INFORMATION RECEIVED
"Sarcastic swine!" muttered Armstrong, savagely, as he set off with
Warrender behind the rotund little chef.
"So confoundedly polite I could have kicked him," returned Warrender, in
the same undertone. "His beastly Latin, too! What did he take us for?"
"What we are--a couple of mugs. And Pratt's worse, with his absurd
theories. Of course these chaps aren't in it. Rush is at the bottom of
it, and the other fellow, though he looked like a foreigner, is very
likely only some ugly freak of a Devonian after all."
"Well, I'll be hanged if I stand any more of Rush's nonsense. Next time
anything happens, I'll get old Crawshay to set that bobby moving we saw
the other day. I'm sick of it."
Ill-humour had for the moment got the upper hand, and they were
conscious only of their soreness as they followed their guide through
the unkempt grounds. Their attention was attracted presently by the
tower that reared itself out of a thicket some little distance on their
left. It was a square much-dilapidated building of stone, encrusted
with moss and ivy, reaching a height of some fifty or sixty feet. The
window openings were boarded up with deal planks that were evidently
new.
"Is the tower used for anything now?" Warrender asked the Swiss.
"Ze tower? No, it is ruin, fall to pieces," replied the man.
[Illustration: "'ZE TOWER? NO, IT IS RUIN, FALL TO PIECES.'"]
"I say, we _are_ a couple of lunatics!" cried Armstrong. "We've left
the dinghy at the ferry. What's the good of the short cut? Pratt can't
work the motor."
"Hang it! I'd clean forgotten."
"Zen ve go back?" said the guide, eagerly. He had come to the end of the
open grounds; the rest of the way lay through a wilderness of shrubs
that promised laborious walking.
"No, I'm hanged if we do," said Warrender. "Now we've come so far we'll
not go back."
"Zen how you cross ze river?"
"Swim it. You needn't come. We'll forge straight ahead. Thanks."
He tipped the man, and plunged with Armstrong into the thicket. Ten
minutes' battling with the intricately woven mass of greenery brought
them to the brink of the stream almost exactly opposite to their
camping-place. They stripped, bundled their clothes upon their heads,
and made short work of the thirty-foot channel.
"My aunt! In native garb!" cried Pratt, as they walked up still
unclothed. "'Here be we poor mariners.' Shipwrecked? Lost the
dinghy?"
"No, only our tempers," replied Armstrong. "The dinghy's still at the
ferry."
"I say, my uncle hasn't got back, has he?" asked Pratt.
"No. Why?"
"I thought perhaps you had met him, and got a taste of _his_ temper,
that's all. 'Tell me not in mournful numbers'--but tell me anyhow you
like the cause of this Ulyssean exhibition."
Warrender began the narrative as he towelled himself, continued it
through his dressing, and concluded it when he had dropped into his
chair by Pratt's side. Pratt listened with ever-growing merriment.
"You priceless old fatheads!" he exclaimed. "When the beggar chucked
Latin at you why didn't you pelt him with Greek, Phil?--or with sines
and hypotenuses, and all that, Jack? Don't you remember how some
Cambridge josser floored a heathen bargee by calling him an isosceles
triangle? I wish I'd gone."
"I wish you had!" echoed Warrender. "But when a fellow's so dashed
polite----"
"Polite! I tell you what it is: you're both too serious for this
flighty world. When you consider that it's gyrating at the rate of I
don't know how many thousand miles a minute, it's unnatural, positively
indecent, for any one to be so stuggy. The art of life is to
effervesce. But, you know, the important feature of your morning's
entertainment seems not to have sufficiently impressed you."
"What's that?" asked Armstrong.
"Rod's wife. _Cherchez la femme_! You oughtn't to have come away
without having had a word with her."
"How on earth could we?" said Warrender. "We weren't asked into the
house, and if we had been----"
"My dear chap, if a fair lady beckoned to me out of her casement window
I'd find some means of receiving her behests. Rod's wife, _nee_ Molly
Rogers, didn't make signs to you for nothing, and I foresee that I shall
have to turn our skipping-rope into a rope ladder, and----"
"Oh, don't go on gassing," Armstrong interposed, irascibly. "Can't you
be serious?"
"Solemnity itself. We've got to fetch that dinghy. I want to go to the
post office. Very well, after lunch Phil shall run me up in the
motorboat. I'll have a word with Rogers on the way, and I bet my boots
I won't come back without some little addition to our dossier."
Pratt's programme was carried out. Warrender and he found Joe Rogers
pulling spring onions in his garden behind the inn. The man had placed
his wig on a pea-stick, and his bald pate glowed in the sunlight like a
pink turnip.
"Good-afternoon, Joe," said Pratt, genially. "I wonder how it is that
you sailormen so often take to gardening when your sea days are over?"
"I can't tell 'ee, sir, 'cept it be as we loves the look o' vegetables,
being without 'em so long at a time. The old woman do say it keeps me
out o' mischief."
"Now, Rogers," called his better half from an upper window, "put on your
hair this minute. Drat the man! Do 'ee want to catch your death of
sunstroke?"
Rogers gave a sly look at his visitors as he donned his wig.
"It do make my skull itch terrible," he said. "But she's a good woman."
"I jolly well hope I shall be looked after as well when my time comes,"
said Pratt. "But I'm not thinking of matrimony yet. What age did you
marry at, Joe?"
"Thirty-one, just the same age as my sister Molly, but not in such a
hurry. My missus took a deal o' courting; 'twas five years' hard
labour; whereas Molly give in in less than a month."
"He came, he saw--he conquered. Must be something fascinating about
him. Has she lost her cold, by the way? My friends happened to see her
this morning."
"Well now, if that ain't too bad. She haven't been nigh me for a good
fortnight, and she didn't ought to go about the village without looking
in."
"They saw her at the house. She seemed to be catching flies or
something at the window. I gather you don't like her husband."
"I've nothing against him, 'cept his name and furren nature. My missus
told her she was cutting a rod for her own back."
"Surely he doesn't beat her?"
"That wasn't her meaning. Rod's his name, and the missus do have a way
of taking up a word and twisting of it about, you may say. 'A rod in
pickle,' says she. 'Tis just a clappering tongue; there's no sense in
it. But it do seem as Molly have turned her back on all her old
friends. 'Tis like this: they furriners bain't favourites in the parish,
and Molly sticks to her husband, as 'tis her duty. That's what I make
of it."
"Well, I dare say she chose the pick of the bunch. How many are there
of them, by the bye?"
"Four, leaving out the secretary. They don't go about in the village
much. None of 'em comes here 'cept that feller you saw t'other day, and
he don't come often. _I_ don't get no good of 'em. 'Twas different in
the old days."
"Things will take a turn," said Pratt, consolingly. "When my--when Mr.
Pratt returns I dare say he'll quarrel with the foreigners, and get
English servants again."
"And be ye all right on the island, sir?"
"Having a ripping time. We're always on the look-out for the ghost, but
he seems rather shy. I can sympathise with him, being so bashful
myself."
"You do seem to have a bit of a bump one side of the head, sir. No
inseck have been poisoning 'ee, I hope."
"No. Insects love me too well to disfigure me. I'm inclined to think
it was a worm, or something like a leech, perhaps. It's a trifle; a
molehill, not a mountain. To-morrow both sides will be equal, and the
angles subtended at the base as right as ever. Good-bye; keep your hair
on."
"Well, old man, we've spent a profitable quarter of an hour," said
Pratt, as he went on with Warrender to the village. "The number of
Gradoff s staff is confirmed; therefore the chap I collared is not one
of them. As to Rod's wife, there's no mystery about her. She's
disgusted, as any sensible person would be, at the petty
narrow-mindedness of the natives who dislike her husband simply because
he's of another breed, and so she cuts 'em dead."
"But what did her movements at the window mean?" asked Warrender. "It
certainly looked as if she wanted help or something."
"Nothing of the sort, depend upon it. She was waving you off; she's as
careful of Rod as Rogers's missus is of him; she was afraid Armstrong
would go for Rod as he went for the Swede. I'm always ready to own up
when I'm wrong. My old theories won't hold water. I think I'll give up
detecting and go in for the Bar. You only have to stick to your brief;
needn't have an idea of your own."
"Well, it seems to me we're not much for'arder."
"Quite a mistake. The issue is narrowed down. Clear our minds of the
foreign menagerie and all that, and concentrate on Rush. That's the
ticket."
Calling at the post office, he was handed a letter from his London
friend, who reported that the scrap of paper was torn from a copy of the
_Pravda_. Only part of the date of issue was visible--the word June; and
the incomplete paragraph of text appeared to relate to the high prices
of perambulators.
"There you are," said Pratt. "Much cry and little wool. It proves
nothing except that some one, some time or other, had a Russian
newspaper, which was partly burnt along with other papers, no doubt
equally uninteresting and unimportant. What we have to do is simply to
weave a spider's web for Rush."
"You change your mind twice a day, and are cock-sure every time,"
Warrender remarked.
"A clear proof that I ought to go in for politics, after all. I'm glad
it's settled at last. Percy Pratt, M.P.--reverse 'em, you get P.M.,
Prime Minister; then Sir Percy, Bart.; Baron Pratt, Viscount, Earl--why
not Duke while I'm about it? But do dukes play the banjo, I wonder?"
"You're better qualified for the part of Mad Hatter, I fancy. Come,
let's step it out."
The evening of that day turned out rather cool and overcast. A breeze
sprang up in the south-west, refreshing after the still heat. After
early supper, Armstrong, declaring that he was getting flabby for want
of exercise, set off in the dinghy for a pull down the river. Pratt
thought it a good opportunity for testing Armstrong's report of the
sounds he had heard in the cottage, and went off alone, leaving
Warrender on guard at the camp.
He had not yet come within sight of the ruins when, above the rustle of
the stirred leaves, a strange moaning broke upon his ear. He stopped to
listen. While far more impressionable than Armstrong, he had solid
musical knowledge which his schoolfellow lacked, and he was struck at
once by an unusual quality in the sound he heard.
"That's not the wind in the eaves," he thought. "It's more like the
whining of an organ pipe when a lazy blower is letting the wind out."
He hurried on. The sound rose and fell. For some moments it maintained
a steady, pure organ note; then with rising pitch it became almost a
shriek.
"I don't wonder the rustics are a bit scared," he thought, "but no ghost
could produce a tone like that--unless he'd been a cathedral alto in his
lifetime. It's due, I expect, to some metal chimney-pot that's got
displaced and partly closed. Wonder if I can find it?"
He entered the ruins, and ran up the staircase. A roseate twilight
suffused the western sky. Led by the persistent sound, he came to the
unroofed room facing the west. The moaning proceeded from some spot
above his head. He tried to clamber up the mass of broken masonry that
littered the floor, but found that he could not gain the level of the
roof except by climbing the jagged brickwork of the broken wall, a feat
too perilous in the half light.
"That's the worst of being fat," he said to himself. "I believe
Armstrong could do it."
Leaving the room presently, he went idly, without definite motive, into
the second room, facing east and overlooking the river and his uncle's
grounds. In this direction dusk was already deepening into night; the
nearer trees were still distinguishable, but beyond the river all
individual objects were blurred by the darkness.
He sat on the paneless window-sill, listening to the strange sound from
above, looking out towards the Red House, wondering whereabouts in the
wide world his uncle was travelling. All at once, far away, almost on a
level with his eyes, he thought he saw a faint red glow. It disappeared
in a moment--so quickly that it seemed an illusion. But there it was
again, indubitably some small luminous body. "Some one with a lamp in
one of the top rooms of the Red House," he thought. Again it
disappeared, only to show again after an interval--a third time--a
fourth.
To Pratt these phenomena were at first merely sensations of sight, not
perceptions of intelligence. But by and by he was struck by the fact
that the glow always appeared at the same spot, not here and there, like
a lamp carried by a person moving about a room. Then he found himself
mentally measuring the intervals between its appearances, expecting
their occurrence as regularly as the beats of a striking clock. It was
with surprise and a sort of disappointment that he discovered that the
intervals were irregular, and with curiosity, after a while, that they
were regular and irregular both, as it seemed, fitfully; the glow
appeared two or three times at equal intervals, then the intervals
became shorter or longer. "Signals, of course," he thought, when the
impression of order and purpose became fixed in him. "Who is it? Where
is it? What's the game?"
The alternations continued for several minutes, then finally ceased.
Pratt got up, left the ruins, and made his way with some difficulty back
to camp.
"Armstrong back?" he asked.
"Not yet," replied Warrender. "Time he was. This is the darkest
evening we've had. See any one?"
"Not a soul. All quiet here?"
"Absolute peace. _You_ weren't here."
"Thanks. Glad you missed me. Will the sweet, melodious strains of my
gentle banjo disturb your serenity?"
"Not a bit. Strum away. But hadn't you better turn in? It's past
nine. Old Jack won't get much sleep before second watch if he isn't
here soon; no reason why you shouldn't have your full whack, especially
after last night's affair."
"I'll stay up till he comes."
Pratt softly thrummed his strings, musing on his discoveries. Half-past
nine came; ten o'clock.
"I say, what's happened to Armstrong?" said Warrender. "Surely he
hasn't been carried out to sea? Come and help me shove off; I'll run
down and see if I can find him. You won't turn in, so you won't mind
taking part of my watch."
"Righto! But I dare say Jack's enjoying himself."
They were just about to launch the motor-boat when they caught the dull
sound of oars in the distance. They waited. The rising moon struggled
through the rack, and cast a faint light on the stream. Presently the
dinghy appeared from among the overarching foliage. Armstrong was
sculling very quietly.
"Thought you were lost," said Warrender. "It's past ten; your watch
starts at eleven-forty."
"All right. Pratt, tie up, will you? Come with me, Warrender."
Armstrong led the way at a long, rapid stride across the clearing and
into the thicket. He said nothing, and did not pause until he came to
the shore of the western channel.
"Keep well behind this tree," he said, in a whisper, placing himself in
shadow.
In a few minutes they heard the splash of oars. A boat emerged from the
shades down stream, lit up fitfully by the transient moonbeams. It
passed close beneath their hiding-place. It held a single oarsman,
whose thickset frame would have been unmistakable even if the moonlight
had not touched his face. He pulled out of sight.
"What's he been up to?" said Warrender.
"Let's get back," replied Armstrong. "I wanted a second witness. Pratt
will wish to start a new career now, I expect."