The Flight of Parson Lolly
(There ended my diary. Thenceforth I was to be like a man in a
maelstrom. And now that circumstances have stayed my hand from its
task for weeks on end, I have no confidence that I can record with
due proportion and emphasis events which seem to have been fantastic
and instantaneous as dreams. Frantic suspense, frozen horror, and
the rest are now a whirling memory. But I hope, above all else, that
whoever reads these lines may feel, as those who knew her did, the
splendid nervous courage, the shrewd discernment, and the strange
compassion and mercy, of Paula Lebetwood!)
Make no mistake. The weary, faltering girl at my side—never, never for
an instant did I suspect her.
Yet while we lagged through a ruined fairyland, past the wreck of Sir
Pharamond’s first hold, beneath branches where the rooks were
brawling, and between the ordered files of the summer-house park—all
the way my heart grew blacker, and the incubus weighed heavier on my
soul. I feared for her, and fear pressed cold fingers against my lips.
Blasphemous thoughts; they were not mine. I had no thoughts of her but
reverence.
They might have been the jangling voices of the birds themselves:
“Look! Here comes the foreign woman who was pledged to the Kingmaker,
but is going to marry his millions instead! Why has she never wept a
tear for the man in his shroud?” What if the trees had voices, these
grey and sombre sycamores? “We saw what happened in the two twilights.
We know where the golden-haired girl was when Cosgrove met his fate.
We know when she left the strawberry grove the day that Heatheringham
rushed toward death. We saw her slip across the shadowed lawn—”
No, no! If trees could speak, they would declare her innocence.
Not trees but men would be her judges, cunning men, who might weave
about her a web of suspicion with strands as fine and strong as silk.
Scotland Yard might be waiting for us when we returned; that is, a
brisk, clear-headed, observant, utterly unprejudiced investigator, a
person whose mind as nearly as might be resembled an inductive and
deductive machine. He would sweep the ground clear of the débris of
false starts and idle speculations, and construct anew.
The deaths: what would the lynx of justice discover immediately in
respect of them? He would hear of a motive, money. How should he know
better than to impute a sordid impulse to this high-minded girl? He
would hear of a quarrel on the afternoon of Cosgrove’s death. How
should he know that there had been more than mere anger in her mood
when she parted from us, that there had been dignity, aloofness, a
temper far above reprisal?
But there was worse, much worse. She may have been with Cosgrove the
moment he was struck down!
Belvoir, coming toward the towers, had seen the Irishman with canvas
lifted regarding the puny battle-axe. In the mixed light, Belvoir had
not been positive he _had_ seen Cosgrove, but the likelihood was that
he had attested to less rather than more than the truth. The American
girl might have been beyond the Irishman at that moment, concealed
partly by his bulk, partly by the darkness of her gown in the
twilight. I, of course, had come past the spot afterward and found the
lawn empty, but the two might easily have gone through one of the
entrances of the House and re-emerged shortly after I had made my
reconnaissance from the parapet. What brief, passionate scene could
then have taken place, such as would have ended by Cosgrove’s turning
away and her hammering him with a rough-and-ready chunk of rock
snatched up from the rim of the flower-bed, I left to the professional
imagination.
In Heatheringham’s death, we knew her insistence that she had
disobeyed his bidding, and her declaration of what she had seen. But,
again, there was not a tittle of proof of her assertion that she had
remained on the edge of the strawberry trees. Quite safely she could
have slipped back into the House. I wondered, in spite of the arm
thrust through the glass, if the detective might not have been outside
the House when he pressed the trigger, and that straightway he rushed
into the Hall (pursuing something?)—to meet his death. Who waited for
him there? No one could have, save Paula Lebetwood.
Black—it was black.
I tried to gain comfort from the obscurities that would confront
Scotland Yard if he tried to build up a theory in this wise. I
recalled the bone, the laugh, the pig’s gore, and other unsolved
conundrums. But Scotland Yard, being an experienced hand, would be
sure to fit them in somewhere. I was sick at heart.
Yes, I must protect her against the world, and, if need be, against
herself. The proof would be in action. I began wondering whom I could
trust.
When we came to the fringe of the sycamore park and passed alongside
the cypress trees, one first-storey window showed light in the
northern wall of the House, and we could see radiance from others down
the long façade.
“Miss Mertoun has returned.” It was the only speech either of us had
offered in two dark and desolate miles.
“Millicent?” The American girl halted in surprise. “Did they make her
go out, too?”
“She volunteered like the rest of the ladies for searching in the Vale
itself.”
“Darling Millicent. I love her better than anything else on earth. She
shouldn’t have tried to find me, Mr. Bannerlee. She isn’t strong, you
know, and this has been a terrible, tragic week for her. She should
never have come to Aidenn Vale, but I didn’t—understand then, as I do
now.”
Somehow we did not go straight on, but lingered there by the cypresses
with their low-hung darkness.
“But her week has not been as tragic as yours.”
Her voice was sombre. “More, much more.”
“What!” I came closer, peered into her face, where the dusk had
erected shadows. “What do you mean?”
“You haven’t wondered, I see, about Millicent and Sean.”
“Wondered? Wondered what, in God’s name?”
She spoke wearily. “You didn’t know Sean, of course. Neither did I, I
suppose.”
“What do you mean?” I cried again, with an intolerable heaviness in
me, remembering Lib.
“Religion and sensuality: they go together often, don’t they? I
thought that if I recognized that—streak in Sean I might disregard it
and it would be like a thing that never was. If that had been
all. . . .”
I caught up the silence. “You can never make me believe—that Miss
Mertoun—”
“Oh, of course not. She wasn’t like the others. . . . She hasn’t
offended me; I’m the offender. . . .”
“Paula, you mustn’t stop. Tell me what you mean.”
“It’s beastly of me, I suppose . . . especially when someone
else . . . I wonder why it is we confide in people we half-know
instead of our closest friends. But it’s horrible to have a thing pent
up in your brain . . . like a deadly growth.”
“Tell me, Paula.”
“If I hadn’t come along, Millicent would be Mrs. Cosgrove now. It
sounds—almost grotesque, doesn’t it? But there it was, a fact that
months and even years couldn’t kill. I never had the least inkling of
it—oh, Millicent’s been a loyal friend to me—until we were all here
and it was—too late. Millicent came, you see, since if she didn’t—I
would never have had a Bidding Feast without Millicent, and she knew
it. But I never guessed . . . until she told me, after midnight, the
night you came.”
“She—loved him still?”
“No, hated him then. But the old heart-wound would break out during
sleep. His music, as she called it, came to her through her dreams.
Then she answered what she believed to be—his call.”
A little wind came winding down the Vale and wrapped its chilly arm
about us. She said, very low: “That was what I meant, partly, when I
spoke of lost innocence a little while ago. I have changed toward
people since I came here. I think I can never trust a person again.”
Then quickly, “We must go in. They’ll be wanting to know I’m safe.”
I followed where she made a road through the darkness.
We reached the House at seven-fifteen. At the bottom of the stairs she
turned. “Thank you—thank you more than I can say. May I have the
campstool? I must go up now, really. I—I—have to—think over to-night.”
I handed over the stool. “If ever—” I commenced, feeling my voice
shake in my throat.
The boy Toby, his hair all on end as usual, crossed the corridor from
the dinner-room to the Hall. She called his name, and the lad
reappeared, coming toward us bashfully. His eyes, turned on her, were
filled with something like awe, and I remembered how she had made this
seemingly lumpish lad her excellent and devoted scholar. He now
carried a few yards of insulated wire.
“Has Superintendent Salt returned?”
“Yes, from the hills, Miss. He came back early, but he’s gone away
again.”
“Did he leave any message?”
“He said you wasn’t to mind if he didn’t bring his friend
from—somewhere—”
“Scotland Yard?”
“Yes, that’s right. He wouldn’t bring him to-night. He said you was to
go ahead anyhow because the French womenfolks was coming with
Constable Pritchard.”
“French women!” I exclaimed in surprise and pleasure. “Does he mean
that the sisters Delambre have been brought back?”
“Sure to be,” said Toby.
“By George, I’ll be tickled to see what they look like. But what does
it all mean? No one could imagine—”
Miss Lebetwood silenced me with a gesture and an eager question. “He
was working here this afternoon, then, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, Miss, but it was a secret or somefing. He put the maids out of
the house at half-past three.”
“Three-thirty!” I exclaimed again, indignantly now. “He didn’t waste
much of his precious time in the search!” I asked the lad, “Why did he
make the women-servants leave the building? He did, didn’t he?”
“Yes, sir; he was going to use some gas from a little tank he had with
him all over the ground floor of the House. He said it was a deadly
poisonous gas, and unless they were looking for their deaths if they
got a whiff they had better go down to New Aidenn for the rest of the
afternoon. Wheeler was in the search; so I drove ’em all down to the
bridge in the big car,” Toby recited with pride.
“And did you come back for a whiff?” asked Miss Lebetwood, smiling
faintly.
“No, Miss; I went to my workroom in the stables and did some more on
my radio. I only remembered about a quarter past six that I had to fix
the lights in the Hall, and when I came to the House I met Mr. Salt
and the constable’s brother that wasn’t here before coming out with
the gas tank. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Tell ’em they can go
anywhere they like now. I’ve sucked the gas back into the respirator;
so there’s no danger for that matter of fact.’ And then he told me
what I told you.”
“I suppose most of our people have returned?”
“Yes, Miss. The ladies are all upstairs or somewhere. There’s them
back from New Aidenn, too, and Mr. Blenkinson and some of the others
from the hills. If you wasn’t found by nine o’clock, they was going to
’phone up Penybont and Bleddfa and maybe get a bloodhound and have a
grand search like they almost had for Sir Brooke Mortimer.”
“Thank you, Toby,” said the girl, “and thank you again, Mr. Bannerlee.
I _shall_ have to do a bit of thinking now.” She went quickly, almost
lightly, up the steps. Somehow, she had drawn comfort from Salt’s
strange behaviour.
I followed Toby into the Hall. Quite by chance I had found the person
I could trust, one whose allegiance to the American girl might be as
great as mine.
He was upon a lofty step-ladder planted beneath the chandelier which
hung some distance clear of the musicians’ gallery. Below him rested a
bushel basket partly filled with electric bulbs.
“Will you be there long, Toby?”
“Only to take out the rest of the bulbs, sir, and connect a bit of
wire with the wall-fixture in case they needs it. Only a minute or
two, sir.”
I drew close to the foot of the ladder and spoke very softly.
“Toby—can you get an hour off before very late to-night—to do
something for Miss Lebetwood?”
“For Miss Paula?” His funny hair seemed to be a forest of notes of
exclamation. “Of _course_ I can, sir, for Miss Paula.”
“Right! I knew you would. Come down here a minute, and I’ll give you
directions. This is very secret, mind. If you should meet even Miss
Paula herself, remember you’re not to show a sign you’re the wiser.”
I laid the trappings of mystery on very thick, enough to make the
souls of a dozen lads lick their lips. I explained how a message might
be delivered at the House later on to-night that would make it
necessary for Miss Lebetwood, and perhaps Miss Mertoun, to leave
without word or warning to anyone by the eleven o’clock train. Secrecy
and haste were the points I stressed. He fell into the plot with so
much spirit that I felt a little ashamed of the deception I was
practising. With eagerness that ran before my suggestions, he promised
to be at New Aidenn station when it opened for the 9.40 train, and to
purchase with money I gave him two tickets for London available by the
late express. He would leave the tickets for me _in the mail_. We went
into the armoury and agreed on a definite spot. He would also secrete
two ladies’ bicycles, property of the Clays, beneath the bush opposite
the third oak tree on the left-hand side of the drive after passing
the gate-house. We went over that complex direction again and again.
Yes, in these days of the many-tentacled police, the telegraph, and
the radio, I was planning for Paula Lebetwood an escape by flight.
With two hours’ clear start, for I would see that the telephone did
not function and that the shaky bridge should go down behind the
pursued, I could almost guarantee scot-freedom. For of course those
tickets would not be used for getting to London, not when the express
connected at Leominster with fast trains running both north and south.
To what destination I would direct the fugitives, I had better not
say, but it was one which would afford a refuge almost before the
wires were singing with the alarm for her capture.
At that moment Aire slipped in from the darkness through one of the
french windows. His head was bare, his clothing was somewhat
dishevelled, and he seemed to lack for breath. His mouth was set, with
its thin blue-whitish lips drawn back from the teeth. He stared at us
some time before speaking; then his voice, the first time I had known
it to be so, was instinct with fear.
“Bannerlee, seen Maryvale?”
“I’ve just returned with Miss Lebetwood. What makes you ask?”
“He’s—gone.”
“He’ll come back.”
“I’m sure he will. Come in here, Bannerlee.”
Quite astonished by his tone, I followed him toward the library,
turning at the door to give a pithy glance at the boy, whose hair now
looked like a forest of query-notes. When I entered the library, Aire
had thrown himself down in one of the big leather arm-chairs in a
posture of complete relaxation, and was breathing heavily. Again it
was some time before he spoke.
“He’s gone, God knows where. He left me an hour ago while we were
walking among the strawberry trees. Went snap off, like breaking a
stick, while I was in the middle of a sentence.”
“Why, Doctor,” I exclaimed, with a snort of assumed cheerfulness,
“surely you’re making too much of this.”
He sprang up, paced the breadth of the room, ugly wrinkles on his
brow. “I hope I am. I hope I am. But I’ve bitched the thing so. And
this afternoon he seemed in perfect possession of himself. I’ve been
so damned optimistic that now the reverse— He seemed perfectly normal
late this afternoon, you understand; in fact the two of us were
planning—no matter. I must go out again.”
“I’ll come along with you.”
“No, thanks. I’ll have to manage him alone. It will be ‘Horse and
Hattock in the Devil’s name,’ and I fancy I’m the only one who can
play up to him.”
“But you’ll be in danger.”
He gave a short laugh. “I think not. I’m more afraid of the things
that can’t hurt.” He looked out to the lawn. “Thank God for a clear
night, and moonlight. You know, the trees seem to have faces in their
trunks; they seem to be grinning and mowing in the wind. That’s the
sort of drivel this thing’s brought me to. Well, I’m off.”
He made toward the door, but paused with his hand on it. “Don’t say a
word of this to anyone, Bannerlee. I’ll need a free hand if I’m to
bring it off. Cheerio.”
He plunged into the night. I saw him cross the silver carpet of the
lawn and disappear between the gigantic jaws of the gate-house towers.
A moment later in the corridor I met Harmony carrying a tray up to
“the young ladies.” She told me that cold viands were laid out in the
dinner-room for those lagging in from the hills. But in spite of my
three hours’ struggle, I was in no humour for feeding, especially
since I was bound to encounter the others and would have to repeat my
adventures again and again.
I asked the girl if there had been any fresh development during my
absence.
“Did you hear about what they dug up this afternoon, sir?”
“Great Scott! You don’t mean another corpse?”
“Lor’, no, sir, not human. In the garden, it was, where the dogs were
scratching the place to pieces. Someone said get a spade and dig and
see what’s there, and they found it.”
“What did they find?”
“A little pig, sir. And it was wrapped in some black cloth they said
must be Parson Lolly’s gown, only it was all tore up and full of holes
and had some funny bits of red paper pinned to it. They do say that
Parson Lolly is too tall for a gown like that. We met Superintendent
Salt when we were coming back from the town, and he was carrying it
with him.”
“So,” I remarked. “It looks to me as if the Superintendent took
advantage of Miss Lebetwood’s absence to spend a busy afternoon down
here.”
“Lor’, yes, sir. He was using the gas-expirator and fair drove us out
of the house.”
“I’m glad he made such a thorough job of inspirating the gas again.”
“Yes, sir, or it wouldn’t be safe. It’s that wonderful, sir.”
“It is,” I agreed heartily, and cursed—to myself.
She with her tray went down the passage while I went up the second
flight, feeling not the shadow of a suspicion of my darling, but the
certainty that before the night was past, she would be accused. I
hurried past Maryvale’s portal with an aching heart.
Yet such was the settled habit of the week that when I reached my own
door, the turmoil of my mind was stilled. This lonely chamber, which
had such baneful associations for me a week ago, had become a harbour
of refuge. Whatever strife and doom might wait outside, here the
ceiling aslope, the candle-bracket askew, the oaken chest, and the
narrow window before my table invited me to my work.
I fell to. I wrote steadily. I forgot to be hungry. Once the sound of
a gong quivered through the House, but not until long after it had
died away did I consider what it meant. Then I set down my pen. Mrs.
Belvoir’s séance must be in progress, and Scotland Yard was doubtless
there. I must attend.
I secured my invaluable pocket light before setting out. Past
Maryvale’s door forbid, down the long stairs, through the corridor of
faces—until a murmurous voice reached me from the Hall of the Moth, a
voice whose tone I recognized though the words were indistinct. Yes,
Mrs. Belvoir was probing beyond the visible.
Softly I opened the door behind the musicians’ stair, tiptoed over the
threshold, and stood concealed within. Great curtains shut out the
moonlight from the Hall, which was dark indeed, save for the circle of
bulbs on the circumference of the chandelier. These, cased by Toby in
paper, gave very little illumination, and that of a mysterious tinge.
At the other end of the room wavered a lazy fire, composed for the
most part of bluish flame.
The people seated around the table, which had been placed not far from
the musicians’ stairs, were so vague that I could not tell their
attitude toward the proceedings. I observed at once that Mrs. Belvoir
was not going to “bring the spirits and all,” not yet, at any rate.
For on the table was spread some dark cloth above which I caught the
faint glimmer of glass: a crystal sphere. The woman seated deep in her
chair before the ball must be the pythoness herself.
Her voice had lapsed when I entered, and a long silence ensued. Then
she said: “It’s no use. I’ve lost it again,” and I saw a white arm
reach up. Instantly a dazzling light shone above her head, from a
special globe connected with the wall-fixture, and Mrs. Belvoir was
gazing intently into the crystal ball. I now saw that the sphere was
erected on a small tripod with legs of different-coloured metals, and
that this structure stood upon a square yellow velvet cloth laid over
a cloth of blue. A mouldy, triangular crust of bread was placed
underneath the crystal, and some statement I had once heard or read,
that “bread possesses a potent protective magic against evil forces,”
occurred to me to explain its presence.
Neither Salt nor any stranger was there. Mrs. Belvoir, attired in pale
mauve ninon, a heliotrope band above her forehead, and an amethyst pin
at her breast, was brooding over the crystal with eyes that widened
and narrowed with the phase of her thought. Those pale sapphire eyes
were darkened with intensity, and the customary indistinctness of her
face—a mermaid-under-water look—was quite gone. Sometimes her hands
clasped or slid about the sphere; sometimes her fingers rested on her
temples or tapped them gently. Beyond a doubt, she was sincere.
The assisting parties were either slightly embarrassed or strongly
impressed, all save Belvoir, who sat opposite her; on his face lived a
smile of scepticism. Up went the arm and the Hall was dim once more.
“I have it now,” said the seeress: “I am in fog, deep fog.”
“Good,” came a _sotto voce_ from the other end of the table, but the
word was drowned in the current of her speech. Leaning back, but
apparently still gazing at the sphere, in trance-life passivity, she
seemed not so much to utter words as to let the words flow from her
mouth.
“I am in fog, thick fog; it clings about me.” Her hands made dim
outward movements, as if pressing away the mist that enveloped her. “I
am lost, and there is a malignant spirit nearby, but I am not sure I
know that—yet. I sit down—on a rock. I am not very hungry, but since
there is nothing else to do, I eat what I have brought with me. I wait
for light to penetrate the fog. I wish to find something; perhaps I
fear the malignant spirit that is near. I wish to find the ancient
hermit’s cell. It is a place hallowed by good works and piety. The
malignant spirit will not dare come near me there. I eat and wait. The
mist clears partly away at last. I go on. The sun shines on me; I am
glorified. . . .”
I suddenly realized it was my story she told. There was nothing
wonderful in this, to be sure, for the narrative of my afternoon on
the hills had long been common property. I listened with care, to see
if she included some detail proving her version to be a brain-picture
really evoked by the crystal and having objective authority. But all
she added to the fable was the “malignant spirit” hovering near me all
the while, a presence which I certainly had no idea was dogging me on
the hilltops.
It became apparent that the seeress was not interested in me but in
the spirit, and some time before the dénouement I had an inkling of
how the story would end.
“I am fleeing from the malignant spirit in its carnal shape. I allow
it to overtake me—so far, no farther. We are approaching the brink of
the cliff. I leap aside, and the animal plunges into the gulf. I am
saved, and I hear the carnal shape of the spirit go thundering down,
down, down. I am saved, and the bull is dead.”
Silence. . . . When Mrs. Belvoir spoke again, her voice had lost its
dreaminess and become positive. But she spoke with effort; the phrases
seemed wrung out of her.
“The bull is dead. . . . But spiritual force . . . is never
destroyed. . . . The bull is dead. . . . The malignant spirit is
living still. . . . It never ceases to operate. . . . It is
localized. . . .”
A small sound shattered the tension of that moment: merely the opening
of one of the french windows.
“My God, what’s that?” cried Eve Bartholomew, before someone reached
above Mrs. Belvoir’s head and lit the bright globe once more. Mrs.
Belvoir turned, intending angry remonstrance, but her voice was
stilled by one look at Doctor Aire.
He was coatless and collarless, and his shirt and trousers were miry.
His small yellow head seemed to have turned almost white, save for a
ragged cut across his forehead, and while he spoke the man leaned hard
on the back of the _Brocade de Lyons_ couch as if in the last throes
of exhaustion.
Everyone was standing up; my presence excited no surprise.
“Maryvale’s—somewhere near.”
“Doctor! What’s happened to you?” cried Crofts.
“I’ve had a bout with him on the tennis court. He was a few stone too
heavy for me. I saw him heading for the House—probably wants something
that’s in his room. I’m afraid—he’s insane.”
“What shall we do, then?” asked Crofts, become very cool in the
crisis.
“Keep a watch at every entrance, enough of us at each place to tackle
him safely.”
“Stephen, you mustn’t go out again. You’ve done too much already,”
said Alberta.
But Aire, though he swayed, hung on grittily, and shook his head. “No,
thanks. A stiff drink will put me right. Just have the men-servants in
here, Crofts, and—”
Miss Mertoun gave a shrill scream. A creature was looking at us
through the open entrance behind Aire—a strange creature.
The thing that looked at us was using Maryvale’s face, but it was not
Maryvale any longer. The countenance, blank of any jot of humanity,
had become a mere bag with features. It lingered there only for a
moment, staring at us with incomprehension so complete that a pang of
pity thrilled through me. A woman sobbed. The face was gone.
Pell-mell the men were gone, too, in a wild chase scattering across
the lawn, and I among them. Yet sorry as I was for Maryvale, he did
not concern me now. I had sterner work even than trammelling a
moonlight madman.
I determined to risk the notice of my absence in order to make certain
that the bicycles were properly waiting where Toby had promised to
conceal them. Keeping under the shadow of trees where I could, I
hastened across the southern lawn toward the oaks that guard the drive
below the gate-house towers. I was just in time to see someone drag
one of the bicycles from its bushy covert into the full moonlight and
bend over the front tyre with a gleaming blade ready to slash. I
sprang upon this man, mastered him more by the surprise of my leap
than by main strength. He fell face upward, groaning. His knife lay on
the grass ten feet away.
“Morgan! What crazy work is this?”
He thrashed about in my inexorable grip, and blurted out his words in
speech that reverted toward the primitive. “The killers, the killers!
They bikes was for them. I saw the lad fetch ’em and hide ’em, aye I
did. ’E’s sweet on ’er since she took notice of ’im.”
“What are you talking about?” I blustered. “What do you know about the
murderers?”
He struggled to rise, but I let my weight bear down, and he relapsed
with another groan, though certainly not hurt. “I know who did the
killin’. I’ve known all along.”
I shook him roughly by the shoulders. “Don’t lie to me. Come, out with
it, now, or I’ll throttle you.”
“Mr. Blenkinson told us. It’s the sure truth.”
“_Blenkinson!_” I bawled. “By God, Blenkinson’s got something to
answer for to me. What lies has he been spreading?”
“He has the proofs. It’s sure as if ’e saw ’em with ’is own eyes.”
“Saw _what_? Saw _who_?”
“Saw the killin’s. The three Americans did ’em, and they’ll make
shares of Mr. Cosgrove’s money.”
My fingers itched for his throat, but black fear blazed in my heart.
“Liar!” I screamed. “They’ll hang you sooner than _her_! Don’t you
know she won’t touch a penny of it until the killer’s found!”
The man on the ground maintained a sullen obstinacy. “Sometimes them
hangs as isn’t guilty, and them suffers as finds out. The milkman knew
it was ’er, and look what ’appened to ’im.”
“You poor, blind fool,” I exclaimed bitterly. “There’s jealousy and
hatred in this somewhere. Damn Blenkinson. Why, there isn’t a particle
of evidence—”
“There is, there is,” he gasped. “There’s court evidence to ’ang ’er
when Mr. Blenkinson comes out with it.”
“What evidence? Tell me!”
He writhed in my clutch. “The beetle-stone as she lost from ’er ring
that day. She tried to keep it secret, but it got about. Mr.
Blenkinson found it right in the same place as the stone she did the
killin’ with. There wasn’t a foot between ’em.”
I pressed my fists against his chest, with a downward thrust now and
then for emphasis. “Your fine Blenkinson’s a liar, do you hear? His
evidence, as you call it, isn’t worth a pin. And if he whispers a word
of his slander, and it comes to my ears, I’ll thrash him within an
inch of his life, do you hear? And the same applies to you—you
contemptible—”
I stood up quickly. Men were crowding out of the plantation near
Whimble-foot and clamouring toward the House. Had the quarry turned? I
must be present now at any cost.
This man was cowed sufficiently. He still lay supine; I prodded him
with my foot. “Remember!” I warned him darkly, and commenced running
toward the mansion, stooping to seize the knife where it glittered on
the turf.
Once only I paused for a moment and looked back. Was there
something—someone—moving stealthily toward the man, who was sitting up
now and feeling himself for bruises? A moment later the figure of a
woman emerged from the shadows, crossed quickly to Morgan, and seemed
to lift him bodily from the ground. I did not immediately grasp that
she had lugged him up by the ear. Now they were arguing,
gesticulating, and though I had heard it seldom, I knew the prim voice
of Miss Ardelia Lacy.
Smiling to myself, I pressed on.
The half-dozen men who reached the corner of the House more or less in
a pack were in the nick of time to see the wretched Maryvale, driven
from cover to cover like a hunted beast, drag his body, which had
never before seemed ponderous, to the base of one of the gate-house
towers. He carried what seemed a club with an enormous broadened head.
He turned there at bay while we closed in upon him, and the awful
wreck of his face with its glaring eyes and bared teeth in the
moonlight will haunt me to my death. He was a beast. While we stood
speechless, he began to climb.
One hand gripped the queer-looking club, but grasping the ivy with one
hand alone, he raised himself steadily. It was agony to watch this
man-turned-ape mounting where none of us dared to follow. In the thick
wavering growth that clung to the tower sometimes he swung
pendulum-wise, sometimes was almost buried in the foliage, but his
ascent was sure as if he climbed the stairs within. We cried out to
him appeals and abuse; I do not think he heard us. Someone ran to the
stables, shouting for a ladder.
Maryvale reached the angle where the covered bridge meets the wall of
the tower. Here the ivy thins, and the man made a wide stop to the
roof of the bridge. Then, surely, I felt the supreme horror, when
Maryvale, using the base of a window-slit for foot-rest, lifted
himself over the edge of the turret-roof and carefully but
expeditiously crawled up the slope of stone toward the pointed top.
We held on shouting, some of us, in sheer desperation. Pendleton made
a frenzied effort to climb the ivy, failed. Maryvale crept on, his
whole body flat against the roof, save for the arm which held the
club-like mass. He reached the pinnacle and lifted himself to a
precarious standing posture, one foot firm on the very apex, the side
of the other foot pressed against the slope.
For a few moments he bent over the object he had carried; then when he
straightened his body, his arm above his head brandished a flaming,
sizzling torch, and he uttered the only words I had heard him speak
that day. He called out to the night at large:
“Lolly, Lolly, Parson Lolly!” His voice gloated above the hiss of the
torch. “Who’s the Parson? I’M THE PARSON! AND NOW I’M GOING OVER THE
HILLS: PARSON LOLLY FLIES!”
The torchlight danced in his face while he laughed shrilly. Then he
launched himself into the air in an enormous leap.
He fell almost but not quite clear of the sloping roof. Striking it
all awry, he dashed against the roof of the bridge and on down.
Mercifully, he was hurled toward the wall of the tower, and his foot
caught for a second in some loop of the ivy-twine twenty feet from the
ground. His swinging body struck the wall a terrific blow, and he hung
head downward for a moment; his torch, which had drawn a flaming mark
across the night, now blazed upward enveloping him with its flames.
Only for an instant, however. The impact of the collision with the
wall had stunned him, and the torch fell from his hand. The ivy gave
way, and the madman, part of his clothing afire, fell insensible to
the ground at our feet.