The Bone
He might hardly have been in the Hall of the Moth all afternoon, had
my impressions been evidence—so quiet he had kept, relapsed out of the
main light of the room into the shadow between the beetling
chimney-mantel and the old long-case clock. Perhaps the indefatigable
quaffing of whiskey-and-sodas, which industry is surely his favourite,
had proved soporific in that dusky alcove, whence only his crossed
feet had appeared, shod sparklingly, spatted sprucely. But now
Charlton Oxford, glazed to a hair, waxed to a needle, was standing in
the aperture of the opened french windows, and his look, whatever his
legs might be, was steady.
His eyes were fixed upon the gap in the lawn shrubs where Sean
Cosgrove had disappeared. Surely that was an unguarded moment; his
speech, although low, was vehement, since it was addressed to a man
now far out of sight and hearing:
“Your code, hey? Your damned code.” He wiped the back of his fist
savagely across his mouth; the heartiness of his baleful speech may
have given him the satisfaction of deep drink.
I, who alone had heard, tiptoed close behind him, and like the tempter
spoke softly over his shoulder.
“And what may your code be, Mr. Oxford?”
Frightened, he swung, caught his heel on the carpet edge and thudded
heavily against the corner of the age-blackened mantel, face bleached
and eyes popping.
“Oh, it’s you, Mr. Bannerlee,” he exclaimed with much relief, and
attempted to pass his alarm off in jest.
“Yes, and really, what did you mean? I’m interested.”
“What’s my code, you say? Ha, ha, Mr. Bannerlee, ’s too long, sir, to
put it in so many words, if you know what I mean. . . . But there’s
_one_ thing”—for emphasis he dug a flabby forefinger into my
ribs—“_one_ thing I’d never do that our fine C-Cosgrove wouldn’t have
the decency, the _decency_, sir, if y’understand—and the common sense,
too, damme, if it comes to that, you know—’s much common sense in it
as anything else . . . y’understand . . .”
“And what article and section of your pandect could Mr. Cosgrove learn
from?”
Oxford steadied himself, and over his face came a phase of profundity.
He gave me a knowing look, and his voice sank to a sibylline tone:
“Never take another man’s woman—never meddle with ’em!”
“But a woman unprotected, eh?” I felt like asking, yet refrained, for
someone else was nighing us, one at whose approach Oxford appeared to
feel distressed. The fancy man evaporated into the afternoon sunlight
down the lawn, and Maryvale, who I think had been standing alone in
the centre of the room, was at my elbow.
That changed look was stronger than ever about him; there seemed a
gaunt and haggard spirit in his eyes.
“Mr. Bannerlee, you must have heard terrible tales to-day.”
“Surely none that deserve such a violent—”
“Oh, yes, yes—some dreadful things have happened in this countryside.
Cosgrove tells me that this morning he related to you the fall of the
old castle, and in there”—he gestured toward the dining-hall—“what
awful things you must have listened to.”
I smothered a laugh that was half-breathless, for there was real
distress in him. “Mr. Maryvale, you exaggerate—”
He laid his hand heavily on my arm, and his fingers took hold. “But
there is one story more terrible still!”
“Indeed, indeed?”
“Yes, indeed. There are legends of this Vale—none more appalling. Did
they tell you—but they could not—of the Lord Aidenn’s arm that would
not die?”
“The arm that would not die?”
“You know the man’s picture, for you examined it in the gallery. And
there”—he motioned toward the portrait—“is the other representation of
that orgulous, cruel man.”
I stared again at the pitiless, thin face with a slight and enjoyable
stir of nervousness.
“It is a dreadful legend,” averred Maryvale. “They never found—” He
turned his head, saw something, and ceased.
For now came a new interruption, and one that I was right glad of,
since Maryvale just then was too remote and metempirical for comfort.
Of his grisly story of the arm of Sir Pharamond Kay, whatever the
fable was, I had no dread; but in the baffling Maryvale himself now
was something unapproachable that moved a mild antipathy in me.
The interruption came in the form of a small, hoydenish, vivid-lipped
creature called Lib Dale. The last to remain in the Hall, save those
who had spoken with me, she and Bob Cullen had been engaged beneath
the musicians’ gallery in a tense-toned division of ideas. Even while
Maryvale had been drawing near me, I caught a glimpse from the heel of
my eye of Bob shuffling his feet in loathness to depart at the hest of
Lib. At length, apparently in disgrace, he had passed limply through
the farther entrance into the corridor. “Go out and soak your head,”
was Lib’s parting tenderness, which I overheard. Then, spying me with
Maryvale, the startling little thing came to interrupt. The man of
business had checked himself in the midst of his sentence; he seemed
to withdraw into some inner chamber of himself; a darkness enveloped
the peaked soul in his eyes. He was gone, and I was left alone to
encounter the sprightly bit of femininity.
“How do you do?” she asked. “Shake. You’re you and I’m me. We know
each other’s names, or else they shouldn’t let us out.”
“No, they shouldn’t,” I retorted feebly, without knowing what I said,
save that it was idiotic.
“Well, don’t shed tears about it. Don’t be so vulgarly emotional.
Can’t you dig me up a real live saint, Mr. Bannerlee—something I can
take home maybe and show the folks?”
“I should think that the legends of this countryside—”
“Or a legend, if it’s handier. I’ve never seen a genuine legend, Mr.
Bannerlee. Lead me to it. Hasn’t my education been neglected?”
I uttered a faint denial.
“Oh, yes, it has,” she chortled. “For instance, I get my English all
gummed up. But that’s your fault.”
“Of course.”
“Now don’t be sil. You don’t know what I mean. For instance. Have you
noticed how all the books you English writers write about we
Amurricans have us saying ‘I guess’ this and ‘I reckon’ that about
every once or twice in so often? Now, over where I come from nobody
talks that way so that you could notice it, but over here in your
delightful little island we have to pull that kind of stuff once in a
while or the natives wouldn’t know where we’re from. Savvy?”
“Oh, quite.”
She had perched on the back of a carved gilt couch with upholstery in
rose _Brocade de Lyons_.
“And now how about getting busy on that saint proposition? One out of
the Old Testament or anything. Warm puppies! won’t I have the kids at
home goggle-eyed? I should snicker.”
“Saints in the Old Testament are few. And I’m afraid—”
“Not so rough, not so rough! What do you mean, you’re afraid? How will
this sound in your biography, that you refused a maiden’s prayer? I’ll
have to take you in hand; you ought to be trained.” She reached down
and gave a tug at a gravitating stocking. “No, from your face I see
it’s hopeless. Well, what are you going to do to keep the ennui away?”
“I had an idea,” I remarked hopefully.
“Quick, quick! Don’t keep me in starvation.”
“In connection with the method of making up the quarrel suggested by
the good Cosgrove—”
“Yes, yes, I follow you there—everything except the ‘good’—”
“Since the good Cosgrove says that the text of our play of
pacification is in the library, I was thinking of having a look at it
and refreshing my memory.”
“I can follow you there, too; only no refreshments here,
thanks—‘Noah’s Flood’ is all news to me as a big, throbbing drammer.
Sounds sort of frisky, I mean riskay, putting all those animals to
bed. Who wrote it?”
“The authors of the mystery-plays are unknown.”
“Something fishy there, I’ll bet. Come on, show me this sensation.”
She grabbed a hand of mine and dragged me through the room of weapons
into the spacious library, a room of irregular shape, since the curve
of the staircase well rounded one wall and the huge jut of the
south-west corner tower made a pocket-like projection almost equal to
a separate room. A monumental mahogany break-front bookcase occupied
the principal straight wall of the room, and other glass-covered
stacks of shelves lined the shorter and the semicircular wall and the
spaces between the windows. Altogether there must have been three
thousand books.
“Gee whiz, Croftsy must be some reader,” said Lib. “I was never here
before, and I’ve got a brainstorm already.”
I smiled, wryly, no doubt. “I believe that the library, like the
portraits and the symbol of the cat and the legends of Aidenn Forest,
came to Crofts with the building. In fact, though I haven’t looked
these over, I imagine many of them are of a sort unlikely to interest
our host.”
Indeed, the major portion of the collection were volumes which could
stir the interest only of the antiquarian and the erudite student of
literature. Few, I am sure, bore the twentieth-century imprint.
Included were old books of all assortments of inconvenient sizes from
folio to duodecimo, and although in their glass prisons, whence no
doubt they were taken and dusted quarterly, they looked spick and
span, still they had a lonesome air, as if longing to be handled for
love.
I mused. “Now where shall we look for one particular volume in all
this?”
“Are you putting that as a question, Marshal?” asked Lib. “That’s not
fair. I’m in the enemy’s country here; don’t know the landmarks.”
“We might look over the ones of reasonable size first. The thing’s a
reprint. Early English Text, I dare say.”
“I don’t get you, Admiral, but am game to follow you in a leaky boat
to the death. I gathered that this Flood has an alias.”
“Er—”
“Doesn’t go under its own name, I mean.”
“That is correct.”
“That’s right, you mean. Well, well, Duke, can this be it?”
She had opened one of the doors of the mahogany case and reached high
from the basis of one toe. The volume she persuaded to fall down and
which she caught was actually a bound issue of the Early English Text
Society and contained the Digby and Coventry Plays.
“By all that’s wonderful! How did your eyes pick out that title so
quickly?”
“Never looked at the title—way up there. What do you think I am,
Senator, a telescope? Say! I just took a slant along the shelves.”
“A slant—along the shelves?”
“Right. I thought that maybe the ‘good’ Cosgrove had been taking a
peep at the crucial volume lately and maybe hadn’t put it back quite
even. Savvy? Now, let’s have a look.”
But she wrinkled both nose and forehead from the first sight of
“Processus Noe cum filiis,” and fluttered the pages very much askance.
“I don’t get this stuff at all. What language is this?”
“English.”
“Why, it’s worse than Amurrican.”
“It’s really Middle English, you know.”
“No, I don’t. See here, what does a choice morsel like this signify?”
She read, in a manner unknown to linguists, the following lines:
“Ye men that has wifis whyls they ar’ yong,
If luf youre lifis chastice thare tong:
Me thynk my heart ryfis both levyr and long
To se sich stryfis wedmen emong.
That looks as if it might mean something.”
“Yes, Noah was very wroth with his wife.”
“His wife? His missus?”
“She was a scold, and Noah, as the gloss of Professor Pollard says,
bids husbands chastise their wives’ tongues early.”
“Not so hot, not so hot,” remarked Lib, apparently in disparagement.
“Where do all the other folks come in?”
“Oh, there’ll be parts for everyone. Noah’s family was large, and
there were plenty of animals to go round. . . . He beats her a bit
later on,” I added hopefully.
She clapped the covers to. “This is too rough for me. It’s not
ladylike. I’m not crazy about—say, what goes on in there?”
Somebody was making a stir in the armoury, whence issued an occasional
scrabbling sound. Lib poked her head cautiously around the doorpost.
“Why, Doctor, what would you seem to be doing this elegant afternoon?”
Doctor Aire was standing with a cutlass in one hand and a claymore in
the other. He lifted his gaze from the floor in surprise and gave an
affable welcome.
“Oh, hello. I had no idea anyone else was indoors.”
“We’ve been giving Noah the once over,” said Lib. “What’s the idea of
all the weapons?”
“Well, you see that early battle-axe lying so well protected out
there, if it was chosen for the commission of crime, has one or two
peculiar things about it. It amused me to find whether—but no, you’d
better guess for yourself. I understand that the subject is taboo just
now, and a very good thing.”
Lib stamped with animation. “That’s not a bit nice. This is such a
dull afternoon, and now you won’t even tell us your secrets.”
“Well, there’s one,” smiled the Doctor with a sort of saturnine
indulgence. “Feel the weight of these.” He handed over to her the pair
of weapons. “Take a look over the lot.” He made a sweeping motion to
indicate the walls crowded with arms. “Then think of the axe that lies
out there inclosed by chicken-wire. Then draw your own conclusions.”
Lib poised the cutlas and claymore and returned them. “Doctor, you’re
a whiz. Any more funny little wrinkles?”
“Take your time,” said the doctor. “Examine them all.”
“You give me too much credit,” she declared. “Come on; what have you
found out?”
Doctor Aire gave a slight shrug, one shoulder lifting higher than the
other. It was a mannerism I had observed before. “Miss Lib, you have
all the brains necessary for this extremely simple point, which I have
practically given away already.”
“Well, you’re a teaser. I’m not a little girl any more, you know. I
don’t _like_ being teased.”
“You must think it out for yourself,” insisted the Doctor, still
smiling.
“Well, I won’t; so there! You’re perfectly horrid!”
“Perfection in any wise is seldom gained. I am honoured,” he murmured,
but Lib, tossing her head and departing to the lawn, in affected
dudgeon, probably did not hear the conclusion of his courtesy.
We laughed together while he replaced the weapons to their props and
fastenings upon the wall.
I looked about the chamber, up the walls crowded with weapons to the
very shadows of the ceiling. Save for the two full-armoured figures of
sheet and mail, most of the equipment I supposed to be Elizabethan or
later, although the Doctor was sure to be a better judge than I. One
gigantic harquebuse _à croc_ with its support attached dominated the
broad wall between the armoury and the Hall of the Moth; all around it
were muskets, calivers, petronels, dags and tacks, and a couple of
blunderbusses, besides firearms whose names I did not know. The short
wall opposite was full of cutting and crushing weapons; hence had come
the two with which the Doctor had been experimenting. Between two sets
of lances standing upright for a frame, the eye was mazed in an
intricate pattern of partisans, maces, falchions, hangers, axes,
poniards, and, one might believe, every other size and shape of
sticker and slasher and pounder.
“I suppose you alluded to the heft of the axe we found last night out
there? Its weight is certainly inconsiderable.”
“Yes,” agreed the Doctor with a drawl, “it appears to have been about
the lightest object on the wall. Why did he take that—that hatchet?
I’m inclined to think that it was made for a plaything, not a real
working instrument. Odd, its selection, very odd.”
“I don’t see why you emphasize the point.”
“Well, look here, where it was taken from, about shoulder height. Now,
assuming naturally that the man who took it wanted it for business
purposes, why didn’t he take this axe here, something less than a yard
further up? There’s real power in this fellow. Or was the intruder
fumbling around in the dark in a room he wasn’t acquainted with? And
then the blood.”
“Ah, yes; I have been waiting with interest to hear your decision
there.”
“No decision is possible immediately, if you ask me where it came
from. I have no kit with me, of course. I accept for the time
Pendleton’s assurance that it belongs to the missing pig, slaughtered
in we don’t know what ritualistic manner. But the position of the
blood on the weapon is what annoys me. You recall it?”
“The handle was slobbered with it.”
“And only a few spots on the blade. That would assure us the killing
was done with the axe, even if the weapon weren’t so inefficient. Ah!”
He lifted his hands in an attitude of dismay, a stiffish caryatid-like
pose. “Pendleton’s right. No good comes of talking of these things.
They’ll unravel. I’m going to get cleaned up for the rehearsal at
five, Mr. Bannerlee. I’ve been discussing transplantings with old
Finlay the gardener, and my hands have tested some extra fine dirt.”
I saw the Doctor swing his body out of the armoury with the regularity
of an automaton, his trunk stiff and upright, his narrow legs working
like scissors; I heard the Doctor enter on the winding stair.
Then, alone in the armoury, into which the first faint smoke of dusk
was creeping, among so many instruments of death, where the intruder
of the night before had stolen while the mockery of cards was in
progress in the Hall, and where he might steal again—there, then, I
was not at ease. I had flickers of apprehension, and the room seemed
musty, close. Both mentally and bodily I felt cabined, confined. More
than half an hour remaining before we were due in the Hall, I resolved
upon taking a light breather up the Vale, to stir my sluggard blood
and puff away my fancies.
No one appeared on the lawn or in the environs of the House. As I
faced north up the Vale a fairish breeze met me face to face, and I
realized that the storm was still in the atmosphere. The airy armies
high above the hills were marshalling once more. A little while later
the sun, not far above the ridge, was flecked with cloud, and the
smouldering embers of the beechen hangers were, one might say,
extinguished to black ashes.
By the time the glories of colour were lost on the hillsides, I had
reached the clearing beyond which lurked the cottage of the sisters
Delambre. This stood in a gorge-like recess, where flowed the small
stream with the ridiculous bridge which I had noted when first I
journeyed down the Vale. Good, full inspirations of the untainted air
had restored physical tone, and my thoughts, too, were less troubled,
perplexed. I was free of most of the jangling discord of the day, of
Belvoir with his eternal harping on morals as accidental products, of
Ludlow in his vigilance to combat offensive ideas, of Lib and Bob and
their little bickerings, of Cosgrove and all the enmities that had
heaped around him: Bob’s and the Baron’s and Charlton Oxford’s,
and—almost—the abrupt flaming of the Irishman and his bride-to-be.
That single incident must have impressed the houseful of us as rudely
as a dozen ordinary quarrels of man to man.
Of the taste of this unpleasantness I could not wholly rid myself, nor
of another thing, which strengthened in the diminishing of light. This
was the witching time of day—and I could not get away from Parson
Lolly.
Well I understood Morgan the stableman when he said that there were
whiles when the “otherness” took hold of one. Having crossed the
clearing, I stood near the cottage of the French sisters, who, though
nothing concerning their characters had been told me, I conceived must
be eccentrics, women so distant from their nativity, if not in mere
statute miles, certainly in their lives and surroundings. While I
looked at the cottage, a rugged thing of stone, scarcely two stories
high, with roof of hewn stone tiles, as is common hereabout, I thought
it had a deserted and disappointed appearance. It was far too early,
indeed, for even tired farm-women to be abed; yet no light glimmered
through window or cranny. I approached; I even knocked. No response.
Puzzled, disturbed, I retraced my path.
So feeling, I came in view of Highglen House, all dark and still on
the edge of sunset. I passed beneath the clustered cypress trees; I
traversed the northern span of the lawn and passed the conservatory
with its mended panes. I stepped on the driveway where it passed the
Hall of the Moth, intending to advance to the front entrance and ring
the bell there, having enough hold on reality, in spite of my fuming
blood, to recall that my own shaving things had been in my bag
recently fetched by Toby, and that with hot water I could quickly
remove the stubble of the day, before the first reading of “Noah’s
Flood” in the Hall of the Moth. At the moment of my setting foot on
the drive, I remember, the faintest sound of speech wandered to me
from somewhere beyond the gate-house. I could not distinguish any
voices, but there seemed to be both men and women in the party,
doubtless returning from beside Aidenn Water.
Then I chanced to look inside the Hall of the Moth.
Now, now, now is the time when I need to hold each sense and faculty
to accurate account. For what I saw then, what then I took to be
hallucination, now I know too well was something real, something
serious, and something totally inexplicable to all who have heard of
it.
Through the cleft between the eminences of Esgair Nantau and Vron Hill
a single dart from the sun still leaped, lustering the twilight about
the house. A fragment of that glimmer, about the size of a top-hat but
rudely circular in shape, played and smouldered mild, high on the bare
stone of the inner wall of the room. Except for this wavering spot,
dusk had taken possession of the empty Hall, wherein even the masses
of the furniture were invisible to me.
The chanciest glance took in the gloom of the chamber, but before I
had looked elsewhere, my eyes perceived yet one other thing
distinguishable in the obscurity, and all the blood in me leaped. To
indicate definitely the position of the object, I should say that to
the best of my affrighted recollection it was just beyond the couch
which Lib Dale had mounted earlier in the afternoon during her talk
with me, although the couch itself, like the rest of the furniture,
was now absorbed in the pool of darkness.
In the air perhaps a foot above the imagined position of the back of
the couch, with no visible means of suspension or support, was what I
can describe only as a clean white bone.