He raced up the broad road, indifferent at that moment whether the eyes of all the policemen in London were upon him. When he reached the street which had swallowed her he could see nothing of the form which had excited him. Then, far ahead, he again saw it passing under a distant lamp-post and merge once more into the darkness. He ran quickly in pursuit.
The girl heard him coming and looked back anxiously. This time he saw her face. In a bound he was at her side.
“Sisily, Sisily!” he cried. “Oh, Sisily, I have found you!”
CHAPTER XXVI
He saw her white face sharply uplifted in the darkness, and caught the startled gleam of her dark eyes. Then she recognized him.
“You!” she breathed. “Oh, Charles, how did you find me?”
“It was chance, Sisily–but no, it was something deeper and stranger than chance.” He spoke in a tone of passionate conviction. “I have been walking London day and night, seeking for you. I felt sure I should find you sooner or later. I had given up hope for tonight, though. It was so late–so late–” The tumult of his feelings checked his utterance.
“I dare not go out earlier,” she whispered.
That was a reminder which brought him back sharply to the reality of things. He looked anxiously around him in the dark and empty street. In the vulgar expression they were both “wanted”–wanted by the police. The danger was doubled now that they were together. That was a freezing thought which had not occurred to him during his search for her. It occurred to him now.
“I wonder where we could go and talk in safety?” he murmured–“and decide what is best to do.”
“We might go to where I am staying,” she unexpectedly suggested. “It is at the end of this street.”
“Would that be quite safe?” he hazarded doubtfully.
“I think so. Mrs. Johns told me that she would be very late to-night. She goes to spiritualistic meetings, and does not return home until early morning sometimes. We should be alone, and free to talk. There is nobody else in the house.”
He was too eager to raise any doubts of the safety of the suggested harbourage. Their conversation, which had been carried on in suppressed and whispered tones, ceased as they advanced along the quiet street. Near the end Sisily turned into the small garden of an unlighted house. She unlocked the hall door, and they entered. He saw her bending over the hallstand, and guessing her intention, struck a match. She took it from him in silence, lit the hall gas, and shut the front door carefully. Then she struck another match from a box on the hallstand, and preceding him into a room on the right, lit the gas there.
It was a small sitting-room, simply and almost shabbily furnished, remarkable for some strange articles which were heaped at random on various small tables. There was a planchette, a tambourine, and other more mysterious appliances which suggested that the inmate spent much time with the trappings and rappings of spiritualism. Papers and journals devoted to spiritualism were scattered about the room, and framed “spirit photographs” hung on the walls.
Charles was not thinking of the interior of the room. His one thought was of Sisily. He had not seen her clearly in the dark street. She appeared to him now unchanged, her dear face as he had last seen it, her features luminous with tender feeling, her dark eyes dwelling gravely on him, just as she used to look. As she stood there, the realization of his haunting dreams, he had to fight down an impulse to take her in his arms. But it was not the moment for that. Because of the graveness of their situation, love had to stand aside.
“Sisily, why did you go away?” he asked at length.
She did not immediately reply, but lowered her glance as though collecting her thoughts. His look fastened with anxious scrutiny on her downcast face. She did not raise her eyes as she answered.
“I had to go, Charles,” was all she said.
“Why did you not tell me, Sisily?” he said in a tone of reproach. “Why did you not let me know, that last day on the cliffs?”
He failed to understand the glance she cast at him as he asked these questions, but it seemed to contain an element of surprise, almost astonishment. Absorbed in his own gloomy thoughts, he went on.
“Do you remember what you told me about your mother’s old nurse, and our memory pictures of her name? I thought you had gone there. So I went to Charleswood to look for you.”
“I did think of going there. I intended to when I left Cornwall,” she hurriedly rejoined. “Then, afterwards, I thought it best not to. I stayed at a private hotel in Euston Road on my first night in London, but did not like it, and next day I went to a boarding-house near Russell Square. I meant to write to Mrs. Pursill from there, telling her my mother was dead. But that night after dinner I heard some of the boarders talking of–the murder, and I knew I couldn’t go to Charleswood–then. I left that place early next morning, and came here. I had been walking about all the morning, not knowing what to do, when I saw the card in this window saying that there was a room to let. Mrs. Johns told me she wanted to let the room more for company than anything else, because she lived alone. I was glad to find it, and grateful to her.”
“You have known all along that the police are looking for you?” he said gravely.
“After I heard them talking at the boarding-house,” rejoined simply. “One of the women had an evening paper, and read it aloud to the others. I knew then, of course. The woman kept looking at me as she read as though she suspected that I was the missing girl. I was very nervous, but tried to pretend that I didn’t notice, and left the room as soon as I dared.” “What about this Mrs. Johns–does she suspect anything?” he asked anxiously.
“Oh, no. She is a very unworldly kind of woman, and thinks of nothing but spiritualism. She never reads newspapers.”
“Do not talk about it,” he said suddenly, as though this picture of her wanderings was too much to be borne. “Why did you go away from Cornwall without a word? You said you had reasons. What were they, Sisily?”
“I will tell you–now.” The soft difference in the tone of the last word was too femininely subtle for him to understand. “That afternoon, when my father was talking to you all in the front room downstairs–do you remember?”
“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently.
“I heard something–I was at the door.”
“It was you, then, and not Thalassa, who looked through the door!” he said, glancing at her curiously.
“I did not mean to listen,” she replied, flushing slightly. “I was going out to the cliffs–to the Moon Rock. I was very unhappy, and wanted to be alone with my thoughts. On my way past the door something my father was saying reached me. It concerned me. I did not take it in at first, or understand what it really meant. As I stood there, wondering, my eyes met my aunt’s through the opening in the door, and I saw her spring to her feet. I hurried away because I did not want to see her. I wanted to think over what I had just heard, to try and understand what it meant.
“I went down to the Moon Rock, and sat there, thinking and thinking. They were so strange and terrible, those words I had overheard, but they were so few that I did not really guess then all that they meant. All I knew was that there was some dreadful secret behind them, some secret of my mother’s which had something to do with me. I wished that I had heard more. As I sat there, wondering what I ought to do, you came–“
“To tell you that I loved you, that I shall love you as long as I live,” he interrupted eagerly.
Again a faint flush rose to her cheeks, but she hurried on: “I could not tell you that I loved you while those dreadful words of my father were ringing in my ears. I wanted to see him first, to question him, to know if I had partly guessed the truth, or if there was any loophole of escape for me. Oh, do not think any worse of me now if I tell you that I loved you then and shall always love you. I wanted to tell you so that day by the Moon Rock, but I knew that I must not.”
“Why not?” His louder voice broke in on her subdued tones impetuously. “You should not have sent me away, Sisily. That was wrong. It has brought much misery upon us both.”
“It was not wrong!” she replied, with unexpected firmness and a momentary hardness of glance, which reminded him of her father’s look. “It was because I was nobody–less than that, if what I thought was true. There was your position to think of. You were to come into the title–my father told me that before.”
“Damn the title!” the young man burst out furiously. “I told you that day I would have nothing to do with it. Why did you think about that?”
“Because I’ve heard of nothing else all my life, I suppose,” she rejoined with the ghost of a smile. “I couldn’t tell you then that I loved you, because of it, and other things. Now, it is different. It does not matter what I say–now.” She spoke these words with an underlying note of deep sadness, and went on: “When you told me that you loved me I saw my duty plainly. I knew I must go away and hide myself from you, from everybody, go somewhere where nobody knew me, where I would never be known. But I wanted to see my father first, to make sure.”
“I understand,” he muttered in a dull voice.
“I thought it all out on the way to the hotel with my aunt. I determined to go back and see my father that night. I felt that I could not sleep until I knew the whole truth. I left the dinner table as soon as I could, and hurried down to the station to catch the half-past seven wagonette to St. Fair.
“I got out of the wagonette at the cross-roads, and walked over the moors. When I reached Flint House I knocked at the door, and Thalassa let me in. I told him I wanted to see my father, and he said he would wait downstairs and take me back across the moors when I came down.
“I ran upstairs and knocked at the door of my father’s study. He did not reply, so I opened the door and went in. He was sitting at his table writing, and when he looked up and saw me he was very angry. ‘You, Sisily!’ he said–‘what has brought you here at this hour?’ I told him I had come to hear the truth from his own lips. I asked him to tell me everything. He gave me one of his black looks, but it did not frighten me–nothing would have frightened me then. He seemed to consider for a moment, and then said that perhaps, after all, it would be better if he told me himself.
“So he told me–told me in half-a-dozen sentences which seemed to burn into my brain. I sat still for a while, almost stunned, I think; then, as the full force of what he had told me came home to my mind, I did something I had never done before. I pleaded with my father–not for my own sake, but for my mother’s. I told him I would go anywhere, do anything, if he would only keep her secret safe. I might as well have pleaded with the rocks. He sat there with a stern face until I went down on my knees to him and begged him to think about it–to keep it secret for a little while at least. He grew angry, very angry, at that. I remember–I shall never be able to forget–his reply. ‘A little while?’ he said, ‘and the claim for the title is to be heard next week. I’m to postpone my claim for the sake of your mother, a —-‘”
Sisily broke off suddenly, her white face flaming scarlet, her eyes widely distended, as though that last terrible scene was again produced before her vision. Charles Turold watched her mutely, with the understanding that nothing he could say would bring comfort to her stricken soul.
She continued after a pause–
“I left him then. I knew that I should never be able to speak to him again. Downstairs, Thalassa was waiting for me. He had a letter in his hand. He looked at me, but did not speak, just opened the door, and we went out across the moors. We went silently. Thalassa was always kind to me, and I think that somehow he understood. It was not until we were nearing the cross-roads that I turned to him and said quickly, ‘Thalassa, you must not tell anybody that I saw my father tonight.’ I wanted to keep it secret, I wanted nobody to know–never. I knew my father would not talk, it was not of sufficient consequence to him. He thought of nothing but the title. Thalassa promised that he wouldn’t. ‘Nobody will ever find out from me, Miss Sisily,’ he said.
“Thalassa went back, across the moors, and I waited by the cross-roads till the wagonette came. When I got back to the hotel I went up to my room and to bed. I do not know what time it was next morning when my aunt came into my room, and told me that my father was dead. She did not tell me much. There had been a terrible accident, she said, and he had been found dead in his room. I did not feel shocked, only … indifferent. I did not even wonder what had happened–not then. Afterwards I overheard one of the maids in the corridor telling another that it was suicide.
“That made no difference to me, except that I wanted more than ever to get away. I formed my plans quickly, to go to London that day, but not by the express. I knew my aunt would not go back that morning after what had happened, but I thought her husband might have to go on business. And the express is always crowded. I did not wish to be seen and brought back. So I decided the slow midday train would be safest for me. I waited for a time, and then I was able to slip away from the hotel without being noticed, while my aunt was out. I got to London that night, feeling lonely and miserable. I knew I had done right, but I could not help thinking … of you.”
She ceased. Charles Turold got up from his seat and took a turn round the room, then came back and stood looking down at her as she sat with her hand resting on the dark polished surface of the table. His first words seemed to convey some inward doubt of the adequacy of the motive for disappearance which her story revealed.
“You should not have gone away like that, Sisily,” he said soberly. “There was no reason, no real reason, I mean. Where was the necessity, after what I told you? Why should your father’s death have made you more anxious to go? It seems to me that you had no reason then.”
She looked at him sadly in her first experience of masculine incomprehension of woman’s exaltation of sacrifice in love, but she did not speak. He continued. “But we must think of what’s to be done.” He walked up and down the room again, considering this question with compressed brows. He stopped, struck by a thought, and looked at her. “The police have been trying to find out from Thalassa whether you went back to Flint House that night, but he will not tell them anything. So they suspect him also.”
She roused at that. “Oh, they must not!” she cried in distress. “Poor Thalassa! He must tell them the truth.”
“The question is–what is the truth?” It flashed through his mind as he spoke that his interrogation was the echo of one put to him by his father before he left Cornwall.
“The truth is, that Thalassa and I left the house together that night before it happened. Oh, cannot they believe that? Cannot it be proved?”
“I could tell them when you left,” he said in a low tone.
“You!” she cried, looking at him with a kind of fear. “How do you know?”
“Because I saw you. I was standing outside, close to the house.”
“Why were you there?” she put in quickly.
He was slower in answering. “I had gone to see your father–about you. I was standing there, thinking … waiting, when the front door opened, and you and Thalassa came out. I was surprised to see you, but it seemed to me an opportunity–a final chance–to speak to you again. I started after you, Sisily, once more to ask you to consider my love for you, but you and Thalassa were swallowed up in the darkness of the moors before I could reach you. I followed with the intention of overtaking you, but I got lost on the moors instead, and was wandering about in the blackness for nearly half an hour before I found my way back to Flint House again.”
“Could you not tell them–the police–that?” she asked, a little wistfully.
“It would be useless,” he solemnly replied.
“What do you mean?” she said breathlessly.
His rejoinder was a long time in coming. When his set lips moved the words were barely audible. “Because I would not be believed. Because I went straight up the path to the house, determined to see your father before it grew later. The front door was open, and the house seemed in complete darkness. I entered, and went upstairs. There was a light in your father’s study. I found your father–dead.” He fixed care-worn eyes upon her. “That story sounds incredible, even to you, doesn’t it? But–“
“Oh!” That startled cry seemed wrung from her involuntarily. Then, swiftly, as if her mind had detached itself to look on her own actions that night through his eyes: “You thought, you believed that I–” She checked herself, but her look completed the thought.
“I did not know what to think, but I did not think–that,” he gloomily rejoined. “Afterwards, the next night, I found out something which made me think–” He paused.
“Yes, yes, tell me what you thought,” she said nervously.
“I thought it was Thalassa.”
She shook her head.
“Who was it then? The latest theory of the police is that I had something to do with it. They’re looking for both of us. They must have found out that I was at Flint House that night. It’s too late to tell them the truth now, not that they were likely to have believed me at any time. Why, my own father believes that I did this thing.” He laughed discordantly. “I tried to convince your father’s lawyer of your innocence, and I might have told him the truth if he had been sympathetic. I don’t know, though,” he added anxiously. “I had to consider your position all along. If my story was disbelieved it only made it worse for you. If it was not Thalassa, who could it have been? Have you any idea–the faintest suspicion?”
Again she shook her head. She made an effort to look at him, but there were tears in her eyes for the first time. His hand was resting on the table, and she touched it gently with her fingers.
“We must find out.” He spoke loudly, as if with the idea that a firm utterance lessened the tremendous difficulty of that performance.
“What can we do?” Her tone was hopeless enough.
“Let me think.” He fiddled with the planchette on the table as though he had some notion of invoking the shade of Robert Turold to answer the question. “Had your father any enemy? Did he fear anybody?”
She raised thoughtful eyes to his in reply.
“My father feared nobody,” she said, “at least, I do not think so. Nobody had any real influence over him except Thalassa.”
“What sort of an influence?”
“It is difficult to describe,” she hesitatingly answered. “Thalassa could take liberties which nobody else would have dared. He used to go into his room at any time. Sometimes I have awakened late at night and heard the murmur of their voices coming from my father’s study.”
“Anything else?” he said, looking at her keenly.
“There was never any question of Thalassa leaving us,” she went on. “Wherever we went, and we were always going to some fresh part of England about the title, Thalassa went also. Perhaps it was because he had known him for so long that my father allowed Thalassa to do things which nobody else could do. Thalassa used to sneer about the title, and say no good would come of it. They had a quarrel once, long, long ago. I was a very little girl at the time, and I can just remember it,” she added dreamily.
She was apparently unconscious of the significance of these revelations, but they made a deep impression upon Charles. There was something expectant and cruel in his face as he listened–the aroused instinct of the hunter. He addressed her–
“This bears out what I have believed all along. Thalassa knows about the murder. He is mixed up in it in some way.”
“Oh, why do you think that?” she exclaimed, clasping her hand in distress.
“Why?” he echoed. “Because your father was not the man to stand insolence from Thalassa or anybody else unless he had to. Thalassa must have had him under his thumb in some way. Why did I not know of this before? It’s clear enough now. Thalassa, even if he did not commit the murder–“
“He did not,” she said quickly. “He left the house with me, so he could not have done it.”
“Then he knows who did. He and your father shared some secret together–some dreadful secret which brought about your father’s death. That is one reason why Thalassa will not speak–because he is implicated in this mystery, whatever it is.”
“No, no. He is keeping silence because of me–I feel sure. I made him promise not to tell.”
Charles Turold shook his head decidedly. “He may have more than one reason for keeping silent,” he said with a swift flash of intuition. “If it is as you say, he is shielding himself as well as you. If your father was killed while Thalassa was out of the house that night, Thalassa knows who did it.”
Her eyes met his in an agony of perplexity and distress. “Oh, no, I cannot think you are right,” she said. “If I could only see Thalassa–for five minutes–“
“What good would that do?” he abruptly demanded.
“He would tell me the truth–if he knew.”
He shook his head incredulously. “You do not know all,” he murmured. He shrank from telling her of the marks on her father’s arm. “I know Thalassa,” she eagerly replied. “He would tell me if he thought it would help me.”
“If you think that I will go down and see him–and get it all out of him.”
“No, no! You must not go,” she cried in affright. “It would not be safe for you.”
“Would it be any more dangerous than hiding in London like a skulking rat?” he bitterly replied. “This cannot go on. We are both in a dangerous position, and might be arrested at any moment. What would happen then? Who would believe my story–or yours? They sound improbable even to ourselves. Here, at least, is a chance of discovering the truth, for I most solemnly believe that Thalassa knows it, or guesses it. What other chance have we of finding out the hideous mystery of that night? I must go, Sisily. I will be careful, for your sake.”
She knew by his voice that he was not to be deterred from the hazardous enterprise, so she did not attempt to dissuade him further. But she clung to him trembling, as though she would have shielded him from the menace of capture. He was thinking rapidly.
“It may be that I shall fail,” he said. “I do not think so, because I shall take every precaution, but the police will be watching for me in Cornwall as well as here. If I fail–if I do not come back … you will understand?”
Her look answered him.
“You had better watch the papers. And be careful on your own account.” He eyed her anxiously. “Do you think you will be safe here till I get back?”
“Yes–I think so,” she murmured sadly.
“Very well. I will go down by to-night’s train–I’ve just time to catch it.” He glanced at his watch with an assumption of cheerfulness. “When you wake up in the morning I shall be in Cornwall.”
“I shall not sleep,” she said, in a miserable broken voice. “I shall lie awake, thinking of you.”
He caught her swiftly in his arms, and kissed her on the lips. “If I find out the truth, nothing shall come between us then, Sisily?”
“No, nothing,” she said.
He turned with a sudden swift movement as though to go, but she still held him.
“Tell Thalassa … that I ask him to tell you the truth, if he knows it….”
She released him then, and stood looking after him as he walked from the room and out of the house.
CHAPTER XXVII
Flint House looked a picture of desolation in the chill grey day, wrapped in such silence that Charles’s cautious knock seemed to reverberate through the stillness around. But the knocking, repeated more loudly, aroused no human response. After waiting awhile the young man pulled the bell. From within the house a cracked and jangling tinkle echoed faintly, and then quivered into silence. He rang again, but there was no sound of foot or voice; no noise but the cries of the gulls overhead and the hoarse beat of the sea at the foot of the cliffs.
A cormorant, sitting on a rock near by, twisted its thin neck to stare fearlessly at the visitor. But Charles Turold was not thinking of cormorants. Where was Thalassa? Where was his wife? He believed they were still in Cornwall, but they might have left the house. He had been in London a long while. Not so long, though–only twelve days. Twelve days! Twelve eternities of unendurable hopelessness and loneliness, such as the damned might know. Was he to fail, now, after finding Sisily? He had a responsibility, a solemn duty. He had reached Cornwall safely from London–run the gauntlet of all the watching eyes of the police–and he would not go back without seeing Thalassa. His mind was thoroughly made up. He would find him, if he had to walk every inch of Cornwall in search of him. And when he found him he would wrest the truth out of him–yes, by God, he would! When he found him, but where was he to be found? The crafty old scoundrel might be in the house at that moment, lurking there like a wolf, perhaps grinning down at him from behind some closed window…. A sudden rage surged over him at that thought, and he fell savagely on the shut door, beating it with insensate fury with his fists. Damn him, he would force his way in!
The cormorant ruffled its greenish feathers and watched him curiously. The faint cries of the gulls overhead seemed borne downward with a note of mocking derision. Charles Turold stepped back from the door with an uneasy look at the cormorant, as though fearing to detect in its unreflecting beadiness of glance some humanly cynical enjoyment at his loss of self-control. The wave of feeling had spent itself. Not thus was victory to be won. He paused to consider, then tried the knocker again. The knocker smote the wood with a hollow sound, like a stroke on the iron door of a vault, loud enough to rouse the dead. Charles Turold had a disagreeable impression of Robert Turold starting up in his grave-clothes at the summons, listening…. But no! The dead man was safe in his grave by this time. He had forgotten that.
A sudden silence fell on the house: a deep and profound stillness, as though seas and wind had hushed their wailing speech to listen for the answer to the knock. The birds, too, were silent. The house remained immutably quiet. Charles Turold bent down, and peered through the keyhole, but could see nothing within but darkness. Then, as he looked, a sound reached his ears, a sound like a thin cackle of laughter from the interior of the house. In the gathering gloom within he had a momentary impression of a stealing greyish shape–a shape which vanished from his vision as he looked.
He rose to his feet, his mind groping blindly for some tangible explanation of this spectral thing, but finding none. A ghost? He shook off that feeling roughly. God knows, that house might well be haunted, but not by a ghost that could laugh, though there was no merriment in that ghastly cackle. The reality of the thing, whatever it was, could not be worse than the sound. Had he really seen anything, after all? Was there some trap about it, some danger to himself? He would have to risk that.
The distant sight of a human figure far away on the wide space of the moors, clambering over the granite slabs of a stile, turned his thoughts to a more perceptible danger. If he could see that man more than half a mile away, his own figure must be apparent over a long distance in that clear brown expanse. Perhaps at that very moment the policeman from the churchtown was prowling about the moors in search of him. His actions at that lonely house were suspicious enough to attract anybody’s attention. That was an act of imprudence which he had no right to commit. He had not evaded the keen eyes of the London police to be trapped like a rat by a rural constable. It was too dangerous for him to remain there. He determined to spend the rest of the day among the cliffs, and return to Flint House when night fell.
He walked away, briskly at first, but with a more laggard step as he plunged into the shelter of the great rocks, for he had had nothing to eat since the night before, and was beginning to be conscious of his weakness. But he strode on, doggedly enough, for more than an hour, until he found himself at a part of the coast he had not seen before–a theatre of black rocks, with dark towering walls, and a hissing sea whitening at the base.
At the foot of these cliffs three jagged conical rocks rose bare and glistening, the spray from the broken sea dashing far up their sides. As Charles stood there, looking down, he saw a man appear from the edge of the furthest one and walk rapidly across the sloping shelf of rock which spanned the narrow bay near the surface of the sea. His heart leapt within him as he took in the figure of the man. It was Thalassa.
As Charles climbed down from the higher cliffs to intercept him, there came to his mind an imperfectly comprehended fragment of conversation which he had overheard, between waking and dozing, in the train that morning. The voices drifted to his dulled hearing from the next compartment, where some men seemed to be discussing somebody of whom they stood in dread, somebody who was forever striding along the cliffs with his eyes fixed on some distant horizon, as though seeking some one. The object of the mysterious being’s quest, if it was a quest, nobody who met him cared to ask. So much he had gathered. He had heard one of the speakers say: “I’ve met un, ever so laate, stalkin’ aloong like th’ devil. Tes aw token o’ a bad conscience. Tes dreadful to think about. I got owt o’ his way…. I’d as soon speak to th’ devil. Iss, aw’d.” Charles had thought nothing of this chatter at the time, but he wondered now if they were talking of Thalassa. Did the local fisherfolk believe that he had something to do with the murder, and shunned him like Ishmael in consequence?
He looked like Ishmael at that moment, crossing that wild place, earnestly scanning every nook of those seamed and riven walls, sometimes glancing stealthily behind him. His preoccupation in this search–if it was a search–was so great that he never once glanced ahead, and he did not see Charles until the young man leaped down the last few paces of his slippery descent and stood plainly forth before him. Thalassa’s brown face did not move a muscle as he looked at him.
“Thalassa,” said Charles sternly, “I have been looking for you.”
Thalassa went on, still scanning the secret places of the towering cliffs as he walked forward with Charles beside him. When the rugged passage was crossed, and the narrow wild bay left behind, he spoke.
“For what?”
“To have the truth out of you, you infernal scoundrel!” cried the young man fiercely, his self-control suddenly vanishing at that indifferent tone. “You know all about the murder of your master; you’re going to tell me, or I’ll throw you off these cliffs into the sea.”
He gripped the other’s arm as he spoke, but Thalassa tore off his fingers, and leapt backward against a rock, a knife in his hand, snarling like a wild beast.
“Keep off!” he cried. “Keep off, or by Christ, I’ll–” He hooked the air with his knife.
Charles eyed him across the space, affected almost to nausea by his evil glance. What a fool he had been to lose his temper! Not in that way was the truth to be reached. The man before him was not to be terrorized or intimidated. Sisily’s way would have been the best. He wondered whether it was too late to attempt it.
“I was hasty, Thalassa,” he said. “Come, do not let us quarrel after I have risked everything to get down here to see you. I have a message for you–from Sisily.”
The face of the man crouching by the rock changed instantly. He made a step forward, as if to speak, then cast a gleaming eye of unbelief at his companion.
“It’s a lie!” he said. “You haven’t seen her.”
“I’m speaking the truth,” Charles earnestly replied. “Do you think I’d have come back to Cornwall otherwise, knowing the police are searching for me?”
“Ay, you know that, do you?” muttered the other. “They’ve been watching Flint House for you. You were a fool to come back here.”
“I’d risk more than that to learn the truth, Thalassa. It’s for Sisily’s sake. I’ve seen her. She’s in London, and I’ve come from her. She gave me this message to bring to you. She said: ‘Tell Thalassa that I ask him to tell the truth–if he knows it.’ The police are looking for her as well as me.”
“I’ve heered so.” With these words, uttered quickly, Thalassa fell into the silence of a man on his guard and pondering. Charles approached nearer.
“Thalassa,” he pleaded, “if you are keeping anything back you must tell me for Sisily’s sake.”
“How do I know you’ve seen her?” retorted Thalassa, darting a dark crafty look at him.
Charles was overwhelmed by a sense of catastrophe. Here was a possibility which had been overlooked. How was he to instil belief that he spoke the truth? A moment passed. Thalassa cast another black look at him, and turned as if to walk away. “I’ll keep my word,” he muttered to himself.
The young man’s quick ear caught the whispered sentence, and saw the way. “I’ll prove it to you,” he said. “You promised Sisily that you’d tell nobody she was at Flint House to see her father on the night he was killed. How could I know that unless I’d seen her?”
“What else?” said Thalassa, facing him with a strange and doubtful glance.
“You let her in,” Charles rapidly continued, “and you waited downstairs for her. Afterwards you took her back across the moors to catch the wagonette. It was on the way, near the cross-roads, that Sisily made you promise not to tell anybody that she’d been there that night.”
“Suppose it’s true–what then?” Thalassa’s voice was edged with the craftiest caution. “She’s sent you to me to ask for the truth, say you. ‘Twould have been safer not. What else is there to say, when she’s told you everything?” He cast a look of savage jealousy at the young man.
“Much.” Charles spoke rapidly, but his glance was despairing. “What happened while you were away from the house? What sent your wife mad? What did you find when you returned? You know these things, Thalassa.”
“Happen I did, what good’d come of telling them?”
“To save Sisily.”
“They’d not help to save her.”
“Do you think she shot her father?”
Thalassa gave him another dark look, but remained silent.
“You know she didn’t, you hound!” cried Charles, anger flaring up in him again. “It was you–it must have been you. Listen to me! I know almost enough to hang you. I was in the house while you were away, and found your master lying dead in his study, and the key of the door in the passage outside. Who could have dropped it there except you?”
“‘Tweren’t me. ‘Twas done afore I got back to the house,” answered Thalassa.
“What time was it when you left the house with Sisily?”
“Agone half-past eight: perhaps ten minutes after. She came running downstairs, her eyes staring and blazing. ‘Thalassa, dear Thalassa, for pity’s sake let me out,’ she said half-sobbing. ‘Oh, what did I come for? He’s wicked–wicked.’ Twasn’t for me to say anything between father and daughter, so I just opened the door without a word, and went out with her.”
“What time did Sisily catch the wagonette?”
“That’s what I don’t know. She made me go back when we got to the cross-roads. She knew as well as I did that the old fool who drives it wasn’t particular as to time, and she worried about my old woman getting scairt if she found herself alone, and me out. ‘Go back to her, Thalassa,’ she said, ‘I shall be all right now.’ That was just after she’d made me promise to tell nobody that she’d been to see her father that night. And, by God, I kept my word. Nobody got anything out of me, though they tried hard enough. Well, when she sent me back I went, leaving her standing, for I had my own reason for going. When I looked back after a bit I saw her standing there by the light of the dirty little lamp above the cross-roads.”
“Did you see the wagonette on the road?”
“Not a sign of it. Just her–alone.”
A faint hope died in Charles’s breast. Even the drunken irregularity of a Cornish cabman told against Sisily. But that point was not so immediately important as Thalassa’s story that the murder had been committed during his absence from Flint House. Although his own experience supported that supposition, Charles was reluctant to accept a theory which plunged the events of that night into deeper mystery than ever.
“Well, go on,” he said. “What did you find when you got back?”
“The house was dark and the door open. The wind was coming in from the sea sharp enough to take your head off your shoulders, and I thought perhaps I’d jammed the door without closing it, and it had blowed open with the wind. But when I got inside I heered something like moaning. I thought that might be the wind too, for it’s for ever screeching up and down the passages like a devil, specially o’ nights. I–” He stopped suddenly, with a cautious sidelong look at his listener.
“Yes, yes!” cried Charles. “And what then?”
Thalassa went on, but a little moodily.
“I went along to the kitchen and found the old woman lying on the floor, in a kind of fit or faint, making the queer noise I’d just heered. When I picked her up she opened her eyes, laughing and crying and making mouths as she pointed to the ceiling. I could get nothing out of her for a while. Then she mutters something about a crash upstairs, and goes off into another fit. I carried her into her bedroom and went upstairs as fast as my legs would take me. There was a light under his door, but he didn’t answer when I knocked. I tried to open it, but it was locked inside. In a bit there was a knock downstairs. You know what happened after that.” He lapsed into silence again, with another look at the young man.
“That was when my aunt and her husband and Dr. Ravenshaw came to the door?” said Charles, filling in the pause. “But how was it that you told them that you feared something had happened to your master? Was that pure guesswork on your part? You hadn’t been in the room, you say.”
“I had to tell them something, hadn’t I?” retorted the other sullenly. “If I hadn’t told them that, it would a’ all come out about me going out with Miss Sisily, and not into the coal cellar, as I said.”
“It is astonishing that your story should have been so near the truth when you knew nothing of what had taken place.”
“I did know something. The door was open, the house dark, and she in a fit on the floor, saying there’d been a crash upstairs. Then his door was locked, and I couldn’t get an answer. Wasn’t that enough?”
“Hardly enough to warrant your saying that you feared your master had been murdered–unless you expected him to be murdered.”
“I didn’t say that,” replied Thalassa with unusual quickness. “All I said was that I was afeered something had happened to him. There was reason for thinking that. I had to make up my story quick–that part about just going for Dr. Ravenshaw. That was because I’d still got my hat and topcoat on, just as I’d come in from the moors, and I wasn’t going to break my promise to Miss Sisily.”
“Did you see the blood under the door when you went up and tried to get in?”
“I’ve told you all there is to tell,” was the dogged response.
“What frightened your wife so much? Do you think she saw the murderer?”
“That’s what I would like to know,” responded Thalassa, with a swift cunning glance.
He turned his face away and looked across the sea, the brown outline of his hooked profile more than ever like an effigy carved by savage hands. Charles scanned him despairingly. The feeling was strong within him that he was still keeping something back.
“Thalassa,” he said, “you should have told this story before. You have done wrong in keeping it back.”
“‘Twould a’ been breaking of my word to Miss Sisily.”
“It was of more importance to clear her. You could have done that if you had come forward and told the police, as you’ve just told me, that she left the house with you before nine o’clock on that night.”
“‘Twouldn’t a’ helped if I had. I found out next day that the wagonette didn’t get to the cross-roads that night till nearly ten o’clock. ‘Twas after half-past nine when it left the inn.”
“What made you find out that?”
“Do you think I didn’t put my wits to work when the damned detective was trying to put me into it as well as her? I thought it all out then–about telling the truth. But I saw ‘twould a’ been no good for her, but only made matters worse. Who’d a’ believed me? There be times when a man can say too much, so I kept my mouth shut.”
There was so much sense in this that Charles had nothing to say in reply. In silence they tramped along till they reached the dip of the sea in which the Moon Rock lay. Here they paused, as if with the mutual feeling that the time had come for the interview to end. Behind them towered the cliffs, with Flint House hanging crazily on the summit far above where they stood. The eye of Charles ranged along the shore to the spot where he had said good-bye to Sisily not so very long ago, then returned to rest doubtingly on Thalassa. The old man stood with his hand resting on a giant rock, his dark eyes fixed on the rim of the waste of grey water where a weak declining sun hung irresolutely, as though fearing the inevitable plunge.
“I’d a’ given my right arm to have saved her from this,” Charles heard him mutter.
Charles found himself looking down at Thalassa’s brown muscular arm, corded with veins, stretched out on the rock by which he stood. It was as though it had been bared for his inspection, which was not, indeed, the case. If that arm could save Sisily, it was at her service. But what was the good of that? What was the good of his own efforts to help her? Charles had a suffocating feeling of the futility of human effort when opposed by the malignity of Fate. He asked himself with aching heart what was to be the outcome of it all? He had failed. What then? It was not until that moment that he realized how strongly he had been buoyed up by the false optimism of hope. His consciousness, as though directed by the power of a devil, was forced to look for the first time upon the hideous inevitability of the appointed end.
“No, no! Not that–not that,” he shudderingly whispered to himself.
Neither moved. The minutes passed leaden-footed. It was silent and still in that wild spot, as if theirs were the only two human hearts beating in a dead world. It seemed as though neither could bring it upon himself to terminate the interview. Charles was the first to break the silence. He spoke like a man coming out of a dream.
“Did that clock upstairs keep good time?” he asked in a low voice.
Thalassa turned on him as if not understanding the purport of the question.
“It was going shipshape and Bristol fashion in the afternoon. What’s that got to do with it? What does it signify if it was five minutes fast or slow?”
The logic of the answer was apparent to Charles, who knew he was only attempting to pluck something by chance out of the dark maze. But another and shrewder idea started up in his mind.
“What was your reason for hurrying back across the moors that night?”
“Miss Sisily told me to go.”
“But you had another reason–a reason of your own,” said Charles, turning quickly to regard him. “You said so yourself.”
“If I had I’ve forgotten what it was,” said Thalassa with a black look.
“You cannot have forgotten!” cried Charles. “What was it?” Hope sprang up in his heart again like a warm flame as he detected something confused and irresolute in the other’s attitude. “Thalassa, you are keeping something back. You know, or you guess, who the murderer is!”
“I’m keeping nothing back.”
“You are. I can see it in your face. What is it that you will not tell? What do you fear?”
“The gallows–for one thing.”
“You’d sooner see Sisily lose her life on them?”
This bitter taunt, wrung from the depth of the young man’s anguished heart, had an instantaneous and unexpected effect on his companion.
“No, no!” he hoarsely cried, “I couldn’t a’ bear that. But it’s nothing to tell, nothing to help. It was earlier that night, before she came. I was looking out of the kitchen window, when I thought I saw a rock move. Then I looked again, and it seemed like a man–though I couldn’t see his face.”
“Is that all?” Bitter disappointment rang in Charles’s voice. “That might have been me. I was out on the rocks that night, close to Flint House.”
“‘Tweren’t you.” Thalassa’s reply was so low as to be almost inaudible. “I don’t know who it was, but I’ll take my Bible oath it weren’t you.”
“Who was it then?” Charles asked breathlessly.
“A dead man, or his spirit. I know that now, though I laughed when _he_ said it. I know better now.”
He stopped suddenly, like one who has said too much, and looked moodily out to sea.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Never mind what I mean. It’s nothing to do with you. A man’s a fool when he gets talking. The tongue trips you up.”
“Thalassa,” said Charles solemnly, “if you know anything which might throw the remotest light on this mystery it is your duty to reveal it.”
“It’s easy to talk. But I swore–I swore I would never tell.”
“This is the moment to forget your oath.”
“It’s fine to talk–for you. But he’d come back to haunt me, if he knew.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the distant churchyard where Robert Turold lay.
Charles looked at his grim and secret face in despair. “I hope you realize what you are doing by keeping silence,” he said.
“I’m keeping a still tongue in my head, for one thing.”
“For one thing–yes. For another, you’re injuring Sisily–you’re doing more than injure her. You’re letting her remain under suspicion of her father’s death, in hiding in London, hunted by the police. Yet she believed in you. It was she who sent me to you, it was she who said: ‘Tell Thalassa from me to tell the truth, if he knows it.’ Is she mistaken in you, Thalassa? Do you think more of your own skin than her safety?”
CHAPTER XXVIII
It was a strange story which Charles Turold heard by that grey Cornish sea–a story touched with the glitter of adventurous fortune in the sombre setting of a trachytic island, where wine-dark breakers beat monotonously on a black beach of volcanic sand strewn with driftwood, kelp, dead shells, and the squirming forms of blindworms tossed up from the bowels of a dead sea. It was there in the spell of solitude thirty years before that Robert Turold’s soul had yielded to temptation at the beck of his monstrous ambition.
That, however, was the end–or what Robert Turold imagined to be the end–of the story. The listener was first invited to contemplate a scene in human progress when men gathered from the four corners of the earth and underwent incredible hardships of hunger, thirst, disease, lived like beasts and died like vermin for the sake of precious stones in the earth. Thalassa brought up before the young man’s eyes a vivid picture of an African diamond rush of that period–a corrugated iron settlement of one straggling street, knee-deep in sand, swarming with vermin and scorpions, almost waterless, crowded with a mongrel, ever-increasing lot of needy adventurers brought from all parts of the world by reports of diamonds which could be picked out with a penknife from the dunes and sandy shingle which formed the background of the villainous “town.” In the great waves and ridges of sand which stretched everywhere as far as the eye could reach, runaway scoundrels of every shade of colour wormed on their bellies with the terrible pertinacity of ants, sweating and groping in that choking dust for the glittering crystals so rarely found.
Thalassa had been infected by the diamond fever like so many more. Like other young men he wanted plenty of money for women and grog–what else, he asked, could a man get for money that was worth having? In those days he was a sailor before the mast, lacking the capital for such delights. So he deserted his timber tramp when she touched at Port Elizabeth, and set out for the diamond fields with another runaway–the ship’s cook, who had an ambition to have his meals cooked for him for the rest of his life, instead of cooking meals for other people.
The fields were far to the north. Thalassa reached them after a terrible journey through the stony veldt and sandy desert, broken by barren hills. His companion died of the hardships, and was buried in the desert which stretched to the wandering course of the Orange River. Thalassa secured his license and went “prospecting.”
“Dost a’ know anything about diamonds–digging for them?” he broke off to ask.
Charles Turold shook his head.
Thalassa lapsed into silence for some moments, his eyes fixed on the sea hissing among the black wet rocks at his feet, then said–
“A man’s a fool most of his days, but sometimes he can be such a fool that the memory ‘ll come up to mock him when he lays dying. Here was I, deserting my ship and throwing away a year’s wages and a’most my life to get to these damned fields, thinking to pick up diamonds cut and glittering like I’d seen them in London shops, when as soon as I’d clapped eyes on the first diamond I saw dug up I knew that I’d left behind me at the other end of the world as many rough diamonds as there was in the whole of that dustbin of a place–diamonds that didn’t have to be dug for, either, only I didn’t know them when I saw them.”
His narrowed eye gleamed craftily, a mere pin’s point of expression in the direction of Charles, as though expecting a question. But Charles kept silence, so he went on with his story. He let it be understood that his luck on the fields was of the worst possible description–never a solitary stone came his way. But he had no heart for digging. He was always thinking of the diamonds in that remote spot which he had ignorantly let slip from his grasp, like the dog in the fable dropping the substance for the shadow. He would have gone back to look for them, but he’d spent most of his little capital in that wild-goose chase, and the miserable remnant oozed away like water in a place where the barest necessaries of life cost fabulous prices. Soon he became stranded, practically penniless.
It was this precarious moment of his fortunes which his star (his evil star, he insisted on that) selected to bring him into juxtaposition with the man whose life was to be inexorably mingled with his own from that time henceforward. The actual meeting place was a tin-roofed grog shanty kept by a giant Kaffir woman and a sore-eyed degenerate white man, whose subjection to his black paramour had earned for him among the blacks on the field the terrible sobriquet of “White Harry.” Here, one night, Thalassa sat drinking bad beer and planning impossible schemes for returning to his diamonds at the other end of the world. The place was empty of other customers. The Kaffir woman slumbered behind the flimsy planking of the bar, and “White Harry” sat on the counter scraping tunes out of a little fiddle. Thalassa remembered the tune he was playing–“Annie Laurie.” Upon this scene there entered two young men, Englishmen. Thalassa discerned that at once by the cut of their jib. Besides, they ordered Bass beer. Who else but Englishmen would order Bass beer at five shillings a bottle in a God-forsaken place like that?
“_He_ was one of them.” Thalassa moved his hand vaguely in the direction of St. Fair churchyard. “Smart and lively he was then–not like what he was afore he died. I took a fancy to him as soon as I set my eyes on him. He was a man in those days, and I knowed a man when I saw ‘un. I didn’t care so much for the looks of the other ‘un–Remington was his name, as I heered afterwards. Well enough for some tastes, but too much of the God Almighty Englishman about him to suit me. A handsome chap he was, this Remington, I’m bound to say–young and slim, wi’ a pink face like a girl’s, not a hair on it, and lookin’ as though he might a’ turned out of a bandbox. Him–Turold–had a moustache, and his face was a dark ‘un, but I liked him for all his black looks–though not so black in those days, either. More eager like.”
Charles Turold found himself trying to picture Robert Turold in the part of a smart lively young fellow, and failing utterly. But Time took the smartness out of a man in less than thirty years. It had also taken the liveliness out of Robert Turold for good and all.
Thalassa went on with his story. The young men were served with their beer at five shillings a bottle, and sat down in a corner to drink it. They talked as they sipped, and Thalassa listened. His original idea that they were young men of wealth (because of the Bass) was soon dispersed by the trend of their conversation. They had gone out from England to make their fortunes on the fields, but had come a cropper like himself, and were discussing what they’d do next. The fair-haired one, Remington, was all for getting back to England while they had any money left, but Turold was dead against it. There were plenty of diamonds to be found, and he was going to have some of them. He’d been talking to a man who was just back from the interior with a story of a river beach full of diamonds, and he was fitting up an expedition to go back and get them. Turold wanted to join in, but Remington said he’d heard too many stories of diamonds to be picked up for the asking. Had he forgotten about the cursed Jew who got a hundred pounds out of them? Turold said this was different–the man had brought back a little bottleful of diamonds. Remington replied with a sneer about “salting.” They argued. “Suppose we dropped the last of our money?” Remington asked. “No worse than crawling back to England like whipped curs, poorer than we set out,” said the other. Remington said he didn’t want to go back to England like that, but he’d sooner face it than run the risk of being stranded in that hell of a place. Turold answered he was not going back till he’d made a fortune. He said (Thalassa remembered his exact words): “I don’t care how I do it, Remington, but I will do it–mark my words.” “Show me a more sensible plan than this, and I’m with you,” Remington had replied.
It was at this stage that Thalassa was seized with an inclination to thrust himself into the dialogue. Striving to explain his reasons at that distance of time, he said it was Robert Turold’s last remark which really decided him–did the trick, as he phrased it. Actually it must have been a prompt recognition of the kinship between two lawless souls.
He left his seat and went across to where the two young Englishmen were earnestly talking, unaware that they had been overheard. He approached them as one shipwrecked sailor might approach two other castaways marooned on the same rock. They all wanted money, and they all wanted to get away from that God-forsaken hole. Diamonds they were after? Well, he could take them to a place at the other end of the world where there were enough diamonds in the rough to make them all rich for life.
After the first surprise at his interruption they heard him in silence, and then plied him with questions. Where were these diamonds? In a volcanic island in the South Pacific. Where about? They couldn’t expect him to tell them that. It was Robert Turold (Thalassa seemed to have addressed himself principally to him) who asked him how he knew that the diamonds were still there. Thalassa’s reply was that they were buried in a big box, and the island was out of the run of ships. What sort of a big box? Turold had asked. Thalassa replied (perhaps reluctantly) that the box was “a kind of a coffin,” and that there was a dead man inside of it as well as the diamonds, but he, at all events, was not likely to run off with them.
Remington and Turold were startled by this answer, and conferred hastily apart. They returned to ask more questions. They wanted to know how the body and the diamonds had got there in the first instance, but that was a story which Thalassa refused to reveal. That had nothing to do with it, he said. The ship which had buried the man there had gone down afterwards with all hands, so nobody knew about the diamonds except him.
After that Remington became the chief questioner, Robert Turold merely looking on, his dark eyes frequently meeting Thalassa’s. It seemed as though he must have realized that these last replies concealed a story better left unprobed. But Remington wanted to know why Thalassa had come searching for diamonds in that part of the world when he knew of plenty in another, and Thalassa had replied, in all simplicity, that it was because the Almighty had endowed him with more muscles than brains, and he hadn’t recognized the worth of the stones at the time. In fact, he didn’t know that they were diamonds. His experience on the fields had improved his knowledge in that respect, and he now knew that he had left behind him on the lonely island enough diamonds in the rough to make them all rich–two bottlesful, and some in a leather bag, where the dead man also kept one of those digging licenses which the damned German officials sold you–what did they call it? Prospector’s license–a _schurfschein_? said Remington. Yes, that was it. He knew it again as soon as he got one on the fields.
Turold and Remington again talked together in whispers, and then Turold asked Thalassa how he proposed to get the diamonds. Thalassa had his plan ready. They must get down to the Cape and get a boat to Sydney from Capetown. That was the jumping-off place. From Sydney they were to take a boat to–another place. The island was a bare two days’ sail from the “other place,” and Thalassa proposed to hire a cutter on the mainland and sail over to it. He was no navigator, but he could find his way back to that island again at any time.
Turold seemed inclined to agree, but Remington put in another of his sharp questions. Why did he want to bring two strangers into the business? What was to prevent him getting the diamonds on his own account, without sharing with anybody? Thalassa replied that he had no money to finance the expedition, and even if he got the diamonds they’d be no use to him. How could a rough seaman like himself, who could hardly write his own name, turn the stones into the large sum of money they represented? That was an enterprise which called for civilized qualities of education and address which he did not possess. From his standpoint it was an even deal between them. They were to supply the money and intelligence in return for his knowledge, and they would share and share alike.
It was Robert Turold who ultimately settled the decision–winning over the reluctant Remington with words which Thalassa had never forgotten. He also recognized the risk, but he thought it was well worth taking. It seemed that the two had a little more than L200 left between them–just about enough to carry the thing through. What was the use of returning to England with that paltry sum, he had asked. He spoke of a girl–some girl who was waiting in England for Remington while he made his fortune abroad. Was he going to go back to her penniless? “Even if this doesn’t turn out right,” he went on, “we’ll have reached another part of the world, with a fresh chance of making money, instead of being poor in England, that breeding-ground for tame rabbits, where poverty is the unforgiveable sin.” “I liked him for those words,” said Thalassa, “for they came from a man whose thoughts were after the style of my own. ‘Twas they decided the other chap, and next morning we set out for Capetown. From there we got passages in a cargo boat for Sydney.”
Charles found it easier to visualize this picture than the former. The departure of the three upon such a wild romantic venture had in its elements all the audacity, greed, and splendour of youth, and he also was young.
Thalassa went on with his story.
During the voyage to Sydney, Robert Turold used to talk to him on deck at nights after Remington had gone to his bunk. It was in these solitary deck tramps under glittering stars that Thalassa first heard from the other’s lips of the Turrald title: the title for which the fortune he was seeking was merely a stepping stone–the means to obtain it. “Night after night he talked of nothing else,” said Thalassa, “and I knew he would do what he wanted to do.” It was easy to gather from his story that his original admiration for Robert Turold soon grew into a deeper and stronger feeling. There was something in the dead man’s masterful ambitious character which exercised a reluctantly conceded but undoubted fascination upon his companion’s fierce spirit.
Such were their relations when they reached Sydney and set out on a further voyage to the other place which Thalassa was so reluctant to name. On arriving at the “other place” they made their way to its east coast, which was the starting point of their journey to the island. From a brown man living on the coast Thalassa hired a smart little ketch which the three of them could easily handle, and in this they embarked for the island from a beach which curved like a white tusk around a blue bay.
They did not reach the island for six days–through baffling winds, and not because they did not steer a right course. As Thalassa had said, there was no difficulty in finding it, for they had only been one day at sea when the smouldering smoke of the distant volcanic cone came into vision, making an unholy mark against the clear sky which they never lost again. Gradually they beat nearer until they made it–a circular ragged high ridge jutting abruptly from a deep sullen sea, with a red glow showing fitfully in the smoke of the summit.
There was an outer reef, but Thalassa knew the passage, and steered the ketch through a tortuous channel above sunken needle-pointed rocks to a little sheltered harbour inshore. Here they made the ketch fast, and landed on a beach of volcanic violet, where they sometimes sank knee deep into sulphuric water, and felt squirming sea things squelch beneath their tread. Above this margin of violet-black sand, deposits of volcanic rock and lava rose almost perpendicularly, enclosing the central cone in a kind of amphitheatre.
The stones they had travelled so far to obtain were there waiting for them. Thalassa hurried over that part of the story, narrating it in barest outline with suspicious glances directed at his listener’s intent face. Apparently he led his companions to the spot as soon as they landed–up a path through a gap in the crater wall, across a furrowed slope all a-quake, where jets of steam issued from gurgling fissures in snaky spirals. On the other side of this dreary waste Thalassa led the way across a ledge to firmer ground and a grave. Charles gathered that the occupant of the grave had been coffined in a seaman’s chest in his clothes: “There he was, with his bottles of diamonds in his coat pockets, and more in his leather bag in his breast pocket, just as I left him twelve months afore to go to the other end of the world looking for what I’d buried.” A grim smile curved Thalassa’s face as he uttered these words; the idea seemed to contain elements of humour for him.
“They were diamonds, then?” said Charles curiously.
“Ay; they were diamonds right enough. Him–Turold–said they were diamonds as soon as he uncorked one of the bottles and poured a few into the palm of his hand. There was some rare big ones in one of the bottles–enough to have brought all those fools tumbling out of Africa if they’d know of them. From some papers they found on the chap Turold said he’d must a-been prospecting in nigh every part of the world.”
“How did he come to be buried there with his diamonds, in that lonely spot?” asked Charles wonderingly.
“He was a passenger, and died as we was passing the island. ‘Twas the skipper’s fancy to give him a land burial. But that doesn’t matter a dump–it’s outside the story.” He turned his eyes away from Charles.
Dusk had fallen before they finished their search, and Thalassa would not undertake the risk of threading the boat out from the tortuous reef passage in the darkness. They decided to camp on the island for the night, preferring the sulphur-impregnated air (“A lighted match would blaze and fizzle in it like a torch,” Thalassa declared) to the cramped discomfort of their little craft. They brought some food ashore, and made a flimsy sort of camp above high water, at the foot of the encircling walls of the crater. There they had their supper, and there, as they lounged smoking, Remington in an evil moment for himself suggested that they should sort the diamonds into three heaps–share and share alike. Robert Turold agreed, and they emptied the stones out of the bottles and leather bag into a single heap. Remington took one bottle and Robert Turold another; to Thalassa fell the empty bag. As the stones were sorted one was to be placed in each receptacle until the tally ran out.
It must have been a strange spectacle–so strange that it made a lasting impression on the least imaginative mind of the three, for he tried in his rude way to reproduce it on that Cornish beach after the lapse of thirty long years. He threw bits of rock on the sand to indicate the positions in which they had sat. From his description Charles pictured the scene adequately enough: the violet-black beach, exhaling sulphuric vapours, the yellow-grey volcanic rocks, the gurgling ebullitions of a geyser throwing off volumes of smoke high above them, and the faces of the three men (ruddy in the fire-glow, white in the moonlight) intent on the division of the heap of dull stones scattered on a flat rock between them. Thalassa remembered all these things; he remembered also how startled they were, the three of them, at the unexpected sound of a kind of throaty chuckle near by, and turned in affright to see a large bird regarding them from the shadow of the rocks–a sea bird with rounded wings, light-coloured plumage, and curiously staring eyes above a yellow beak. When it saw it was observed it vanished swiftly seaward in noiseless flight.
The division, commenced good-humouredly enough, soon developed the elements of a gamble between Robert Turold and Remington. They forgot Thalassa’s existence as they argued and disputed over the allotment of certain stones. The foot or so of flat rock became the circumference of their thoughts, ambitions, and passions–their world for the time being. In that sordid drama of greed Thalassa seemed to have comported himself with greater dignity than his two superiors by birth and education. He even took it upon himself to reason with them on their folly. Perhaps he knew from his own seamy experience of life what such things developed into. At all events, he urged his companions to defer the division until they returned to civilization and could get the spoils appraised by eyes expert in the knowledge of precious stones. But they would not listen, so, not liking the look of things, he withdrew a little distance off and watched them, leaning against a rock. That was his tacit admission (so Charles interpreted this action) that he was on Robert Turold’s side, and felt that his own interests were identical with those of the master mind. The two, left to themselves, wrangled more fiercely than ever. There were unpleasant taunts and mutual revilings. The listener by the rock learnt definitely what he had previously suspected–that there was bitter blood and bad feeling between the two men, buried for a time, but now revived with a savageness which revealed the hollowness of their supposed reconciliation. It was about a girl, some girl in England with whom they had both been in love. Thalassa gathered that Remington had left England as the favoured suitor. He had (in Thalassa’s words) “cut Turold out.”
Charles Turold could not forbear a faint exclamation of astonishment. His brain reeled in trying to imagine the austere figure of Robert Turold squabbling over a girl and some diamonds on a lonely island in the South Pacific. He was too amazed at the moment to see the implications of this part of the story.
“They went on snarling and showing their teeth, but not biting,” continued Thalassa, “sorting out the little stones all right, but quarrelling over the bigger. There was two–the biggest in the bunch by far–which they kept putting aside because they couldn’t agree about the sharing of them. At last it came about that there was only these two big ‘uns left, lying like two beans on the bit o’ rock, side by side. Before I could guess what was likely to happen Turold grabbed them up quick, and put them in his bottle. ‘These two are mine, Thalassa’s and mine,’ he said. ‘You’ve had your share, Remington.’ Remington sprang from the rock quick as a snake. ‘One’s mine,’ he said. But Turold was up as quick. ‘It’s not for you,’ he says, with his dark smile. ‘We’ll put it against the girl you filched from me, and call it an even deal. What does a happy lover want with diamonds?’ ‘Damn you!’ cries the other, and hit him in the face. They both went down, scuffling and panting in the sand. I stood where I was, for I weren’t going to come between them till I saw how it was going to be. Presently I could see that Remington was stronger, and that Turold was getting the worst of it. After a bit Turold called out, ‘Thalassa!’
“I ran down at that fast enough, and got out my knife as I went. They’d slipped down the sloping beach half-way to the sea, writhing like a couple of the blind-worms that I kept stepping on, going over and over so quick that I couldn’t do anything at first. But one of them was sobbing in his breath as though he was pretty well finished, and I guessed it was Turold. Then I saw Remington’s face on top, and before they could swing round again I got a good stroke in his neck where it gleamed white in the moonlight. The blood jumped out warm on my hand, and he rolled over so quick that I thought I had killed him. But as I stooped over him he was up like a flash, staggering up the steep beach, his feet plopping and sucking in the water underneath. Turold was on his feet by that time, breathing hard, getting back his breath. ‘After him–quick!’ he says to me, his face black with rage–‘he’s got the diamonds.’
“I ran after him up the beach, but he heard me coming and had the start of me. He had firm ground under him by then, and was tearing along the rocks towards the path I’d taken them that afternoon, turning round now and again to look back, the blood glistening in the moonlight on his white face. There we was–him going higher and higher, me after him, and Turold standing below on the beach, staring up at the two of us.
“Run my best, I couldn’t get near him. I suppose he thought he was done for if I caught him, and by that time my blood was pretty well up. I had one pull over him–I knew the island, and he didn’t. The path he was taking led to the top of the island, where the crater was, with a kind of wall of rocks round it. But before you came to that there was a great hole which fell down God Almighty knows how deep, and was supposed to have been another volcano at some time or other. This hole was divided into two by a narrow ridge running right across it, and the path Remington was on took him straight to the edge. So he’d either got to go across this ridge when he come to it or turn back and be caught.
“He was a long way ahead when he come to it, but he never stopped. He just gave one glance down at me, and went on to the ridge. I watched him balancing along it like a man on a tight rope, mounting higher and higher, for the ridge went up steep on the far side. Thinks I to myself, ‘You’re a plucky one,’ then all of a sudden I heard a shout from below, and looked down. There stood Turold, waving me out of the way. He’d been to the boat for a gun we’d brought with us, and was taking aim at Remington. The next thing I saw was Remington turning round on the ledge to come back to my side, having found out, I suppose, that the ridge would take him into the crater. Just as he turned I heard the shot. It must have winged Remington pretty bad, because he went tumbling off the ridge head first, like a man taking a dive into the water. I turned and climbed down to where I’d left Turold. His face was all aglow with rage. ‘The infernal scoundrel!’ he said, then–‘Did you get the diamonds?’ ‘How was I to get them when I never caught him?’ I said. ‘Then we’ll get them off his body in the morning,’ he said in a low tone. ‘You’ll never do that,’ says I. He asks me why not, turning on me a face as savage as a dog’s. ‘Because whichever side he’s dropped he’s safe from us,’ I said. ‘There’s a hole that no man’s ever seen the bottom of on one side of the ridge, and on the other a stinking lake of green boiling sulphur. When you shot him you sent him into one or the other, so you can say good-bye to him and the diamonds.’ ‘Oh!’ he cries, when he heard that–just like that; then after a bit he points up the path, and asks me to go back and have a look for him. I went back as far as the ridge. The moon was clear as day, shining on that infernal green lake on the one side, and into the deep hole on the other. The lake was bubbling and stewing in the moonlight like a witchpot, and the other side of the ridge was just black emptiness, and there was no sign of Remington–I knowed there couldn’t be. Back I went again, and as I was climbing down the path to where Turold was standing I saw something glinting in the black sand at his feet, and when I got there I picked up the bottle of diamonds where Remington must have dropped them when struggling with Turold. I gave them to Turold. ‘And now,’ says I, ‘let’s get out of here. The moon’s bright enough to let me find my way through the reefs, and this island ain’t a healthy place to stay too long on. I know it, and you don’t.’ He was glad enough to follow me to the boat, and we got through on a good flowing tide.”
Thalassa stopped abruptly, as though to leave on his listener’s mind an impression of that furtive departure on a dark whispering sea beneath a blood-red moon.
“You got back to the mainland?” queried Charles, as he remained silent.
“Ay–and to England. Afore we got there Turold had persuaded himself that Remington slipped off the ridge accidental, and that he missed him when he fired.”
“Perhaps his conscience pricked him. Go on.”
“There’s nowt much more to tell. Turold got me my share of the money, and then we parted. He offered to invest it for me, but I wasn’t going to trust no banks–not I. It took me two years to waste it on gambling and women. Then I took to sea again. That lasted another year. Then I found myself in ‘Frisco, where I shipped in a four-masted barque and come home round the Horn. I was pretty sick of the sea after two bad goes of rheumatic fever, so I made up my mind to hunt up Turold. I found him after a while. He didn’t seem best pleased to see me at first, but he said I could stay till he had time to think out what he could do for me. That was the beginning of it. We never parted again, him and me, until he was carried out of yon house feet first. We got used to each other’s ways, and I was worth all he paid me because I saved him worry and expense. He was all for saving, in those days. Married he was too, to a little timid thing of a girl who was in fear and trembling of him. ‘Twas a black day for her when she married that headstrong stubborn devil. ‘Mr.’ Thalassa she always called me, poor woman. I married a maid-servant they had. That was Turold’s idea–he thought by that way he could get his household looked after very cheaply by the pair of us. I wasn’t keen on marrying, but it didn’t make much odds one way or the other, for no living woman, wife or no wife, would have kept me in England if I’d wanted to get out. As it happened, I never did. I stayed on, going from place to place where they went–where Turold took us.”
“Whom did my uncle marry?” asked Charles.
“You might a’ guessed that. ‘Twas the girl t’other had cut him out of. I thought the masterful devil’d get her when Remington was out of the way, but I asked him once straight out, and he said yes, it was the same girl. She was a pretty timid little thing in those days, but I don’t know why they was both so mad after her. However, there it was.”
“And do you think that after all these years, Remington is really alive?” said Charles, looking at him earnestly. “Do you think it was he who murdered my uncle?”
“Happen maybe, happen not. The night he was killed I found him in a rare funk in his room. He rang his bell like a fury, and when I went up he swore he heard the footsteps of Remington just afore, running round the rocks outside of Flint House just as he heard him pattering along the rocks on the island that night. I didn’t believe ‘un then, but I’m not so sure since. If he’s come back to get Turold it’s for sure he’s still somewhere about, waiting his chance to get me as well. I’m keeping my eye open for ‘un–walked the coast for miles, I have, looking for him. He won’t take me unawares, same as Turold.” His eyes searched the cliffs behind them.
“You may not recognize him if you meet him. It is thirty years since you saw him. A man changes a lot in thirty years.”
“That’s true, ’tis a thought which never crossed my mind.” Thalassa’s look was troubled.
“As you’ve told me this story you’d better leave it in my hands, and not go looking for anybody with that knife of yours.”
“What be you going to do?”
“I must go to Scotland Yard and tell them your story. It’s the only chance.”
“And get me into trouble?”
“There’s not much fear of that. In any case, you must stand that, for Sisily’s sake.”
Thalassa nodded his acquiescence. “Better be careful yersel’ getting back to London. The police here is watching for you. They’ve been a’ Flint House more than once, looking for both of you.”
“It’s a risk I must take, nevertheless,” said the young man, rising from his seat as he spoke. “It’s for Sisily’s sake. Good-bye, Thalassa, and thank you for what you’ve told me.”
Thalassa did not reply or offer to accompany him. From his seat on the rocks he followed Charles’s ascent up the narrow path with contemplative eyes.
CHAPTER XXIX
Barrant returned to London in the mental disposition of a man who sees an elaborate theory thrown into the melting-pot by an unexpected turn of events. The humbling thought was that he had allowed a second fish to glide through his hands without even suspecting that it was on his line. He had never remotely connected Charles Turold with the murder until Mr. Brimsdown had imparted Mrs. Brierly’s disclosure to him. He had acted promptly enough on that piece of information, but once again he was too late.
Austin Turold might have felt reassured if he had known how little his share in the events of that night occupied Barrant’s mind during their last interview. The complexion Austin’s conduct bore to the detective’s reflection was that of a father who had intentionally misled the power of authority in order to shield his son. The law took a serious view of that offense, but it was a matter which could be dealt with at leisure in Austin’s case. By his brother’s death Austin Turold had become a man of property and standing. It was the drawback of his wealth that he could not disappear like his son. He was to be found when wanted. The main thing just then was to catch the son, or the girl–or both. Barrant went back to London for that purpose.
As the days slipped away without that end being achieved he became worried and perplexed. His own position was an unenviable one, and his thoughts were far from pleasant. He felt that he had failed badly, and that his standing with his superiors in Scotland Yard was under a cloud in consequence. But he could not see where he had actually been at fault. It was such a damned amazing case. In most crimes the trouble was to find sufficient clues, but in this case there were too many. And the inferences pointed different ways. That was the trouble. He was not even sure that in this latest discovery, so annoyingly belated, he had reached the ultimate solution of the facts. It was not that the theory of these two young people committing murder for love was too cynical for belief. He had encountered more incredible things than that in his professional career. Life was a cynical business, and youth could be brutal in pursuit of its aims, especially when the aim was passion, as it usually was. In his experience youth and age were the dangerous periods–youth, because it knew nothing of life, and age because it knew too much. There were fewer surprises in middle-age. That was the period of responsibility–when humanity clung to the ordered way with the painful rectitude of a procession of laden ants toiling up a hill. Youth was not like that–nor age.
No, it was not that. His difficulty was to fit all the circumstances into any compact theory of the case. Try as he would, there were always some loose ends left over, some elements of uncertainty which left him perplexed. He fashioned a new view of the murder, with Charles Turold as the principal figure in it–the actual murderer. He assumed that Charles and Sisily had gone to Flint House that night to prevent the truth about Sisily’s birth becoming known. The assertion of her illegitimacy rested upon her father’s bare statement, but his lawyer was convinced he would not have made the statement without having the proofs in his possession. These proofs had not been found. Very well. What inference was to be drawn from that? Sisily knew that they were kept in the clock-case, and pointed out the hiding place to her lover. In a struggle for their possession Robert Turold was shot down, or he might have been shot first and staggered to the clock afterwards to see if they had been stolen. Either supposition accounted for the fallen clock, and fitted in with nearly all the known facts of the murder.
Nearly all, but not all! In face of Mrs. Brierly’s disclosure it seemed a condition precedent to the elucidation of the mystery to substitute Charles Turold for Thalassa as the person whose undisciplined love for Sisily had led him to shoot her father to shield her name. Nor was it incredible to suppose that he had remained in Cornwall to cover her flight in the hope of diverting suspicion from her. But the loose end in the theory was Thalassa’s share in that night’s events, and his dogged silence since under strong suspicion.
Thalassa knew more than he had yet revealed, but what did he know? What was his share in the business? It was difficult to say. Barrant was unable to accept the assumption that three people were concerned in the murder. That idea, if not impossible, was at least contrary to reason. But if it was excluded, how was the silence of Thalassa to be explained? Was he afraid? It was as difficult to associate that quality with him as with an eagle or beast of prey.
And the theory failed to explain the reason for Robert Turold’s frantic letter to his lawyer on the night of the murder. That was another loose end.
What a case! It was an abnormal and sinister mystery in any light, with no absolute or demonstrative certainty of proof by any of its circumstances, however regarded. The effect of its perplexing clues distorted the imagination, outraged the sense of possibility and experience. To reach conclusiveness in it seemed as impossible as an attempt to scale an unending staircase in a nightmare. The facts were there, but they were inexplicable, or at least they stared at him with the aspect of many faces.
As he weighed these doubts he found his thoughts reverting with increasing frequency to the hood clock in Robert Turold’s study and the question of its connection with the crime. He pondered over the point with the nervous anxiety of a puzzled brain, and it seemed to him now that he had not devoted as much investigation to this peculiar clue as it deserved. He recalled Mr. Brimsdown’s conversation on the matter. He remembered that he had been struck at the time by the penetration of his remarks about the clock, and while not accepting his fantastic theory, had determined to give more careful thought to the point. But Mrs. Brierly’s disclosure put the idea out of his head.
It recurred to him with renewed force when he found himself in Exeter nearly a fortnight later on another case. It was a good opportunity to go on to Cornwall, and he took it. His business completed, he caught the early train, and in due time arrived at Penzance. With an obscure instinct for solitude he hastened through the town and struck out across the moors.
The afternoon was waning when he reached Flint House and pulled the old-fashioned bell-handle of the weatherbeaten door. There was no reply, and a second ring passed disregarded. That was disconcerting and unexpected. He wondered whether Thalassa and his wife had left the place. Then he noticed that the door was merely closed and not shut. He lifted the heavy iron knocker, and knocked loudly. The repeated knocking sent the door flying open, and Barrant found himself looking into an empty hall. Half-way down a pair of curtains stirred slightly and parted suddenly, revealing a narrower passage which led to the door of the kitchen. The curtains streamed horizontally, twisting and coiling like snakes. Barrant stepped quickly inside and closed the door. The curtains fell together again.
There was something so startling in this action of the wind that Barrant stood motionless, looking round him. The cold current of air he had admitted died away in the draughty passages with queer gasping noises, like a wind strangled. Then there was the most absolute silence. The curtains hung perpendicular, as thickly motionless as blankets. Barrant noticed that the hallstand and a chair beside it were thick with dust. Evidently the house was empty.
Turning first to make quite sure that the front door was securely shut, he took his way upstairs to Robert Turold’s study.
A point of light, falling through the shattered panel of the closed door, pierced the vague gloom of the passage and hovered on the door of the bedroom opposite–the room into which the dead man had been carried.
Barrant entered the study and looked around him. It was intolerably dirty and neglected; everything was covered with a thick grey dust. Barrant walked over to the clock and regarded it attentively.
What a rascally fat face that moon had! It must have seen some queer sights in old houses during its two hundred years of life. Strange that those old clockmakers could make clocks to last so long, but couldn’t keep their own life-springs running half the time! The moral verse was curious enough. Why should a man who spent half his lifetime putting together a clock presume to tell his fellow creatures to make the most of the passing hour?
His reflections took a more practical turn. The clock was the sole witness to the time of the murder. There were two other clocks in Flint House, but nobody had thought of looking at them when the crime was discovered. Barrant regarded that as a regrettable oversight. It was always important to know the exact time when a murder was committed. Thalassa said that the hood clock was going and kept excellent time, but the value of that secondary testimony was impaired by the fact that Thalassa might not be telling the truth. On the other hand, there was certain presumptive evidence which suggested that he was. It was a proved fact that Mr. and Mrs. Pendleton and Dr. Ravenshaw left the doctor’s house in a motor-car for Flint House not later than half-past nine on the night of the murder. Assuming that they covered the journey across the moors in five or six minutes and occupied another five minutes in getting upstairs and breaking in the door, the testimony of the hood clock seemed correct, because Dr. Ravenshaw said death had just taken place, and he and the doctor who made the post-mortem examination were both agreed that Robert Turold could not have lived many minutes after he was shot. Therefore the presumptive evidence seemed to determine the time of death accurately enough.
But that was only a minor phase of the mystery. The real problem was the hidden connection between the clock and the murder. What had brought the clock down, and why had Robert Turold fallen almost on top of it, his outstretched hands resting on the dial? The complete elucidation of the mystery lay behind the obscurity in which these two points were shrouded. To find the answer to them was the surest and quickest way of reconciling all the contradictory facts of the case. But Barrant racked his brains for the reason in vain.
He examined the room. There was a leather-topped writing-table with drawers, several cabinets filled with manuscripts and papers, some walnut chairs with carved legs, and a tall deep bookcase filled with dreary-looking books. His eyes wandered over the titles of the volumes. They also belonged to a bygone period–a melancholy accumulation of works as dead as their writers. Two whole shelves were occupied with the numbers of a forgotten periodical which claimed to give “ample details of the unhappy difference between Queen Caroline of Great Britain and her consort George the Fourth.” Barrant wondered idly why human nature was always so interested in the washing of dirty linen. Above these was ranged a row of published sermons. Barrant’s eye roamed higher and fell on a fat sturdy volume wedged in between some slimmer books. The title of this book was “Clocks of All Periods.” Clocks!
He reached for the volume and placed it on the table. A cursory glance through the pages conveyed the suggestion that it contained more information about clocks than was worth acquiring or writing down. There was a chapter on water clocks, to begin with: “Known to the Egyptians and the Holy Land.” Barrant turned the leaves. “The Ancient Chinese used a smouldering wick as timekeeper.” Barrant shook his head impatiently. “King Alfred’s supposed device of measuring Time by Candles–a Myth.” Would to heaven his invention of juries was a myth, too. Scotland Yard would get on much better without them. “A Lamp-clock was another Simple and Ingenious Design.” How intolerably long-winded the writer was. What had he to say about hood clocks? “Very few of the Early Clocks had Dials. The Device was generally a Mechanical Figure which struck the Hour on a Bell.” Evidently the forerunner of the devilish alarum clock. “Early clockmakers–Old English monks as Clockmakers.” The pages flowed rapidly through Barrant’s fingers. “Introduction of Minute Hand Marks–Period of Clocks Showing Tides–Longfaced Clocks.” Ah, here it was at last–“Hood Clocks.”
He began to read the chapter with interest, but as he was about to turn the first page the silence of the room was broken by a faint cackling laugh–an elfin sound which died away instantly. He looked up, startled. His surprise was not lessened at the sight of Mrs. Thalassa watching him from the open doorway. She entered on tiptoe, with a strange air of caution, examining him with restless eyes.
“I heard you,” she mumbled. “I saw you go upstairs. Mr. Thalassa was out, and I was afraid to go to the door. I’ve been playing patience, and it won’t come out.”
She showed her apron full of small cards. She placed them on the table, and arranged them in rows.
A new idea came into Barrant’s mind as he looked at her. If the poor creature had recovered sufficient wits to take to her cards again she might be coaxed to recall what she had seen on the night of the murder. He drew near her. “Can I help you?” he said.
She nodded sideways at him like a child–a child with withered face and grey hair.
Together they bent over the cards. A gull flashed past the window with a scream, as though it had seen them and was repelled at the strange sight.
“Only kings can go into vacant spaces,” murmured Barrant’s companion, intent on the game.
The result of the game was inconclusive. A king remained surrounded by small cards, like a real monarch overwhelmed by the rabble on May Day. Mrs. Thalassa’s eyes strayed mournfully over the rows, then she gathered up the cards and shuffled them again.
“Do you know any other games of patience?” Barrant asked.
She shook her head.
“Then this is the game you were playing on that night?”
“What night?” she whispered.
“The night Mr. Turold was killed.”
“I don’t want to think of that–it frightens me.”
She remembered, then! Her face went grey, but her eyes were alert, watching his.
“Listen to me”–he spoke very gently–“I want to help you get rid of your fear and terror, but to do so I must talk to you about that night. Do you understand?”
The kindness in his voice seemed to reach her feeble consciousness, and she looked at him earnestly.
“Will you try and recollect?”
She seemed to search his eyes for courage, and gave a trembling nod.
“What time was it when you heard the crash upstairs? Think well.”
She seemed to make an effort to remember. “I don’t know,” she said at last.
“Think again. You were playing patience–the game you have just shown me?”
Her eyes turned to the cards on the table. “Yes,” she said.
“What time did you commence–can you think?”
She shook her head. “I seem to remember it was half-past eight by the kitchen clock when I started my last game. I was alone in the kitchen then. The game was just coming out when I heard a crash–“
She broke off suddenly with a painful sigh and a frightened glance at the hood clock on the wall.
“One game!” Barrant glanced at his watch with, an air of mistrust. “You mean two, don’t you?”
Her eyes returned to his. She shook her head with a rapid tremulous motion. “No!” she exclaimed excitedly. “One, only one!”
Barrant cast another glance at his watch, which he Still held in his hand. “You are quite sure you did not play two?” he persisted, with a puzzled glance.
“No, no–one!” She sprang to her feet excitedly.
“Very well–one,” acquiesced Barrant soothingly. “One. Go on.”
But his effort to calm her came too late. She cast a wild and fearful glance at the wall behind her, as if there was something there which frightened her.
“How it rings–how it rings!” Her indistinct utterance grew louder. “Yes, Jasper, I hear. Yes, sir, I’m coming. Where’s the supper tray?”
“Don’t be afraid, Mrs. Thalassa,” said Barrant, approaching her, but she backed hurriedly away towards the door.
“Coming with the supper tray–coming with the supper tray…. What’s that? Ah-h-h-h-h!”
Her disjointed mutterings ended in a shrill scream which went ringing through the stillness and seemed to linger in the room after she had disappeared. Barrant heard her muttering and laughing as she descended the stairs.
The sounds died away into a silence so absolute as to suggest the impression of a universe suddenly stricken dumb. Barrant crossed the room to the window, where he stood looking out, deep in thought.
What was the meaning of it all–of this latest scene in particular? The game of patience so tempestuously concluded had occupied half-an-hour. He had noted the time. Yet Mrs. Thalassa insisted she had played only one game after half-past eight on the night of the murder. If he dared accept such a computation of time an unimagined possibility in the case stood revealed. But–a demented woman. “A parable in the mouth of a fool.” Perhaps it was because she was a fool that he had stumbled on this revelation. She lacked the wit to lie about it.
If so–
His eyes, straying incuriously over the outstretched panorama of sea and cliffs beneath the window, fell upon a man’s outline scaling the cliff path near the Moon Rock. Disturbed in his meditations, Barrant watched the climber. He reached the top and appeared in full view on the bare summit of the cliffs. Barrant stared down upon him, amazed beyond measure. The advancing figure was Charles Turold.
CHAPTER XXX
Barrant hastened from the room downstairs to the front door. From the open doorway he saw Charles Turold advancing across the rocks in the direction of the house, and he ran swiftly down the gravel path to intercept him.
Charles looked up and came on as if there was nothing to turn back for. His clear glance dwelt on the figure by the gate without fear–with seeming gratification. Barrant was amazed. He had been prepared for an attempt at flight, but not this welcoming look. Never before had he known a man show joy at the prospect of arrest. The experience was so disturbing that he went across the intervening space to meet Charles, and laid a hand upon his arm.
“I suppose you know you are wanted by the police?” he said.
“I am aware of it,” was the quiet reply. “I was going to give myself up.”
“Did you come back to Cornwall for that purpose?” asked the detective, shooting another puzzled glance at him.
“I came back to try and discover the truth.”
“About what?”
“About my uncle’s death.”
“And have you discovered it?”
“I have.”
Barrant did not understand the young man’s attitude, or the tone of heartfelt relief in which he uttered these words, but he felt that the conversation in its present form had gone far enough.
“Do you propose to tell me the truth?” he asked, with a slight cynical emphasis on the last word.
“I do.”
Barrant’s surprise kept him silent for a moment, but when he spoke he was very incisive–
“In that case it is my duty to warn you–“
“There is no need to warn me,” Charles quickly interrupted. “I know. Any statement I make will be taken down and used against me. That’s the formula, isn’t it, or something to that effect? Let us go into the house–my story will take some time in the telling.”
He made this request as a right rather than a favour, and Barrant found himself turning in at the gate with him. In silence they walked to the house, and it was Charles Turold who led the way to the sitting-room.
“It was here it began,” he murmured, glancing round the deserted apartment, “and it seems fitting that the truth should be brought to light in the same place.”
“Provided that it is the truth,” commented his companion.
Charles did not reply. They had been standing face to face, but he now drew a chair to the table and sat down. Barrant walked to the door and locked it before seating himself beside him.
“You can begin as soon as you like,” he said.
“I think I had better tell you about my own actions, first of all, on that night,” said Charles, after a brief silence. “It will clear the way for what follows. I was up here that night–the night of the murder.”
“I know that much,” was Barrant’s cold comment.
“You suspected it–you did not know it,” Charles quickly rejoined.
He remained profoundly silent for a moment, as if meditating his words, and then plunged into his tale.
The account of his own visit to Flint House on the night of the murder he related with details withheld from Sisily. The visit was the outcome of a quarrel between father and son over Robert Turold’s announcement about his wife’s previous marriage. Charles was shocked by his uncle’s decision to make the story public, and had wandered about the cliffs until dark trying to decide what to do. Ultimately he returned home and asked his father to use his influence with his brother to keep the secret in the family. His father called him a fool for suggesting such a thing, declined to offend his brother or blast his own prospects by such damned quixotic nonsense. On this Charles had announced his intention of seeing his uncle and telling him he would leave England immediately and forever unless the scandal was kept quiet. That made his father angry, and they quarrelled violently. Charles cut the quarrel short by flinging out of the house in the rain, to carry out his intention of interviewing his uncle. He walked across the moors to Flint House. The front door was open, the downstairs portion of the house in darkness, and his uncle lying upstairs in his study–dead.
He hurried over all this as of small importance in the deeper significance of Thalassa’s story. That was to him the great thing–the wonderful discovery which was to clear Sisily and put everything right. He believed that the plan which had brought him to Cornwall was working splendidly. The chance encounter with the detective was really providential–a speeding up, a saving of valuable time.
The possibility of disbelief did not dawn upon him. He overlooked that his listener was also his custodian and judge–the suspicious arbiter of a belated story told by one whose own actions were in the highest degree suspicious. His overburdened mind forgot these things in the excitement of hope. He talked with the candour and freedom of one young man confiding in another. When he had finished he looked at his companion expectantly, but Barrant’s eyes were coldly official.
“A strange story!” he said.
“A true one,” Charles eagerly rejoined. “Thalassa has been walking along the coast ever since in the expectation of finding this man. He will kill him if he meets him.”
It was Barrant’s lot to listen to many strange stories which were always true, according to the narrators, but generally they caused him to feel ashamed of the poverty of human invention. He was not immediately concerned to discover whether Thalassa’s story was true or false, or whether it had been concocted between him and Charles with the object of deceiving the authorities. The consideration of that infamous brownfaced scoundrel’s confession could be postponed–if it had ever been made. The present business was with Charles Turold. There was something infernally mysterious in his unexpected reappearance in that spot. He had gone to London when he disappeared–he admitted that. What had brought him back? To see Thalassa, as he said, in order to try and get at the truth? Nonsense! He–Barrant–was not simple enough to believe that. What then?
Barrant was not prepared to supply a ready answer to that question. But his trained ear had detected many gaps in the young man’s own narrative which, filled in, might give it. Turold knew more than he had said–he was keeping things back. Again–what things? Behind him stood the shadowy figure of the girl and her unexplained flight. Barrant’s instinct told him that Charles was shielding her. He turned to the task of endeavouring to reach the truth.
“Let’s go back a bit,” he said casually. “You’ve left one or two points in your own story unexplained. What about the key?”
“The key?” Charles started slightly. You mean–“
“I mean the key of the room upstairs. You said you found the key in the passage outside. You must have locked the door after you and taken it away with you.”
“I did,” replied the young man, in some hesitation.
“For what reason?”
Charles realized that he was on very thin ice. In his intense preoccupation with Thalassa’s story he had forgotten that his own impulsive actions on that night must be construed as proof of his own guilt or bear too literal interpretation of having been done to shield Sisily. He saw that he was in a position of extraordinary difficulty.
“I was hardly conscious of what I was doing, at the time,” he said.
“You took the key away with you?”
Charles nodded with the feeling that the ice was cracking beneath him.
“And how did it get back into the room afterwards?”
Charles paused to consider his reply, but the detective supplied it.