A Funeral and a Vigil
“I don’t quite see what you mean,” said Reeves as they sat down to
luncheon.
“Never mind,” said Carmichael, “we shall see if I’m right or not.
Meanwhile, there’s the funeral this afternoon, and it would hardly be
decent to take any action till after that, would it? Hullo, Marryatt,
what time does the thing start?”
“Half-past two. A good many of the members mean to turn out, and one
wanted them to get away in time for an afternoon round. I must say, I
think the club’s done handsomely by poor Brotherhood, considering how
few of us really knew him. The Committee has sent a very fine wreath.”
“And that’s the only one, I should think,” said Gordon.
“Oddly enough, it isn’t. There’s one other, a peculiarly
expensive-looking thing, which came down from London. There’s no name
on it, no inscription of any kind, in fact.”
“H’m!” said Reeves; “that’s curious.”
“My dear Reeves,” expostulated Gordon, “I’m not going to have you
examining the wreaths on the coffin with your lens and forceps. There
are limits of decency.”
“Well, I won’t worry about it anyhow till Carmichael has—Hullo! hit
him on the back, Gordon.” For Carmichael had been overtaken by one of
those choking fits which the best-behaved of us are liable to.
“It’s a curious thing,” he gasped on recovering, “that one always used
to say, when one was small, that one’s drink had ‘gone the wrong way.’
Nothing at all to do with the wind-pipe, I believe.”
The funeral was, it must be confessed, a riot of irony. The members
who attended had decided that it would look bad to take their clubs
with them to the churchyard, but their costumes were plainly a
compromise between respect for the dead and a determination to get on
with business as soon as it was over. None of them had any tears to
shed. The village of Paston Oatvile turned out to a child in sheer
morbidity, to see “’im as fell down off of the railway put away.” The
sonorous assurances of the burial service had to be read out in full
earshot of the village green on which, little more than a week ago,
Brotherhood had laboriously disproved the doctrine of personal
immortality. To these same solemn cadences the great lords of Oatvile,
ever since they abandoned the Old Faith under William III, had been
laid to rest within these same walls—
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone
—and yet there had been a sort of feudal dignity about their manner of
departing. But this unknown sojourner of a day, who had known hardly a
soul in the parish, who had loved nothing of all that country-side
except eighteen little holes in the ground, what mourning could there
be for him—the body so mangled, the soul whose existence he had
denied?
One understood why people wanted to be cremated. While we keep all our
seriousness for our frivolities, what wonder that men feel a sense of
disproportion about the traditional solemnities of interment? With the
villagers, indeed, it was different—you might almost say that the hour
of their funerals was the hour they lived for. It made them one with
the earth they had tilled and furrowed; it gave them, at last, a
permanent tenure among their own immemorial fields. “Man that is born
of woman is full of sorrow and hath but a short time”—they had
learned, unconsciously, to measure their lives by the secular oaks in
the great park, by the weather-beaten antiquity of the village church
itself. But this strange race of light-hearted invaders, to whom each
spot of ground was no more than a good lie or a bad one, what part had
they in the communal life of these retired valleys? It meant nothing
to them.
We have been following the service with Gordon’s eyes; Reeves, it is
probable, was lost in speculation as to the donor of the mysterious
wreath, and Carmichael was doubtless reminded of a thousand things.
But it was over at last, and Reeves, eager to get back to business,
implored Carmichael to explain his hints about the disappearance of
the cipher. “Wait till we get back to your room,” was the only answer.
And, when the desired haven was reached, “Have another look among
those papers, and make certain you didn’t pass it over by mistake.”
“Good Lord,” said Reeves suddenly, “here it is! But I swear it wasn’t
when I looked before. I say, Carmichael, have you been playing the
funny ass with the thing?”
“No,” said Carmichael, “I haven’t.”
“Who has, then?”
“That’s the point. I should be glad if I were in a position to
enlighten you. You see, I know the maid was blameless as regards that
piece of paper. She only does the rooms early in the morning; now, I
came in after breakfast, when you’d gone off to Binver, to have
another look at the cipher and see if I could make anything of it by
inspection. And it was still there.”
“And you’re sure you didn’t take it away with you?”
“Positive. Now, observe this: that document must have been taken away
while you and Gordon were both at Binver, while I was over at the
station.”
“But how did it get back there?”
“It was put back there. And it was put back there, not during
luncheon, for I had another look afterwards, but while we were down at
the funeral. It follows that none of our party this afternoon has been
meddling with your papers—I’m glad to think, for example, that the
Secretary escapes suspicion.”
“But do you seriously mean to say there’s somebody in this house who
comes into my room and disturbs my papers for his own ends?”
“Don’t be so shocked about it. You’ve been spending the last three
days spying on other people; is it impossible that other people should
spy on you? Look here, that paper is in your room at half-past ten; it
is no longer there at half-past twelve; it is back again at four
o’clock. Do you mean to tell me that somebody acquainted with your
habits hasn’t been meddling with your papers?”
“What made you suspect it?”
“That’s the odd thing. Did you ever notice how often a false
calculation puts you on the track of a true one? Puzzling over that
odd experience we had last night about the photograph, I found myself
wondering whether conceivably some one could have come in and altered
it while you were out. Well, upon reflection, that was impossible,
because we were in the room the whole time, all four of us. But
meanwhile, it did occur to me that perhaps our proceedings were being
rather too public. Look how full of comparative strangers this
dormy-house is; any one of those may be Brotherhood’s murderer, for
all we know, or at least an accomplice. And then, when you found the
cipher gone, it occurred to me at once, ‘I was right; there is
somebody on the spot who is following our movements!’ That was why I
had that choking-fit at luncheon—you were just going to talk about the
disappearance of the cipher in a crowded dining-room; and it seemed to
me imprudent.”
“But, look here, what’s the man’s game? Why take the thing away and
then put it back again?”
“My dear Reeves, you shouldn’t go to funerals, it has a depressing
effect on your intelligence. The cipher was taken away this morning,
when it might have been of some use to you, I suspect, by somebody who
had seen me looking at it and so realized that it was important. Then,
by a mere accident, it proved that you did not need the paper after
all, and had read the message without it. I saw what would happen—if
we left your room empty, the cipher, now useless, would be put back.
And that is exactly what happened. The hypothesis has become a
certainty.”
“Good Lord,” said Reeves, walking up and down the room. “What on earth
are we to do about it?”
“Keep quiet about our movements for one thing. I shouldn’t even
discuss them with Marryatt more than you can help: he’s a little
slow-witted, you see, and a little fond of talking, so anything you
say to him may get round. Gordon is different—he’s all right. The next
point is clear. We must set a trap of some kind, and catch our man
red-handed.”
“You mean the murderer?”
“Not necessarily the murderer. The man who is watching us; it may not
be the murderer at all.”
“But how do you propose to catch him?”
“I propose that two of us—preferably you and Gordon, because I am fond
of my sleep—should sit up to-night and watch outside the door.
Meantime, we have to excite the curiosity of your visitor so
powerfully that he will want to come out and investigate your room. I
propose that we should put up a notice (with the Secretary’s leave, of
course) saying that you have one or two of Brotherhood’s books and
things which you are prepared to give away as souvenirs to anybody who
cared for him; please apply to your rooms to-morrow. And now let’s go
down and have some tea.”
“But I haven’t got any of Brotherhood’s things,” objected Reeves as
they went downstairs.
“Exactly. And nobody cared a brass farthing for Brotherhood. But
meanwhile, there is every chance that this anonymous gentleman will be
interested to see what you have got, and will pay a nocturnal visit to
your room. If you see anybody pass, you can fall on him and throttle
him. If nobody passes, at about one o’clock I should go to bed if I
were you. It’s a pity to forgo one’s sleep.”
“Well, we’d better do the thing thoroughly. I’ll go out this evening
and come in with a bag, so as to look as if I’d been over and got some
things from Brotherhood’s house.”
“That’s a good idea. One moment, I must go over to young van Beuren
and get some chewing-gum.”
“Carmichael,” said Reeves when he got back, “you’ve been surprising us
a good deal lately, but one thing I should never have guessed about
you—I should never have imagined that you chewed.”
“I don’t,” said Carmichael, and would answer no more questions on the
subject. Nor had Reeves any opportunity to press the point, for
Marryatt came in soon afterwards, and sat down at their table. “Is it
true?” asked Carmichael, “that Brotherhood is the first member of the
club to be buried here?”
“He is. There was Parry, of course, who died here, but he was buried
in London. It must be strange for these Oatviles, who have had all the
expensive funerals to themselves for the last two hundred years, to
make room for an old fellow like that.”
“Two hundred? Why not three hundred?” asked Reeves.
“Well, the Oatviles were Catholics, you know, up to James II’s time.
People say that the room we use as the billiard-room now used to be
the chapel at one time. And the Oatviles don’t seem to have been
buried here till the time of Queen Anne.”
“Really, Marryatt?” said Carmichael. “That is most interesting. They
must have died abroad, I fancy, for of course Protestant burial was
the only kind legal in England. Did it ever occur to you how little
early Renaissance architecture you find in English villages? It’s an
odd testimony, I think, to the vitality of Catholicism. Puritanism
must have had something to do with it, of course, but considering what
an itch for architecture the Renaissance brought with it, you would
expect more traces of it, if the Laudian religion had ever really
taken hold.”
“I think, to judge by the parish register, the Oatviles must have been
very staunch recusants, and a great trouble to my predecessors. They
were important people, too, in the neighbourhood, even before the
great house was built, while they lived here at the Dower-house.”
Gordon was not acquainted with the evening’s programme till after
dinner; he accepted his part in it with a wry face; but with
pleasurable tremors of excitement. It would be the first time, he
said, his revolver would have been loaded since he shot off his last
cartridges in November, 1918. There was a small, unoccupied room whose
door faced that of Reeves; this door habitually stood ajar, and there
was not much likelihood that any unauthorized wanderer would trespass
there. Gordon and Reeves were to make their way there quietly at
twelve o’clock, and sit there in the dark till one. They pleaded hard
to be allowed to play bezique with an electric torch, but Carmichael
was firm. Even whispering was not to be carried on except in case of
necessity, and to crown their privations, they were warned not to
smoke. Until twelve they sat playing bridge in Reeves’ room with
Marryatt: then the company dispersed, although Carmichael insisted on
being left behind for a little, while Reeves and Gordon went off and
pretended to undress, “to make sure,” he said, “that our visitor
doesn’t arrive too early.”
It is extraordinary what a lot you can hear, even in a country house,
when you sit for an hour in the dark on the alert. Expresses whistled
through Paston Oatvile; and one goods train only passed its signals
after several stoppages, each of which meant a repetition of the
musical clink-clink-clink which goods trucks make as they hit one
another. A dog somewhere at the back had a fit of loneliness, and
howled; cats told their nightly tale of love and hate. Coals fell out
of distant grates; the woodwork creaked uncannily at intervals. But at
no moment was there a step in the passage: nor was any hand laid on
the door of the room opposite. They both felt cramped and overwatched
when one o’clock sounded from the belfry of the old stables, and they
were free to creep back to their beds.
“I say,” whispered Reeves, “why not come into my room and have a
whisky-and-soda before we turn in?”
“Oh,” replied Gordon, “didn’t Carmichael tell you? We are not to go
into your sitting-room on any account.”
“The old brute!” said Mordaunt Reeves. “But I suppose he knows what
he’s doing.”