the other
knight can’t do. Very little examination shows what that thing is—it’s
an unaided mate in four moves. Thus.”
He moved the one white knight successively from square to square until
it reached the mating position on Queen’s Seventh. Eileen watched
eagerly, expecting that this time something would happen, but she
could detect nothing whatever. Westenhanger had noticed her attitude.
He looked across the table at her with a smile.
“That’s what you saw me do yesterday. Now I’ll tell you what I was
looking for.”
He turned to Rollo.
“You know that each of these pieces has a long spike on its base which
slides into the holes in the Chess-board? On the surface it looks as
if that had been designed merely to keep the pieces from being knocked
over by anyone who has to walk among them in order to shift them from
square to square. But I had at the back of my mind the idea of the old
Corinthian as a man with a mechanical turn, and I put that idea
alongside the notion of the spikes and the sequence of four fixed
moves by the white knight. And so I reached the idea of . . .”
He looked interrogatively at his hearers, but neither of them had
caught his meaning.
“Of a combination lock!” he concluded, after a pause. “Your
grandfather was more of a mechanic than you gave him credit for. As I
understand the machine—of course, this is only guess-work—under each
hole in the four squares of the knight’s moves there lies the end of a
lever. When you drop the knight into its place on the square, the
spike depresses the lever. The whole secret of the thing is that the
four levers must be depressed in that particular sequence. That guards
against the lock being sprung in the course of normal play. The
chances against that combination are considerable; and I expect some
of the other pieces also depress lock-levers, so that it’s almost
impossible that the thing should be unlocked by a chance game. In
fact, the whole affair is simply a clumsy forerunner of the ordinary
dial lock on good safes.”
“Yes, but it hasn’t opened!” commented Eileen.
“It _has_ unlocked something, though,” Westenhanger retorted. “That
was what puzzled me yesterday when apparently nothing happened after
I’d played the moves. But the Corinthian was taking no chances. The
Chess-board is the lock, but the thing it secures is somewhere else.”
“That sounds nonsense to me,” Eileen said, decidedly.
Westenhanger smiled with a touch of friendly maliciousness.
“We’ve still two things which we haven’t used. This is where I went
wrong yesterday, Eileen,” he interjected. “There’s another text, and
there’s the leather disc. Take the text first of all. _Where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also._ Remember the pun in the
first case? There’s another one here. I didn’t spot it for a while.”
He challenged Eileen’s ingenuity with a look across the table and left
her to puzzle the thing out for herself.
“Not see it? I’ll give you a clue. ‘As pants the hart for cooling
streams . . .’”
He caught her eye and his glance led her gaze round the room till it
came to the tapestry of Diana’s hunting.
“Oh, now I see!” she cried. “You mean there’s something hidden behind
that stag—the hart—in the arras!”
Westenhanger assented with a nod.
Rollo Dangerfield had maintained his serenity up to this point; but
evidently he now felt the strain.
“Mr. Westenhanger,” he said. “You’re not leading me on to a
disappointment? I’ve guessed at something behind all this. Please do
not keep me in suspense.”
Westenhanger felt ashamed of the comedy he was playing. He had not
thought of how it must appear to the man most concerned. At once, in
response to old Rollo’s rather pathetic query, he dropped the pretence
that the issue was still unknown.
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Dangerfield. In trying to make it interesting I’m
afraid I forgot that you might be anxious about the end of the
business—afraid it was all going to peter out in an empty treasury.
I’ve only been making believe that I’m working this out step by step
as we go along. Of course I’ve done it all once before and found the
real thing I was looking for.”
Old Rollo’s old-fashioned courtesy returned to him.
“I am very sorry to have interrupted you,” he said. “Please go on with
your story. I am quite ready to wait for the end when it comes.”
He settled himself in his chair, evidently restraining all signs of
impatience. Westenhanger continued.
“You’ll have no cause to regret our intrusion into your affairs, Mr.
Dangerfield. I can promise you that. I’ll go on. With this needle I
can prick through the arras and fix the exact position of the
hiding-place behind the cloth. You see the stag’s very small; anywhere
near the centre of the body will do. I put the needle clean through
and leave it sticking in the panel behind, to mark the place.”
He suited the action to the word, then he lifted the tapestry and
disclosed the panelled surface.
“Nothing visible in the way of a handle, you see?” he pointed out.
“The panelling’s quite smooth.”
He dropped the tapestry into place again and came back to the table.
“Now this leather disc,” he picked it up as he spoke. “You suggested
to us that it might be a child’s toy. That was what eventually put me
on the track. It _is_ a child’s toy. I’ve played with one like it when
I was a child myself, though I haven’t seen one for years now.
Possibly the modern child doesn’t use things of that sort. But in my
young days they used to call them ‘suckers.’ Here’s one in its normal
state.”
He drew from his pocket a disc of leather with a loop of twine
attached, exactly like the Corinthian relic, except that
Westenhanger’s leather was soft and moist.
“I’ll show you how it works.”
He dipped it for a moment into the glass of water, then placed it flat
on the table with the twine loop on the upper side.
“Now I squeeze it into contact with the table, so as to exclude all
air between it and the wooden surface. The water acts as a seal.
That’s right. Now I pull vertically upwards on the twine. You see the
centre of the disc is pulled up by the twine. That makes a vacuum
between the leather and the table; and the pressure of the atmosphere
pins the ‘sucker’ to the wood. The harder you pull, the faster it
sticks. It’s exactly the way a limpet sticks to a rock; and you know
how tight that clings. With a thing of this size, I could lift an
ordinary paving stone out of its bed. We used to pull up quite big
stones with them when I was a kiddie.”
By levering the ‘sucker’ adroitly he loosened it from the table, just
as a limpet is slid off its bed by a side-thrust.
“I think the rest’s obvious. The Corinthian wanted some means of
pulling out that particular panel without leaving any mark or
attaching a handle. He used this sucker for the purpose. I’ll show
you.”
He went over to the arras, lifted it, and attached his leather disc at
the point where the needle had been. A slow, steady pull on the twine
completed the work, and a large piece of the panel came forward,
evidently the end of a drawer fitting back into the wall of the room.
“Your grandfather’s safe deposit!” said Westenhanger.
As Rollo came forward, the engineer dipped his hand into the drawer.
“Some loose things on top. Will you take them, please? Let’s see. A
diamond pendant. . . . A jewelled collar, isn’t it . . . ? And
this. . . . Here’s something else. . . . There are one or two more, I
think, further back in the drawer.”
He stretched his arm into the cavity, felt about for a few moments,
then grasped something. His voice changed as he turned round with it
in his hand.
“The _real_ Talisman, Mr. Dangerfield!”