The Crash
Again I smelt powder.
In tingling silence some of us crossed the Hall and regarded the
headless thing. Belvoir lit the other chandelier, and in its sparkle,
to my immeasurable relief, the figure proved to be the scarecrow which
had served in the sisters’ field. The woman who had stooped in the
fireplace and held the effigy in the path of the leaping, swinging bar
sat in her chair, again impassive. I noted her admirable hands, strong
and hairy like a man’s, her face, broad and full of flesh, but firm
and capable. The bumpkinish policeman touched me on the sleeve and
pointed to the table, a sign we should keep to our own end of the
Hall.
I noted a disturbance there. Crofts, towering over the American girl,
shook her with rude fingers clamped into her shoulders.
“You—you—”
While I returned to our group, I was struck with the curious feeling
that someone was missing there. Someone had slipped out. Vaguely I
wondered who it had been, and whether his absence would be revealed
when we took our places once more. But we were not to sit down
together again that night.
The American girl had drawn away from Crofts and stood looking at him,
not angrily, but with a certain speculation in her gaze. My blood
rushed up when I saw her white skin bruised by the marks his fingers
had made. She said, “You think I—?”
“Murderess!” That was like Crofts.
Several of us protested at his folly; the rest were horrified into
dumbness.
Her steady gaze did not fail. “You do suspect me. So did Mr.
Heatheringham—and Mr. Blenkinson has done me the honour also. But I
didn’t do it, people, and—sometimes—I wonder if anybody did . . . at
least in the sense we’ve been thinking.”
“Nobody did! with that damned engine—that thunderbolt! Nobody did!”
“Don’t shout so. That engine, as you call it, was Mr. Salt’s discovery
this afternoon while the House was cleared. I had nothing to do with
it just now.”
Crofts’ jaw fell. “Cleared? The House cleared? There wasn’t anything
in this ‘lost’ business?”
“Very little. I did want to find Mr. Bannerlee’s oratory, but
principally I hoped to draw you kind people out of the Vale. Mr. Salt
and I have been associated in a lawful conspiracy. He and the Scotland
Yard Inspector—”
“Who?”
“The Scotland Yard man. He was to arrive at New Aidenn by motor early
in the afternoon since the trains were slow. While the House was
empty, they investigated, and found this machine. Mr. Salt expected
something like it. This was the real weapon, of course; that stone
half buried in the loam was a blind.”
“You’ve known this—long?”
“How could I? I had a hint of it when I kept finding in so many places
how the old castle here was built on a mill-site: Cwm Melin, you know.
It even happened that Mr. Bannerlee knew that name and that name only
for this place. He had never heard of Aidenn Vale.”
“The devil with Bannerlee. What’s a mill got to do with it?”
“The mill-wheel, don’t you see, winds up the spring of the machine. It
must be quite automatic, and I dare say at this moment the cat’s
claw—I suppose that’s what it is—the long heavy arm of iron, is ready
to leap out again.”
Doctor Aire’s face revealed a ferment within. “By jingo—I think I have
it. That mocking roar—hideous—was the sound of water tumbling into a
cistern, or a heavy cask. Then if the cistern discharged over the
wheel, the gear actuating the arm would wind until—yes, by thunder,
that’s it!”
“What’s what?”
“We heard the purr. That was the gear winding against the resistance
of the spring—a sword-spring, perhaps. When the tension exceeded the
strength of the spring, the accursed thing let fly. There must be a
shaft. . . .” The Doctor lapsed into mumbling.
“Beneath the perfidious tree!” screamed Mrs. Bartholomew so suddenly
that we all jumped. “What does that mean?”
Miss Lebetwood answered, “There was once a cross—see the traces—carved
on the chimney.”
Aire had his eye shrewdly on her. “We can credit you with the
flashlight, can’t we?”
She nodded. “Yes; the camera’s in the gallery, and there were powders
attached to several places on the wall. Constable Pritchard
manipulated the electric button that ignited them. I hope we have
obtained a decent picture of the claw in mid-air.”
“But who—who’s responsible?” asked Mrs. Bartholomew plaintively, with
outspread hands.
“Dead too long to make any difference,” said Aire.
“Could this, er, machine last for centuries?” Crofts demanded,
shouldering his way to the Doctor.
“For millenniums, without oiling,” returned Aire. “Why not? The really
important thing is—”
“I’ve got it!” I cried. “About your question, Mrs. Bartholomew.
Remember, Miss Lebetwood, what Maryvale told me the day he finished
his picture? Someone, he said, of the house of Kay. And, by heaven, he
was right!”
“The really necessary thing,” persisted Aire, “is to dismantle this
machine without getting killed. It will be ticklish work, though,
since it’s automatically prepared to lunge out with its claw on five
seconds’ notice. We’ll have to make a start with the cistern and the
wheel.”
“That’s not the first thing, Doctor,” said the American girl.
Aire turned toward her in surprise. “Nothing can be more urgent. You
wouldn’t leave this thing for a night or for an hour, would you, like
a gun primed and cocked? Why, at any moment, sooner or later, the
equilibrium—”
“I think not, and if we hear the purr again we can keep our distance.
Something needs to be done, however, before you take the machine
apart. We must find the real murderer.”
We gave vent to all kinds of sounds, mainly incredulous.
“Listen! We have _not_ discovered yet the person here who knows Welsh
and whom Mr. Bannerlee is shielding.”
I commenced a vain “I haven’t admitted—” but my speech was charged
down.
“I can prove you are!” she cried. “Yes, sir! I want to know why you
are shielding him, or her. All day long I haven’t got my mind off
those matches you wanted so badly after recovering your own copy of
the Book. Do you know, it’s my belief you knew you were carrying
evidence dangerous to someone, and you wanted to destroy it before you
reached the House. I think it was the translation you actually did
destroy later on.”
“Look here—” put in Crofts, reaching out a hand. His face might have
been that of a man sinking under water for the third time. “Look
here—”
“Crofts!” cried Alberta, her eyes bright with agony.
“The parchment and translation were in old Watts’ copy,” Belvoir
snapped.
I doubt if she heard them, intent as she was on the molten stream of
her thought. “This translation, done off-hand, betrayed someone of us
who had a competent knowledge of Welsh and consequently a head-start,
at any rate, in knowledge of the cat’s claw.”
“It was in old Watts’ copy,” muttered Belvoir.
“When you came into the library, Mr. Bannerlee, you were about
satiated with your attempts to burn the paper. But even if you
couldn’t destroy it, you could get it off your person, and you did
that. You told how you ‘reached your hand up into a dark corner,’ and
you might have added ‘and changed my quarto with the one on the
shelf.’ What happened a few minutes later when you and Lib were
looking over your copy? A flake of moss fell to the floor; Lib must
have noticed it, for you were scrupulous to mention it in the diary,
and you passed it off with some remark about careless dusting. But I
read in Armitage about moss, and I read about mossy stones in the
diary, and I’ve seen plenty of mossy ones around the oratory, and you
can’t tell me that the copy with the parchment in it wasn’t the one
you’d left up there last week. So I imagine you knew well enough what
Lib had found when she called out to you while you were leaving the
library.”
“How absurd!” I cried.
“‘Imagine’ is a well-chosen word,” said Lord Ludlow crisply. “I am not
much edified by this botanical excursion. You can’t accuse a man of
being accessory to murder because of the way he turns a phrase.”
“Thanks, Ludlow,” I nodded. “There’s no need, really—”
“The thing I am driving at,” said the American girl in a quiet little
voice that drilled its way into our brains, “is that you, Mr.
Bannerlee, wrote the translation yourself. There is no other
conclusion, is there?”
“Wilder and wilder!” I exclaimed. “This is too bad, Miss Lebetwood,
when you’ve realized all along that I have no knowledge of Welsh.”
Our speech had settled into a duel with unmerciful give-and-take. “Are
you sure? Consider this: In the diary your early references to the
Welsh language were all natural and ambiguous, which puzzled me
mightily when I came to other things later on. Then I saw that you
must be taking advantage of those early references to conceal the fact
that you are really quite adept in Welsh.”
“Took advantage? That’s rather strong, isn’t it?”
“Well, just think. You made a pun on the name of St. Tarw, which means
‘bull.’ You even went out of your way to use an American expression,
that it was a ‘bully name.’ A little later, when the man you call the
gorilla-man shouted at you in Irish, you knew quite definitely that he
did _not_ shout in Welsh, although Welsh and Irish belong to the same
race of languages, and that particular expression must sound about the
same in one language as in the other.
“But these were trivial compared with the point they hinted at, and
that telegram there clinches the point. You told Lib all about how you
read Ellis Griffiths’ history, and now we know the manuscript has
never been printed, let alone translated.”
She came close to me, still speaking, and I yielded a step before the
accusations she flung out like weapons. “You destroyed the manuscript
you yourself had made. You hurled the stone from the rockery into the
earth from the balcony outside your room. And at the same time you
dropped the placard the wind carried down to the corner of the House,
and it was you who left the earlier placard in Sean’s room that
morning when everyone else was downstairs.”
My voice sounded horribly ineffective in its attempt at surprise. “You
accuse _me_! You accuse _me_—of—?”
“I do, I do! Haven’t I been putting you on your guard all morning and
all afternoon—ever since I showed you the campstool? Haven’t I been
telling you what I know and hinting what I’ve guessed? Haven’t I done
enough—?”
My laugh, to show contempt, was also a failure. “Preposterous. It’s
a—vertebrate without a skeleton: your theory. I didn’t want to kill
your lover. What motive could I have had?”
Those blue eyes could be as sharp as steel. She seemed to be the
embodiment of intellect become passionate. “Motive? Something
overwhelmed you stronger than any motive: impulse. If you had thought
two minutes, Sean would be alive to-day. You had motive, yes, though
I’m ashamed to describe it, but the impulse dwarfed the cause behind
it, for once. You had been thinking about it, hadn’t you, ever since
the night before, and all day long, or there would have been no
threatening message in Sean’s room—but it was that chance, that chance
in a thousand that settled it. I understand now what has always seemed
to me the greatest mystery of all: the motive you had for the diary
and the tremendous trouble you took in writing five thousand words
overnight.”
“I set down the reason plainly: I wanted to clear up the muddle we all
were in.”
“That may have been so when you took up your pen, but before you laid
it down the diary had become a greater thing than any mere alignment
of facts; it had become your defence! You were someone else, Mr.
Bannerlee; the bright and cheery, affable, not-too-scholarly,
antiquarian and athlete—all that part of you subservient now to
something else: Iago!”
“Who was Iago?” asked Mrs. Bartholomew with troubled mouth. “Something
in Shakes—”
“The spider spins its web with all its cunning bound up in instinct.
While you spun your web, Mr. Bannerlee, all your cunning was bound up
in intellect, and you loved each shrewd knot and strand. Yes, that was
it; you came to be in love with artifice, you laughed in your sleeve
at Salt and Doctor Aire and Heatheringham and me—all people who were
trying to break through your web.”
I had hold of myself now, in spite of the tumult of my heart, and
could return blow for blow. “What nonsense! What a fool I’d be if I
killed a man to preen myself for intellectual superiority. I tell you
again, I never wanted to kill your lover. What reason had I?”
Her eyes fell for a moment before mine, and a little storm of wrinkles
crossed her brow. “Impulse, impulse, I said, didn’t I? I think you
wrote of it, three times at least. That first night by the tower—when
I and the Parson’s sign were together inside the circle your torch had
cast? Again, after Sean and I had quarrelled, and yet again as you
walked up the Vale in the twilight and could not forget the quarrel.
Afterward too, when you were so depressed on learning that I was to be
immensely rich. You covered it well, oh, yes! But could I fail to know
what was tugging at you all the while?” She raised her eyes to mine
for a long, grave look. “I suppose you would call it being in love
with me, wouldn’t you?”
I fought down the thing in my throat. “And suppose I was—suppose I
am—what difference does it make? Must I plead guilty to a crime I
never dreamed of because I had the bad luck to take a fancy to the
face of a woman who’s denied to me? I was well enough when I walked on
the mountain and felt as if I could move the earth. I wish to God I
had stayed up there, and not come down into this place where Fate
takes the strings and plays her hellish tricks!”
She gave me the most mournful look I have ever seen on any face.
“That’s why I can’t despise you, you know, though I’ve tried. I can’t
look on you as a—a thing of horror. You’ve played the game right
through: you put down every prevarication and evasion you had made,
and then you let me read the diary. You just—gave yourself away, and
did it without a murmur. When you were up there alone on the Forest
and exulted in your loneliness, you were a man any woman would have
given a lot to march beside. And then you came down here among us—and
how quickly you proved that all our gods have feet of clay.”
My indignation howled at highest pitch. “I tell you for the last time
that I deny absolutely the trumped-up charge you keep senselessly
repeating.”
She shook her head. “Denial’s no good. Do you think, as everyone seems
to believe, that terrible machine worked by chance just now, by some
overplus of pressure or loss of equilibrium? No, Mr. Bannerlee; a man
set the cat purring and the claw lunging. Do you know where he is?”
Silence. . . .
“A man did it?” I repeated, my voice parched and scraping, my body
numb as a block of wood. “A man—did it?” I remembered I had felt that
one of us had secretly left the Hall. But no—that had been after the
deviltry of the machine.
“A man in this House—in your room, Mr. Bannerlee. Twelve-fifteen was
the time set.”
I saw faces leaping and jigging around me, one of them with great blue
eyes and crown of golden hair swinging enormous toward me and swinging
giddily away again. The door into the corridor, which I had not seen
opened, was suddenly closed from outside. I heard a sea of voices, and
above them shot out the voice of Crofts, booming like a huge wave:
“But my God, how was it done?”
“They found out this afternoon,” said the American girl, “and Mr. Salt
scratched off a few details for me. The mantelpiece is as old as the
castle, and looks and feels sound enough, but it swings down by means
of an invisible hinge. The claw operates it. The claw must be
articulated in some way with a shaft driven from a water-wheel in the
wall below. The purring sound from the clash of the teeth would draw
anyone toward the fireplace, just in the path of the flying bar as he
stooped to find where the noise came from. The blow was so terrific it
drove Sean through the opening of the french windows, to crawl a yard
or two—and die. Heatheringham was already dead when he was hurled
against the glass, and his arm striking upward and through the pane
that way caused the revolver he was carrying cocked to explode. I
think—that’s all.”
She had recited all this with the most studied coolness and precision,
this account of the machine—a device surely the creation of a haunted
and tortuous brain. The account completed, the driving-force which had
sustained her was gone, and she looked weary almost to haggardness.
Pity and shame and grief wrenched me for the part I had played in the
fatal story. When Mrs. Belvoir ended her close-lipped listening of an
hour with a querulous question, I heard someone, Alfred Bannerlee,
speaking as if from far away.
“I’ll tell you about that. It was the cats’ heads stuck everywhere
about here that made me wonder if I hadn’t dropped into Cwm Melin, as
it was called in the parchment account. ‘Hear the cat purring under
the perfidious tree’ was fresh in my mind. There was a cat’s head on
the firearch, and there had been a cross above. I can’t say that, er,
gave the show away, but it stirred me up a bit. Upstairs, though, when
I saw the bracket on the wall and thought of ‘no more trouble than
snuffing a night-light,’ an idea seemed spread out as plain as an open
book. I never thought of the mechanism as a certainty, only as a
possibility—barely that. I swear that when I tugged with my razor
strop and brought the wretched bracket down, I had no idea what might
happen. From what I hear, there must be some sort of weighted valve
controlling the flow from the cistern to the water-wheel. A chain from
the bracket operates the valve and sets the whole damned business in
motion. But I didn’t understand that then. It was all like a
dream—what happened—”
The faces passed into a blur again, jerking up and down. Voices roared
and voices were thin echoes shivering into silence. Everything was
moving, even the sisters Delambre. One strode across the room like a
tempest, tossing her garments this way and that. The other came
waddling after, and was engaged in a mighty struggle with her hood.
The hood came away, revealing a goodly beard.
A comic-opera transformation had taken place. Suddenly it was Salt who
was standing before me, Salt and a giant of a man with beefy face.
Salt’s expression was ridiculous, for he was doing his best to make it
stern and menacing. The words in the air seemed to come from his lips:
“Quietly, Mr. Bannerlee.”
Then I thought that I had fainted. But I had not; instantaneous, utter
darkness had swept into the Hall.