Some time after the inquest, which had ended in the inconclusive verdict
which Mr. Andrew Ashe had himself predicted and achieved, Paynter was
again sitting on the bench outside the village inn, having on the little
table in front of it a tall glass of light ale, which he enjoyed much
more as local color than as liquor. He had but one companion on the
bench, and that a new one, for the little market place was empty at
that hour, and he had lately, for the rest, been much alone. He was
not unhappy, for he resembled his great countryman, Walt Whitman, in
carrying a kind of universe with him like an open umbrella; but he was
not only alone, but lonely. For Ashe had gone abruptly up to London,
and since his return had been occupied obscurely with legal matters,
doubtless bearing on the murder. And Treherne had long since taken up
his position openly, at the great house, as the husband of the great
lady, and he and she were occupied with sweeping reforms on the estate.
The lady especially, being of the sort whose very dreams “drive at
practice,” was landscape gardening as with the gestures of a giantess.
It was natural, therefore, that so sociable a spirit as Paynter should
fall into speech with the one other stranger who happened to be staying
at the inn, evidently a bird of passage like himself. This man, who was
smoking a pipe on the bench beside him, with his knapsack before him on
the table, was an artist come to sketch on that romantic coast; a tall
man in a velvet jacket, with a shock of tow-colored hair, a long fair
beard, but eyes of dark brown, the effect of which contrast reminded
Paynter vaguely, he hardly knew why, of a Russian. The stranger carried
his knapsack into many picturesque corners; he obtained permission to
set up his easel in that high garden where the late Squire had held his
al fresco banquets. But Paynter had never had an opportunity of judging
of the artist’s work, nor did he find it easy to get the artist even to
talk of his art. Cyprian himself was always ready to talk of any art,
and he talked of it excellently, but with little response. He gave his
own reasons for preferring the Cubists to the cult of Picasso, but his
new friend seemed to have but a faint interest in either. He insinuated
that perhaps the Neo-Primitives were after all only thinning their line,
while the true Primitives were rather tightening it; but the stranger
seemed to receive the insinuation without any marked reaction of
feeling. When Paynter had even gone back as far into the past as the
Post-Impressionists to find a common ground, and not found it, other
memories began to creep back into his mind. He was just reflecting,
rather darkly, that after all the tale of the peacock trees needed a
mysterious stranger to round it off, and this man had much the air of
being one, when the mysterious stranger himself said suddenly:
“Well, I think I’d better show you the work I’m doing down here.”
He had his knapsack before him on the table, and he smiled rather grimly
as he began to unstrap it. Paynter looked on with polite expressions of
interest, but was considerably surprised when the artist unpacked and
placed on the table, not any recognizable works of art, even of the most
Cubist description, but (first) a quire of foolscap closely written
with notes in black and red ink, and (second), to the American’s extreme
amazement, the old woodman’s ax with the linen wrapper, which he had
himself found in the well long ago.
“Sorry to give you a start, sir,” said the Russian artist, with a
marked London accent. “But I’d better explain straight off that I’m a
policeman.”
“You don’t look it,” said Paynter.
“I’m not supposed to,” replied the other. “Mr. Ashe brought me down here
from the Yard to investigate; but he told me to report to you when I’d
got anything to go on. Would you like to go into the matter now?
“When I took this matter up,” explained the detective, “I did it at Mr.
Ashe’s request, and largely, of course, on Mr. Ashe’s lines. Mr. Ashe
is a great criminal lawyer; with a beautiful brain, sir, as full as the
Newgate Calendar. I took, as a working notion, his view that only you
five gentlemen round the table in the Squire’s garden were acquainted
with the Squire’s movements. But you gentlemen, if I may say so, have
a way of forgetting certain other things and other people which we are
rather taught to look for first. And as I followed Mr. Ashe’s inquiries
through the stages you know already, through certain suspicions I
needn’t discuss because they’ve been dropped, I found the thing shaping
after all toward something, in the end, which I think we should have
considered at the beginning. Now, to begin with, it is not true that
there were five men round the table. There were six.”
The creepy conditions of that garden vigil vaguely returned upon
Paynter; and he thought of a ghost, or something more nameless than a
ghost. But the deliberate speech of the detective soon enlightened him.
“There were six men and five gentlemen, if you like to put it so,” he
proceeded. “That man Miles, the butler, saw the Squire vanish as plainly
as you did; and I soon found that Miles was a man worthy of a good deal
of attention.”
A light of understanding dawned on Paynter’s face. “So that was it, was
it!” he muttered.
“Does all our mythological mystery end with a policeman collaring a
butler? Well, I agree with you he is far from an ordinary butler, even
to look at; and the fault in imagination is mine. Like many faults in
imagination, it was simply snobbishness.”
“We don’t go quite so fast as that,” observed the officer, in an
impassive manner. “I only said I found the inquiry pointing to Miles;
and that he was well worthy of attention. He was much more in the old
Squire’s confidence than many people supposed; and when I cross-examined
him he told me a good deal that was worth knowing. I’ve got it all down
in these notes here; but at the moment I’ll only trouble you with
one detail of it. One night this butler was just outside the Squire’s
dining-room door, when he heard the noise of a violent quarrel. The
Squire was a violent gentleman, from time to time; but the curious thing
about this scene was that the other gentleman was the more violent of
the two. Miles heard him say repeatedly that the Squire was a public
nuisance, and that his death would be a good riddance for everybody. I
only stop now to tell you that the other gentleman was Dr. Burton Brown,
the medical man of this village.
“The next examination I made was that of Martin, the woodcutter. Upon
one point at least his evidence is quite clear, and is, as you will
see, largely confirmed by other witnesses. He says first that the doctor
prevented him from recovering his ax, and this is corroborated by Mr.
and Mrs. Treherne. But he says further that the doctor admitted having
the thing himself; and this again finds support in other evidence by the
gardener, who saw the doctor, some time afterward, come by himself and
pick up the chopper. Martin says that Doctor Brown repeatedly refused to
give it up, alleging some fanciful excuse every time. And, finally, Mr.
Paynter, we will hear the evidence of the ax itself.”
He laid the woodman’s tool on the table in front of him, and began to
rip up and unwrap the curious linen covering round the handle.
“You will admit this is an odd bandage,” he said. “And that’s just the
odd thing about it, that it really is a bandage. This white stuff is the
sort of lint they use in hospitals, cut into strips like this. But most
doctors keep some; and I have the evidence of Jake the fisherman, with
whom Doctor Brown lived for some time, that the doctor had this useful
habit. And, last,” he added, flattening out a corner of the rag on the
table, “isn’t it odd that it should be marked T.B.B.?”
The American gazed at the rudely inked initials, but hardly saw them.
What he saw, as in a mirror in his darkened memory, was the black figure
with the black gloves against the blood-red sunset, as he had seen it
when he came out of the wood, and which had always haunted him, he knew
not why.
“Of course, I see what you mean,” he said, “and it’s very painful for
me, for I knew and respected the man. But surely, also, it’s very far
from explaining everything. If he is a murderer, is he a magician? Why
did the well water all evaporate in a night, and leave the dead man’s
bones dry as dust? That’s not a common operation in the hospitals, is
it?”
“As to the water, we do know the explanation,” said the detective. “I
didn’t tumble to it at first myself, being a Cockney; but a little talk
with Jake and the other fisherman about the old smuggling days put me
straight about that. But I admit the dried remains still stump us all.
All the same--”
A shadow fell across the table, and his talk was sharply cut short. Ashe
was standing under the painted sign, buttoned up grimly in black, and
with the face of the hanging judge, of which the poet had spoken, plain
this time in the broad sunlight. Behind him stood two big men in plain
clothes, very still; but Paynter knew instantly who they were.
“We must move at once,” said the lawyer. “Dr. Burton Brown is leaving
the village.”
The tall detective sprang to his feet, and Paynter instinctively
imitated him.
“He has gone up to the Trehernes possibly to say good-by,” went on Ashe
rapidly. “I’m sorry, but we must arrest him in the garden there,
if necessary. I’ve kept the lady out of the way, I think. But
you”--addressing the factitious landscape painter--“must go up at once
and rig up that easel of yours near the table and be ready. We will
follow quietly, and come up behind the tree. We must be careful, for
it’s clear he’s got wind of us, or he wouldn’t be doing a bolt.”
“I don’t like this job,” remarked Paynter, as they mounted toward the
park and garden, the detective darting on ahead.
“Do you suppose I do?” asked Ashe; and, indeed, his strong, heavy face
looked so lined and old that the red hair seemed unnatural, like a red
wig. “I’ve known him longer than you, though perhaps I’ve suspected him
longer as well.”
When they topped the slope of the garden the detective had already
erected his easel, though a strong breeze blowing toward the sea rattled
and flapped his apparatus and blew about his fair (and false) beard
in the wind. Little clouds curled like feathers, were scudding seaward
across the many-colored landscape, which the American art critic had
once surveyed on a happier morning; but it is doubtful if the landscape
painter paid much attention to it. Treherne was dimly discernible in the
doorway of what was now his house; he would come no nearer, for he
hated such a public duty more bitterly than the rest. The others posted
themselves a little way behind the tree. Between the lines of these
masked batteries the black figure of the doctor could be seen coming
across the green lawn, traveling straight, as a bullet, as he had done
when he brought the bad news to the woodcutter. To-day he was smiling,
under the dark mustache that was cut short of the upper lip, though
they fancied him a little pale, and he seemed to pause a moment and peer
through his spectacles at the artist.
The artist turned from his easel with a natural movement, and then in a
flash had captured the doctor by the coat collar.
“I arrest you--” he began; but Doctor Brown plucked himself free with
startling promptitude, took a flying leap at the other, tore off his
sham beard, tossing it into the air like one of the wild wisps of the
cloud; then, with one wild kick, sent the easel flying topsy-turvy, and
fled like a hare for the shore. Even at that dazzling instant Paynter
felt that this wild reception was a novelty and almost an anticlimax;
but he had no time for analysis when he and the whole pack had to follow
in the hunt; even Treherne bringing up the rear with a renewed curiosity
and energy.
The fugitive collided with one of the policemen who ran to head him
off, sending him sprawling down the slope; indeed, the fugitive seemed
inspired with the strength of a wild ape. He cleared at a bound the
rampart of flowers, over which Barbara had once leaned to look at her
future lover, and tumbled with blinding speed down the steep path up
which that troubadour had climbed. Racing with the rushing wind they all
streamed across the garden after him, down the path, and finally on to
the seashore by the fisher’s cot, and the pierced crags and caverns the
American had admired when he first landed. The runaway did not, however,
make for the house he had long inhabited, but rather for the pier, as if
with a mind to seize the boat or to swim. Only when he reached the other
end of the small stone jetty did he turn, and show them the pale face
with the spectacles; and they saw that it was still smiling.
“I’m rather glad of this,” said Treherne, with a great sigh. “The man is
mad.”
Nevertheless, the naturalness of the doctor’s voice, when he spoke,
startled them as much as a shriek.
“Gentleman,” he said, “I won’t protract your painful duties by asking
you what you want; but I will ask at once for a small favor, which will
not prejudice those duties in any way. I came down here rather in
a hurry perhaps; but the truth is I thought I was late for an
appointment.” He looked dispassionately at his watch. “I find there is
still some fifteen minutes. Will you wait with me here for that short
time; after which I am quite at your service.”
There was a bewildered silence, and then Paynter said: “For my part, I
feel as if it would really be better to humor him.”
“Ashe,” said the doctor, with a new note of seriousness, “for old
friendship, grant me this last little indulgence. It will make no
difference; I have no arms or means of escape; you can search me if you
like. I know you think you are doing right, and I also know you will do
it as fairly as you can. Well, after all, you get friends to help you;
look at our friend with the beard, or the remains of the beard. Why
shouldn’t I have a friend to help me? A man will be here in a few
minutes in whom I put some confidence; a great authority on these
things. Why not, if only out of curiosity, wait and hear his view of the
case?”
“This seems all moonshine,” said Ashe, “but on the chance of any light
on things--well, from the moon--I don’t mind waiting a quarter of an
hour. Who is this friend, I wonder; some amateur detective, I suppose.”
“I thank you,” said the doctor, with some dignity. “I think you will
trust him when you have talked to him a little. And now,” he added with
an air of amiably relaxing into lighter matters, “let us talk about the
murder.
“This case,” he said in a detached manner, “will be found, I suspect,
to be rather unique. There is a very clear and conclusive combination of
evidence against Thomas Burton Brown, otherwise myself. But there is one
peculiarity about that evidence, which you may perhaps have noticed.
It all comes ultimately from one source, and that a rather unusual one.
Thus, the woodcutter says I had his ax, but what makes him think so? He
says I told him I had his ax; that I told him so again and again. Once
more, Mr. Paynter here pulled up the ax out of the well; but how? I
think Mr. Paynter will testify that I brought him the tackle for fishing
it up, tackle he might never have got in any other way. Curious, is
it not? Again, the ax is found to be wrapped in lint that was in my
possession, according to the fisherman. But who showed the lint to the
fisherman? I did. Who marked it with large letters as mine? I did. Who
wrapped it round the handle at all? I did. Rather a singular thing to
do; has anyone ever explained it?”
His words, which had been heard at first with painful coldness were
beginning to hold more and more of their attention.
“Then there is the well itself,” proceeded the doctor, with the same air
of insane calm. “I suppose some of you by this time know at least the
secret of that. The secret of the well is simply that it is not a well.
It is purposely shaped at the top so as to look like one, but it is
really a sort of chimney opening from the roof of one of those caves
over there; a cave that runs inland just under the wood, and indeed IS
connected by tunnels and secret passages with other openings miles and
miles away. It is a sort of labyrinth used by smugglers and such people
for ages past. This doubtless explains many of those disappearances we
have heard of. But to return to the well that is not a well, in case
some of you still don’t know about it. When the sea rises very high at
certain seasons it fills the low cave, and even rises a little way in
the funnel above, making it look more like a well than ever. The noise
Mr. Paynter heard was the natural eddy of a breaker from outside, and
the whole experience depended on something so elementary as the tide.”
The American was startled into ordinary speech.
“The tide!” he said. “And I never even thought of it! I guess that comes
of living by the Mediterranean.”
“The next step will be obvious enough,” continued the speaker, “to a
logical mind like that of Mr. Ashe, for instance. If it be asked why,
even so, the tide did not wash away the Squire’s remains that had lain
there since his disappearance, there is only one possible answer. The
remains had NOT lain there since his disappearance. The remains had been
deliberately put there in the cavern under the wood, and put there AFTER
Mr. Paynter had made his first investigation. They were put there, in
short, after the sea had retreated and the cave was again dry. That is
why they were dry; of course, much drier than the cave. Who put them
there, I wonder?”
He was gazing gravely through his spectacles over their heads into
vacancy, and suddenly he smiled.
“Ah,” he cried, jumping up from the rock with alacrity, “here is the
amateur detective at last!”
Ashe turned his head over his shoulder, and for a few seconds did not
move it again, but stood as if with a stiff neck. In the cliff just
behind him was one of the clefts or cracks into which it was everywhere
cloven. Advancing from this into the sunshine, as if from a narrow door,
was Squire Vane, with a broad smile on his face.
The wind was tearing from the top of the high cliff out to sea, passing
over their heads, and they had the sensation that everything was passing
over their heads and out of their control. Paynter felt as if his head
had been blown off like a hat. But none of this gale of unreason seemed
to stir a hair on the white head of the Squire, whose bearing, though
self-important and bordering on a swagger, seemed if anything more
comfortable than in the old days. His red face was, however, burnt like
a sailor’s, and his light clothes had a foreign look.
“Well, gentlemen,” he said genially, “so this is the end of the legend
of the peacock trees. Sorry to spoil that delightful traveler’s tale,
Mr. Paynter, but the joke couldn’t be kept up forever. Sorry to put a
stop to your best poem, Mr. Treherne, but I thought all this poetry had
been going a little too far. So Doctor Brown and I fixed up a little
surprise for you. And I must say, without vanity, that you look a little
surprised.”
“What on earth,” asked Ashe at last, “is the meaning of all this?”
The Squire laughed pleasantly, and even a little apologetically,
“I’m afraid I’m fond of practical jokes,” he said, “and this I suppose
is my last grand practical joke. But I want you to understand that the
joke is really practical. I flatter myself it will be of very practical
use to the cause of progress and common sense, and the killing of such
superstitions everywhere. The best part of it, I admit, was the doctor’s
idea and not mine. All I meant to do was to pass a night in the trees,
and then turn up as fresh as paint to tell you what fools you were. But
Doctor Brown here followed me into the wood, and we had a little talk
which rather changed my plans. He told me that a disappearance for a few
hours like that would never knock the nonsense on the head; most people
would never even hear of it, and those who did would say that one night
proved nothing. He showed me a much better way, which had been tried in
several cases where bogus miracles had been shown up. The thing to do
was to get the thing really believed everywhere as a miracle, and then
shown up everywhere as a sham miracle. I can’t put all the arguments as
well as he did, but that was the notion, I think.”
The doctor nodded, gazing silently at the sand; and the Squire resumed
with undiminished relish.
“We agreed that I should drop through the hole into the cave, and make
my way through the tunnels, where I often used to play as a boy, to
the railway station a few miles from here, and there take a train
for London. It was necessary for the joke, of course, that I should
disappear without being traced; so I made my way to a port, and put in
a very pleasant month or two round my old haunts in Cyprus and the
Mediterranean. There’s no more to say of that part of the business,
except that I arranged to be back by a particular time; and here I am.
But I’ve heard enough of what’s gone on round here to be satisfied that
I’ve done the trick. Everybody in Cornwall and most people in South
England have heard of the Vanishing Squire; and thousands of noodles
have been nodding their heads over crystals and tarot cards at this
marvelous proof of an unseen world. I reckon the Reappearing Squire will
scatter their cards and smash their crystals, so that such rubbish won’t
appear again in the twentieth century. I’ll make the peacock trees the
laughing stock of all Europe and America.”
“Well,” said the lawyer, who was the first to rearrange his wits, “I’m
sure we’re all only too delighted to see you again, Squire; and I quite
understand your explanation and your own very natural motives in the
matter. But I’m afraid I haven’t got the hang of everything yet. Granted
that you wanted to vanish, was it necessary to put bogus bones in the
cave, so as nearly to put a halter round the neck of Doctor Brown? And
who put it there? The statement would appear perfectly maniacal; but so
far as I can make head or tail out of anything, Doctor Brown seems to
have put it there himself.”
The doctor lifted his head for the first time.
“Yes; I put the bones there,” he said. “I believe I am the first son of
Adam who ever manufactured all the evidence of a murder charge against
himself.”
It was the Squire’s turn to look astonished. The old gentleman looked
rather wildly from one to the other.
“Bones! Murder charge!” he ejaculated. “What the devil is all this?
Whose bones?”
“Your bones, in a manner of speaking,” delicately conceded the doctor.
“I had to make sure you had really died, and not disappeared by magic.”
The Squire in his turn seemed more hopelessly puzzled than the whole
crowd of his friends had been over his own escapade. “Why not?” he
demanded. “I thought it was the whole point to make it look like magic.
Why did you want me to die so much?”
Doctor Brown had lifted his head; and he now very slowly lifted his
hand. He pointed with outstretched arm at the headland overhanging the
foreshore, just above the entrance to the cave. It was the exact part of
the beach where Paynter had first landed, on that spring morning when
he had looked up in his first fresh wonder at the peacock trees. But the
trees were gone.
The fact itself was no surprise to them; the clearance had naturally
been one of the first of the sweeping changes of the Treherne regime.
But though they knew it well, they had wholly forgotten it; and its
significance returned on them suddenly like a sign in heaven.
“That is the reason,” said the doctor. “I have worked for that for
fourteen years.”
They no longer looked at the bare promontory on which the feathery trees
had once been so familiar a sight; for they had something else to look
at. Anyone seeing the Squire now would have shifted his opinion about
where to find the lunatic in that crowd. It was plain in a flash that
the change had fallen on him like a thunderbolt; that he, at least, had
never had the wildest notion that the tale of the Vanishing Squire had
been but a prelude to that of the vanishing trees. The next half hour
was full of his ravings and expostulations, which gradually died away
into demands for explanation and incoherent questions repeated again
and again. He had practically to be overruled at last, in spite of the
respect in which he was held, before anything like a space and silence
were made in which the doctor could tell his own story. It was perhaps a
singular story, of which he alone had ever had the knowledge; and though
its narration was not uninterrupted, it may be set forth consecutively
in his own words.
“First, I wish it clearly understood that I believe in nothing. I do
not even give the nothing I believe a name; or I should be an atheist.
I have never had inside my head so much as a hint of heaven and hell. I
think it most likely we are worms in the mud; but I happen to be sorry
for the other worms under the wheel. And I happen myself to be a sort
of worm that turns when he can. If I care nothing for piety, I care less
for poetry. I’m not like Ashe here, who is crammed with criminology, but
has all sorts of other culture as well. I know nothing about culture,
except bacteria culture. I sometimes fancy Mr. Ashe is as much an art
critic as Mr. Paynter; only he looks for his heroes, or villains, in
real life. But I am a very practical man; and my stepping stones have
been simply scientific facts. In this village I found a fact--a fever.
I could not classify it; it seemed peculiar to this corner of the coast;
it had singular reactions of delirium and mental breakdown. I studied it
exactly as I should a queer case in the hospital, and corresponded and
compared notes with other men of science. But nobody had even a working
hypothesis about it, except of course the ignorant peasantry, who said
the peacock trees were in some wild way poisonous.
“Well, the peacock trees were poisonous. The peacock trees did produce
the fever. I verified the fact in the plain plodding way required,
comparing all the degrees and details of a vast number of cases;
and there were a shocking number to compare. At the end of it I had
discovered the thing as Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood.
Everybody was the worse for being near the things; those who came
off best were exactly the exceptions that proved the rule, abnormally
healthy and energetic people like the Squire and his daughter. In other
words, the peasants were right. But if I put it that way, somebody will
cry: ‘But do you believe it was supernatural then?’ In fact, that’s what
you’ll all say; and that’s exactly what I complain of. I fancy hundreds
of men have been left dead and diseases left undiscovered, by this
suspicion of superstition, this stupid fear of fear. Unless you see
daylight through the forest of facts from the first, you won’t venture
into the wood at all. Unless we can promise you beforehand that there
shall be what you call a natural explanation, to save your precious
dignity from miracles, you won’t even hear the beginning of the plain
tale. Suppose there isn’t a natural explanation! Suppose there is, and
we never find it! Suppose I haven’t a notion whether there is or not!
What the devil has that to do with you, or with me in dealing with
the facts I do know? My own instinct is to think there is; that if my
researches could be followed far enough it would be found that some
horrible parody of hay fever, some effect analogous to that of pollen,
would explain all the facts. I have never found the explanation. What
I have found are the facts. And the fact is that those trees on the
top there dealt death right and left, as certainly as if they had been
giants, standing on a hill and knocking men down in crowds with a club.
It will be said that now I had only to produce my proofs and have the
nuisance removed. Perhaps I might have convinced the scientific world
finally, when more and more processions of dead men had passed
through the village to the cemetery. But I had not got to convince the
scientific world, but the Lord of the Manor. The Squire will pardon my
saying that it was a very different thing. I tried it once; I lost
my temper, and said things I do not defend; and I left the Squire’s
prejudices rooted anew, like the trees. I was confronted with one
colossal coincidence that was an obstacle to all my aims. One thing made
all my science sound like nonsense. It was the popular legend.
“Squire, if there were a legend of hay fever, you would not believe in
hay fever. If there were a popular story about pollen, you would say
that pollen was only a popular story. I had something against me heavier
and more hopeless than the hostility of the learned; I had the support
of the ignorant. My truth was hopelessly tangled up with a tale that
the educated were resolved to regard as entirely a lie. I never tried to
explain again; on the contrary, I apologized, affected a conversion to
the common-sense view, and watched events. And all the time the lines of
a larger, if more crooked plan, began to get clearer in my mind. I knew
that Miss Vane, whether or no she were married to Mr. Treherne, as I
afterward found she was, was so much under his influence that the first
day of her inheritance would be the last day of the poisonous trees.
But she could not inherit, or even interfere, till the Squire died. It
became simply self-evident, to a rational mind, that the Squire must
die. But wishing to be humane as well as rational, I desired his death
to be temporary.
“Doubtless my scheme was completed by a chapter of accidents, but I was
watching for such accidents. Thus I had a foreshadowing of how the ax
would figure in the tale when it was first flung at the trees; it would
have surprised the woodman to know how near our minds were, and how I
was but laying a more elaborate siege to the towers of pestilence. But
when the Squire spontaneously rushed on what half the countryside would
call certain death, I jumped at my chance. I followed him, and told him
all that he has told you. I don’t suppose he’ll ever forgive me now, but
that shan’t prevent me saying that I admire him hugely for being what
people would call a lunatic and what is really a sportsman. It takes
rather a grand old man to make a joke in the grand style. He came down
so quick from the tree he had climbed that he had no time to pull his
hat off the bough it had caught in.
“At first I found I had made a miscalculation. I thought his
disappearance would be taken as his death, at least after a little time;
but Ashe told me there could be no formalities without a corpse. I
fear I was a little annoyed, but I soon set myself to the duty of
manufacturing a corpse. It’s not hard for a doctor to get a skeleton;
indeed, I had one, but Mr. Paynter’s energy was a day too early for me,
and I only got the bones into the well when he had already found it. His
story gave me another chance, however; I noted where the hole was in the
hat, and made a precisely corresponding hole in the skull. The reason
for creating the other clews may not be so obvious. It may not yet be
altogether apparent to you that I am not a fiend in human form. I could
not substantiate a murder without at least suggesting a murderer, and
I was resolved that if the crime happened to be traced to anybody, it
should be to me. So I’m not surprised you were puzzled about the
purpose of the rag round the ax, because it had no purpose, except to
incriminate the man who put it there. The chase had to end with me, and
when it was closing in at last the joke of it was too much for me, and
I fear I took liberties with the gentleman’s easel and beard. I was the
only person who could risk it, being the only person who could at the
last moment produce the Squire and prove there had been no crime at all.
That, gentlemen, is the true story of the peacock trees; and that
bare crag up there, where the wind is whistling as it would over a
wilderness, is a waste place I have labored to make, as many men have
labored to make a cathedral.
“I don’t think there is any more to say, and yet something moves in
my blood and I will try to say it. Could you not have trusted a little
these peasants whom you already trust so much? These men are men, and
they meant something; even their fathers were not wholly fools. If your
gardener told you of the trees you called him a madman, but he did
not plan and plant your garden like a madman. You would not trust your
woodman about these trees, yet you trusted him with all the others. Have
you ever thought what all the work of the world would be like if the
poor were so senseless as you think them? But no, you stuck to your
rational principle. And your rational principle was that a thing must
be false because thousands of men had found it true; that BECAUSE many
human eyes had seen something it could not be there.”
He looked across at Ashe with a sort of challenge, but though the
sea wind ruffled the old lawyer’s red mane, his Napoleonic mask was
unruffled; it even had a sort of beauty from its new benignity.
“I am too happy just now in thinking how wrong I have been,” he
answered, “to quarrel with you, doctor, about our theories. And yet, in
justice to the Squire as well as myself, I should demur to your sweeping
inference. I respect these peasants, I respect your regard for them; but
their stories are a different matter. I think I would do anything for
them but believe them. Truth and fancy, after all, are mixed in them,
when in the more instructed they are separate; and I doubt if you have
considered what would be involved in taking their word for anything.
Half the ghosts of those who died of fever may be walking by now; and
kind as these people are, I believe they might still burn a witch. No,
doctor, I admit these people have been badly used, I admit they are in
many ways our betters, but I still could not accept anything in their
evidence.”
The doctor bowed gravely and respectfully enough, and then, for the last
time that day, they saw his rather sinister smile.
“Quite so,” he said. “But you would have hanged me on their evidence.”
And, turning his back on them, as if automatically, he set his face
toward the village, where for so many years he had gone his round.