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