“Well, Harry, my boy, and what’s the latest news from Venice?”
Harry Lorian stretched his long legs and lay back in his chair.
“I had a letter from the governor this morning, Colonel. He appears to be filling his portfolio with studies of windows and doorways and stair-rails and the other domestic necessities dear to his architectural soul!”
Colonel Reynor laughed in his short, gruff way, as my friend, Lorian, gazing sleepily about the quaint old hall in which we sat, but always bringing his gaze to one point—a certain door—blew rings of smoke straightly upward.
“I suppose,” said our host, the Colonel, “most of the material will be used for the forthcoming book?”
“I suppose so,” drawled Lorian, glancing for the twentieth time at the yet vacant doorway by the stair-foot. “The idea of architects and artists and other constitutionally languid people, having to write books, fills my soul with black horror.”
“He had a glorious time with our old panelling, Harry,” laughed the Colonel, waving his cigar vaguely toward the panelled walls and nooks which gradually were receding into the twilight.
“Yes,” said my friend. “He was here quite an unconscionable time—even for an old school chum of the proprietor. I hope you counted the spoons when he left!”
Lorian’s disrespectful references to Sir Julius, his father, were characteristic; for he reverences that famous artist with the double love of a son and a pupil.
“Of course we did,” chuckled Reynor. “Nothing missing, my boy!”
“That’s funny,” drawled Lorian. “Because if he didn’t steal it from here I can’t imagine from where he stole it!”
“Stole what, Harry?”
“Whatever some chap broke into his studio for last night!”
“Eh!” cried the Colonel, sitting suddenly very upright. “Into your father’s studio? Burglars?”
“Suppose so,” was the reply. “They took nothing that I was aware to be in his possession, though the place was ransacked. I naturally concluded that they had taken something that I wasunawareto be in his——Ah!”
Sybil Reynor entered by the door which, for the past twenty minutes, had been the focus of Lorian’s gaze. The gathering dusk precluded the possibility of my seeing with certainty, but I think her face flushed as her dark eyes rested upon my friend. Her beauty is not of the kind which needs deceptive half-lights to perfect it, but there in the dimness, as she came towards us, she looked very lovely and divinely graceful. I did not envy Lorian his good fortune; but I suppressed a sigh when I saw how my existence had escaped the girl’s notice and how the world in her eyes, contained only a Henry Lorian, R.I.
Her mother entered shortly afterwards and a general conversation arose, which continued until the arrival of Ralph Edie and his sister. They were accompanied by Felix Hulme; and their advent completed the small party expected at Ragstaff Park.
“You late arrivals,” said Lorian, “have only just time to dress, unless you want to miss everything but the nuts!”
“Oh, Harry!” said Mrs. Reynor, “you are as bad as your father!”
“Worse,” said Lorian promptly. “I am altogether more rude and have a bigger appetite!”
With such seeming trivialities, then, opened the drama of Ragstaff, the drama in which Fate had cast four of us for leading rôles.
Following dinner, the men—or, as my friend has it, “the gunners”—drifted into the hall. The hall at Ragstaff Park is fitted as a smoking lounge. It dates back to Tudor days and affords some magnificent examples of mediæval panelling. At every point the eye meets the device of a man with a ragged staff—from which the place derives its name, and which is the crest of the Reynors.
A conversation took place to which, at the time, I attached small importance, but which, later, assumed a certain significance.
“Extraordinary business,” said Felix Hulme—“that attempted burglary at Sir Julius’s studio last night.”
“Yes,” replied Lorian. “Who told you?”
Hulme appeared to be confused by the abrupt question.
“Oh,” he replied, “I heard of it from Baxter, who has the next studio, you know.”
“When did you see Baxter?” asked Lorian casually.
“This morning.”
“I suppose,” said Colonel Reynor to my friend, “a number of your father’s drawings are there?”
“Yes,” answered Lorian slowly; “but the more valuable ones I have at my own studio, including those intended for use in his book.”
Something in his tone caused me to glance hard at him.
“You don’t think they were the burglar’s objective?” I suggested.
“Hardly,” was the reply. “They would be worthless to a thief.”
“First I’ve heard of this attempt, Lorian,” said Edie. “Anything missing?”
“No. The thing is an utter mystery. There were some odds and ends lying about which no ordinary burglar could very well have overlooked.”
“If any loss had been sustained,” said theColonel, half jestingly, “I should have put it down to the Riddle!”
“Don’t quite follow you. Colonel,” remarked Edie. “What riddle?”
“The family Riddle of the Ragstaffs,” explained Lorian. “You’ve seen it—over there by the staircase.”
“Oh!” exclaimed the other, “you mean that inscription on the panel—which means nothing in particular? Yes, I have examined it several times. But why should it affect the fortunes of Sir Julius?”
“You see,” was the Colonel’s reply, “we have a tradition in the family, Edie, that the Riddle brings us luck, but brings misfortune to anyone else who has it in his possession. It’s never been copied before; but I let Lorian—Sir Julius—make a drawing of it for his forthcoming book on Decorative Wood-carving. I don’t know,” he added smilingly, “if the mysterious influence follows the copy or only appertains to the original.”
“Let us have another look at it,” said Edie. “It has acquired a new interest!”
The whole party of us passed idly across the hall to the foot of the great staircase. From thedirection of the drawing-room proceeded the softly played strains of theDuettofromCavalleria. I knew Sybil Reynor was the player, and I saw Lorian glance impatiently in the direction of the door. Hulme detected the glance, too, and an expression rested momentarily upon his handsome face which I found myself at a loss to define.
“You see,” said the Colonel, holding a candle close to the time-blackened panel, “it is a meaningless piece of mediæval doggerel roughly carved in the wood. The oak-leaf border is very fine, so your father tells me, Harry”—to Lorian—“but it is probably the work of another hand, as is the man and ragged staff which form the shield at the top.”
“Has it ever occurred to you,” asked Hulme, “that the writing might be of a very much later date—late Stuart, for instance?”
“No,” replied the Colonel abruptly, and turned away. “I am sure it is earlier than that.”
I was not the only member of the party who noticed the curt tone of his reply; and when we had all retired for the night I lingered in Lorian’s room and reverted to the matter.
“Is the late Stuart period a sore point with the Colonel?” I asked.
Lorian, who was in an unusually thoughtful mood, lighted his pipe and nodded.
“It is said,” he explained, “that a Reynor at about that time turned buccaneer and became the terror of the two Atlantics! I don’t know what possessed Hulme to say such a thing. Probably he doesn’t know about the piratical page in the family records, however. He’s a strange chap.”
“He is,” I agreed. “Everybody seems to know him, yet nobody knows anythingabouthim. I first met him at the Travellers’ Club. I was unaware, until I came down here this time, that the Colonel was one of his friends.”
“Edie brought him down first,” replied Lorian. “But I think Hulme had met Sybil—Miss Reynor—in London, before. I may be a silly ass, but somehow I distrust the chap—always have. He seems to know altogether too much about other people’s affairs.”
I mentally added that he also took too great an interest in a certain young lady to suit Lorian’s taste. We chatted upon various matters—principally upon the manners, customs, and manifold beauties of Sybil Reynor—until myfriend’s pipe went out. Then I bade him good night and went to my own room.
With that abruptness characteristic of the coast and season, a high wind had sprung up since the party had separated. Now a continuous booming filled the night, telling how the wrath of the North Atlantic spent itself upon the western rocks.
To a town-dweller, more used to the vaguely soothing hum of the metropolis, this grander music of the elements was a poor sedative. Sleep evaded me, tired though I was, and I presently found myself drifting into that uncomfortable frame of mind between dreaming and waking, wherein one’s brain becomes a torturing parrot-house, filled with some meaningless reiteration.
“The riddle of the ragged staff—the riddle of the ragged staff,” was the phrase that danced maddeningly through my brain. It got to that pass with me, familiar enough to victims of insomnia, when the words began to go to a sort of monotonous melody.
Thereupon, I determined to light a candle and read for a while, in the hope of inducing slumber.
The old clock down in the hall proclaimed the half-hour. I glanced at my watch. It was half-past one. The moaning of the wind and the wild song of the sea continued unceasingly.
Then I dropped my paper—and listened.
Amid the mighty sounds which raged about Ragstaff Park it was one slight enough which had attracted my attention. But in the elemental music there was a sameness which rendered it, after a time, negligible. Indeed, I think sleep was not far off when this new sound detached itself from the old—like the solo from its accompaniment.
Something had fallen, crashingly, within the house.
It might be some object insecurely fastened which had been detached in the breeze from an open window. And, realising this, I waited and listened.
For some minutes the wind and the waves alone represented sound. Then my ears, attuned to this stormy conflict, and sensitive to anything apart from it, detected a faint scratching and tapping.
My room was the first along the corridor leading to the west wing, and therefore the nearestto the landing immediately above the hall. I determined that this mysterious disturbance proceeded from downstairs. At another time, perhaps, I might have neglected it, but to-night, and so recently following upon Lorian’s story of the attempt upon his father’s studio, I found myself keenly alive to the burglarious possibilities of Ragstaff.
I got out of bed, put on my slippers, and, having extinguished the candle, was about to open the door when I observed a singular thing.
A strong light—which could not be that of the moon, for ordinarily the corridor beyond was dark—shone under the door!
Even as I looked in amazement it was gone.
Very softly I turned the knob.
Careful as I was, it slipped from my grasp with a faintclick. To this, I think, I owed my failure to see more than I did see. But what I saw was sufficiently remarkable.
Cloud-banks raced across the sky tempestuously, and, as I peered over the oaken balustrade down into the hall, one of these impinged upon the moon’s disc and, within the space of two seconds or less, had wholly obscured it. Upon where along, rectangular patch of light, splashed with lozenge-shaped shadows spread from a mullioned window across the polished floor, crept a band of blackness—widened—claimed half—claimed the whole—and left the hall in darkness.
Yet, in the half-second before the coming of the cloud, and as I first looked down, I had seen something—something indefinable. All but immediately it was lost in the quick gliding shadow—yet I could be sure that I had seen—what?
A gleaming, metallic streak—almost I had said a sword—which leapt from my view into the bank of gloom!
Passing the cloud, and the moon anew cutting a line of light through the darkness of the hall, nothing, no one, remained to be seen. I might have imagined the presence of the shining blade, rod, or whatever had seemed to glitter in the moon-rays; and I should have felt assured that such was the case but for the suspicion (and it was nearly a certainty) that a part of the shadow which had enwrapped the mysterious appearance had been of greater depth than the rest—more tangible; in short, had been no shadow, but a substance—the form of one who lurked there.
Doubtful how to act, and unwilling to disturbthe house without good reason, I stood hesitating at the head of the stairs.
A grating sound, like that of a rusty lock, and clearly distinguishable above the noise occasioned by the wind, came to my ears. I began slowly and silently to descend the stairs.
At the foot I paused, looking warily about me. There was no one in the hall.
A new cloud swept across the face of the moon, and utter darkness surrounded me again. I listened intently, but nothing stirred.
Briefly I searched all those odd nooks and corners in which the rambling place abounded, but without discovering anything to account for the phenomena which had brought me there at that hour of the night. The big doors were securely bolted, as were all the windows. Extremely puzzled, I returned to my room and to bed.
In the morning I said nothing to our host respecting the mysterious traffic of the night, since nothing appeared to be disturbed in any way.
“Did you hear it blowing?” asked Colonel Reynor during breakfast. “The booming of the waves sounded slap under the house. Good job the wind has dropped this morning.”
It was, indeed, a warm and still morning, when on the moorland strip beyond the long cornfield, where the thick fir-tufts marked the warren honeycomb, partridges might be met with in many coveys, basking in the sandy patches.
There were tunnels through the dense bushes to the west, too, which led one with alarming suddenness to the very brink of the cliff. And here went scurrying many a hare before the armed intruder.
Lorian and I worked around by lunch-time to the spinneys east of the cornfield, and, nothing loath to partake of the substantial hospitalities of Ragstaff, made our way up to the house. There is a kind of rock-garden from which you must approach from that side. It affords an uninterrupted view of the lower part of the grounds from the lawn up to the terrace.
Only two figures were in sight; and they must have been invisible from any other point, as we, undoubtedly, were invisible to them.
They were those of a man and a girl. They stood upon the steps leading down from the lawn to the rose-garden. It was impossible to misunderstand the nature of the words which theman was speaking. But I saw the girl turn aside and shake her head. The man sought to take her hand and received a further and more decided rebuff.
We hurried on. Lorian, though I avoided looking directly at him, was biting his lip. He was very pale, too. And I knew that he had recognized, as I had recognized, Sybil Reynor and Felix Hulme.
During lunch, a Mr. Findon, who had driven over with one of the Colonel’s neighbours, asked Sybil Reynor whether the peculiar and far from beautiful ring which she invariably wore was Oriental. From his conversation I gathered that he was something of an expert.
“It is generally supposed to be Phœnician, Mr. Findon,” she answered; and slipping it from her finger she passed it to him. “It is my lot in life to wear it always, hideous though it is!”
“Indeed! An heirloom, I suppose?”
“Yes,” replied the girl; “and an ugly one.”
In point of fact, the history of the ring was as curious as that of the Riddle. For generationsit had been worn by the heir of Ragstaff from the day of his majority to that of his eldest son’s. Colonel Reynor had no son. Hence, following the tradition as closely as circumstances allowed, he had invested Sybil with the ring upon the day that she came of age—some three months prior to the time of which I write.
As Mr. Findon was about to return the ring, Lorian said:
“Excuse me. May I examine it for a moment?”
“Of course,” replied Sybil.
He took it in his hand and bent over it curiously. I cannot pretend to explain what impelled me to glance towards Hulme at that moment; but I did do so. And the expression which rested upon his dark and usually handsome face positively alarmed me.
I concluded that, beneath the cool surface, he was a man of hot passions, and I would have ascribed the fixed glare to the jealousy of a rejected suitor in presence of a more favoured rival, had it centred upon Lorian. But it appeared to be focused, particularly, upon the ring.
The incident impressed me very unfavourably. A sense of mystery was growing up around me—pervading the atmosphere of Ragstaff Park.
After lunch Lorian and I again set out in company, but my friend appeared to be in anything but sporting humour. We bore off at a sharp angle from the Colonel and some others who were set upon the rough shooting on the western rim of the moors and made for the honeycombed ground which led one upward to the cliff edge.
Abruptly, we found ourselves upon the sheer brink, with the floor of the ocean at our feet and all the great Atlantic before us.
“Let us relent of our murderous purpose,” said Lorian, dropping comfortably on to a patch of velvety turf and producing his pipe. “I have dragged you up here with the malicious intention of talking to you.”
I was not sorry to hear it. There was much that I wished to discuss with him.
“I should have stayed to say something to some one,” he added, carefully stuffing his briar, “but first I wanted to say something to you.” He paused, fumbling for matches. “What,” he continued, finding some and striking one, “is Felix Hulme’s little game?”
“He wants to marry Miss Reynor.”
“I know; but he needn’t get so infernally savage because she won’t accept him. He lookedat me in a positively murderous way at lunch to-day.”
“So you noticed that?”
“Yes—and I saw that you noticed it, too.”
“Listen,” I said. “Leaving Hulme out of the question, there is an altogether more mysterious business afoot.” And I told him of the episode of the previous night.
He smoked stolidly whilst I spoke, frowning the while; then:
“Old chap,” he said, “I begin to have a sort of glimmering of intelligence. I believe I am threatened with an idea! But it’s such an utterly fantastic hybrid that I dare not name it—yet.”
He asked me several questions respecting what I had seen, and my replies appeared to confirm whatever suspicion was gathering in his mind. We saw little enough sport, but came in later than anyone.
During dinner there was an odd incident. Lorian said:
“Colonel, d’you mind my taking a picture of the Riddle?”
“Eh!” said the Colonel. “What for? Your father made a drawing of it.”
“Yes, I know,” replied Lorian. “I mean a photograph.”
“Well,” mused the Colonel, “I don’t know that there can be much objection, since it has been copied once. But have you got a camera here?”
“Ah—no,” said my friend thoughtfully, “I haven’t. Can anybody lend me one?”
Apparently no one could.
“If you care to drive over to Dr. Mason’s after dinner,” said our host, “he will lend you one. He has several.”
Lorian said he would, and I volunteered to accompany him. Accordingly the Colonel’s high dogcart was prepared; and beneath a perfect moon, swimming in a fleckless sky which gave no hint of the storm to come, we set off for the doctor’s.
My friend’s manœuvres were a constant source of surprise to me. However, I allowed him to know his own business best, and employed my mind with speculations respecting this mystery, what time the Colonel’s spirited grey whisked us along the dusty roads.
We had just wheeled around Dr. Mason’s drive, when the fact broke in upon my musings that aStygian darkness had descended upon the night, as though the moon had been snuffed, candle-wise.
“Devil of a storm brewing,” said Lorian. “Funny how the weather changes at night.”
Two minutes after entering the doctor’s cosy study, down came the rain.
“Now we’re in for it!” said Mason. “I’ll send Wilkins to run the dogcart into the stable until it blows over.”
The storm proved to be a severe one; and long past midnight, despite the doctor’s hospitable attempts to detain us, we set off for Ragstaff Park.
“We can put up the grey ourselves,” said Lorian. “I love grooming horses! And by going around into the yard and throwing gravel up at his window, we can awaken Peters without arousing the house. This plan almost startles me by its daring originality. I fear that I detect within myself the symptoms of genius.”
So, with one of Dr. Mason’s cameras under the seat, we started back through the sweet-smelling lanes; and, at about twenty minutes past one, swung past the gate lodge and up the long avenue, the wheels grinding crisply upon the newly wettedgravel. There was but little moon, now, and the house stood up, an irregular black mass, before us.
Then, from three of the windows, there suddenly leapt out a dazzling white light!
Lorian pulled up the grey with a jerk.
“Good God!” he said. “What’s that! An explosion!”
But no sound reached us. Only, for some seconds, the hard, white glare streamed out upon the steps and down on to the drive. Suddenly as it had come—it was gone, and the whole of Ragstaff was in darkness as before!
The horse started nervously, but my friend held him with a firm hand, turning and looking at me queerly.
“That’s what shone under your door last night!” he said. “That light was in the hall!”
Peters was awakened, the horse stabled and ourselves admitted without arousing another soul. As we came around from the back of the house (we had not entered by the main door), and, candles in hand, passed through the hall, nothing showed as having been disturbed.
“Don’t breathe a word of our suspicions to anyone,” counselled Lorian.
“Whatareour suspicions?” said I.
“At present,” he replied, “indefinable.”
To-night the distant murmur of the sea proved very soothing, and I slept soundly. I was early afoot, however, but not so early as Lorian. As I passed around the gallery above the hall, on my way to the bathroom, I saw him folding up the tripod of the camera which he had borrowed from Dr. Mason. The morning sun was streaming through the windows.
“Hullo!” Lorian called to me. “I’ve got a splendid negative, I think. Peters is rigging up a dark-room in the wine-cellar—delightful site for the purpose! Will you join me in developing?”
Although I was unable to conjecture what my friend hoped to gain by his photographic experiments, I agreed, prompted as much by curiosity as anything else. So, after my tub, I descended to the cellar and splashed about in Hypo., until Lorian declared himself satisfied.
“The second is the best,” he pronounced critically, holding the negative up to the red lamp. “I made three exposures in all; but thereflection from the polished wood has rather spoiled the first and also the third.”
“Whatever do you want with this photograph, anyway,” I said, “when the original is available?”
“My dear chap,” he replied, “one cannot squat in the hall fixedly regarding a section of panel like some fakir staring at a palm leaf!”
“Then you intend to study it?”
“Closely!”
As a matter of fact, he did not join us during the whole of the day; but since he spent the greater part of the time in his own room, I did not proffer my aid. From a remark dropped by the Colonel, I gathered that Sybil had volunteered to assist, during the afternoon, in preparing prints.
I was one of the first in to tea, and Lorian came racing out to meet me.
“Not a word yet,” he said, “but if the Colonel is agreeable, I shall tell them all at dinner!”
“Tell them what?” I began——
Then I saw Sybil Reynor standing in the shadow of the porch, and, even from that distance, saw her rosy blushes.
I understood.
“Lucky man!” I cried, and wrung his hand warmly. “The very best of good wishes, old chap. I am delighted!”
“So am I!” replied Lorian. “But come and see the print.”
We went into the house together; and Sybil blushed more furiously than ever when I told her how I envied Lorian—and added that he deserved the most beautiful girl in England, and had won her.
Lorian had a very clear print of the photograph pinned up to dry on the side of his window.
“We shall be busy to-night!” he said mysteriously.
He had planned to preserve his great secret until dinner-time; but, of course, it came out whilst we sat over tea on the balcony. The Colonel was unfeignedly delighted, and there is nothing secretive about Colonel Reynor. Consequently, five minutes after he had been informed how matters were between his daughter and Lorian, all the house knew.
I studied the face of Hulme, to see how he would take the news. But he retained a perfect mastery of himself, though his large dark eyes gleamed at discord with the smile which he wore.
Our photographic experiments were forgotten; and throughout dinner, whereat Sybil looked exquisitely lovely and very shy, and Lorian preserved an unruffled countenance, other topics ruled.
It was late before we found ourselves alone in Lorian’s room, with the print spread upon the table beneath the light of the shaded lamp.
We bent over it.
“Now,” said Lorian, “I assume that this is some kind of cipher!”
I stared at him surprisedly.
“And,” he continued, “you and I are going to solve it if we sit up all night!”
“How do you propose to begin?”
“Well, as it appears to mean nothing in particular, as it stands, I thought of beginning by assuming that the letters have other values altogether. Therefore, upon the basis thateis the letter which most frequently occurs in English, witha,o,i,d,h,n,r, afterwards, I had thought of resolving it into its component letters.”
“But would that rule apply to mediæval English?”
“Ah,” said Lorian thoughtfully, “most sage counsellor! A wise and timely thought! I’m afraid it wouldn’t.”
“What now?”
Lorian scratched his head in perplexity.
“Suppose,” he suggested, “we write down the words plainly, and see if, treating each one separately, we can find other meanings to them.”
Accordingly, upon a sheet of paper, I wrote:
Wherso eer thee doome beeLooke untoe ye strypped treeOffe ragged staffe. Upon itte leyGolde toe greene ande kay toe kay.
Wherso eer thee doome beeLooke untoe ye strypped treeOffe ragged staffe. Upon itte leyGolde toe greene ande kay toe kay.
Wherso eer thee doome beeLooke untoe ye strypped treeOffe ragged staffe. Upon itte leyGolde toe greene ande kay toe kay.
Our efforts in the proposed direction were rewarded with poor success. Some gibberish even less intelligible than the original was the only result of our labour.
Lorian threw down his pencil and began to reload his pipe.
“Let us consider possible meanings to the original words,” he said. “Do you know of anything in the neighbourhood which might answer to the description of a ‘strypped tree’?”
I shook my head.
“What has occasioned your sudden interest in the thing?” I asked wearily.
“It is a long story,” he replied; “and I have an idea that there’s no time to be lost in solving the Riddle!”
However, even Lorian’s enthusiasm flagged at last. We were forced to admit ourselves hopelessly beaten by the Riddle. I went to my own room feeling thoroughly tired. But I was not destined to sleep long. A few minutes after closing my eyes (or so it seemed), came a clamouring at the door.
I stumbled sleepily out of bed, and, slipping on my dressing-gown, admitted Lorian. Colonel Reynor stood immediately behind him.
“Most extraordinary business!” began the latter breathlessly. “Sybil had—youtell him, Harry!”
“Well,” said Lorian, “it is not unexpected! Listen: Sybil woke up a while ago, with the idea that she had forgotten something or lost something—you know the frame of mind! She went to her dressing-table and found the family ring missing!”
“Thering!” burst in the Colonel excitedly. “Amazing!”
“She remembered having taken it off, during the evening, to—er—to put another one on! But she was unable to recall having replaced it. She determined to run down and see if she had left it upon the seat in the corner of the library.Well, she went downstairs in her dressing-gown, and, carrying a candle, very quietly, in order to wake no one, crossed to the library and searched unavailingly. She heard a faint noise outside in the hall.”
Lorian paused. Felix Hulme had joined the party.
“What’s the disturbance?” he asked.
“Oh,” said Lorian, turning to him, “it’s about Sybil. She was down in the library a while ago to look for something, and heard a sort of grating sound out in the hall. She came out, and almost fell over an iron-bound chest, about a foot and a half long, which stood near the bottom of the staircase!”
“Good heavens, Lorian!” I cried, “how had it come there?”
“Sybil says,” he resumed, “that she could not believe her eyes. She stooped to examine the thing ... and with a thrill of horror saw it to be roughly markedwith a skull and cross-bones!”
“My dear Lorian,” said Hulme, “are you certain that Miss Reynor was awake?”
“She wokeusquickly enough!” interrupted the Colonel. “Poor girl, she was shaking dreadfully.Thought it was a supernatural appearance. She’s with her mother now.”
“But the box!” I cried. “Where is the box?”
“That’s the mystery,” answered Colonel Reynor. “I was downstairs two minutes later, and there was nothing of the kind to be seen! Has our Ragstaff ghost started walking again, I wonder? You ought to know, Hulme; you’re in the Turret Room—that is the authentic haunted chamber!”
“I was aroused by the bell ringing,” replied Hulme. “I am a very light sleeper. But I heard or saw nothing supernatural.”
“By the way, Hulme,” said my friend, “the Turret Room is directly above the hall. I have a theory. Might I come up with you for a moment?”
“Certainly,” replied Hulme.
We all went up to the Turret Room. Having climbed the stairs to this apartment, you enter it by descending three steps. It is octagonal and panelled all around. My friend tapped the panels and sounded all the oaken floor-boards. Then, professing himself satisfied, he bade Hulme good night, and accompanied me to my room.
Ragstaff Park slumbered once more. But Lorian sat upon the edge of my bed, smoking and thinking hard. He had been to his own room for the print of the Riddle, and it lay upon a chair before him.
“Listen to this,” he said suddenly: “(a) Some one breaks into the governor’s studio, and takes nothing. His drawings of the Ragstaff Riddle happen to be at my studio. (b) You hear a noise in the night, and see (1) a bright light; (2) a gleaming rod. (c) You and I see a bright light on the following night, and presumably proceeding from the same place; i.e., the hall. (d) Something I have not mentioned before—Hulme has a camera in his kit! And he doesn’t want the fact known!”
“What do you mean?”
“I tested him the other night, by inquiring if anyone could lend me a camera. He did not volunteer! The morning following the mysterious business in the hall, observed by you, I saw a photographic printing frame in his window! He must have one of those portable developers with him.”
“And to what does all this point?”
“To the fact that he has made at least three attempts to obtain a copy of the Riddle, and has at last succeeded!”
“Three!”
“I really think so. The evidence points to him as the person who broke into the studio. He made a bad slip. He referred to the matter, and cited Horace Baxter as his informant. Baxter is away!”
“But this is serious!”
“I should say so! He couldn’t attempt to photograph the panel in daylight, so he employed magnesium ribbon at night! First time his tripod slipped. It is evidently one of the light, telescopic kind. His negative proved useless. It was one of the metal legs of the tripod which you saw shining! The second time he was more successful. That was the light of his magnesium ribbon you and I saw from the drive!”
“But, Lorian, I went down and searched the hall!”
“Now we come on to the, at present, conjectural part,” explained Lorian. “My theory is that Hulme, somewhere or other, has come across some old documents which give the clue to thosesecret passages said to exist in Ragstaff, but which the Colonel has never been able to locate. I feel assured that there is some means of secret communication between the Turret Room and the hall. I further believe that Hulme has in some way got upon the track of another secret—that of the Riddle.”
“But whatisthe secret of the Riddle?”
“In my opinion the Riddle is a clue to another hiding-place, evidently not connected with the maze of passages; possibly what is known as a Priest’s Hole. As you know, Hulme asked Sybil to marry him. I believe the man to be in financial straits; so that we must further assume the Riddle to conceal the whereabouts of a treasure, since the Reynors are far from wealthy.”
“Thechest! Lorian! The chest!” I cried.
“Quite so. But what immediately preceded its appearance? The loss of the family ring! If I am not greatly in error, Hulme found that ring! And the ring is the key to the riddle! Do you recall the shape of the bezel? Simplya square peg of gold! Look at the photograph!”
He was excited, for once.
“What does it say?” he continued: “‘Ye strypped tree!’ That means the device of leaves,twigs, and acorns—strippedfroma tree—see? Here, at the bottom of the panel, is such a group, and (this is where we have been so blind!) intertwined with the design is the wordCAEG—Ancient Saxon forkey! Look! ‘Golde toe Greene and kay toe kay’! Amongst thegreenleaves is a square hole. Thegoldknob on the ring fits it!”
For a moment I was too greatly surprised for speech. Then:
“You think Hulme discovered this?”
“I do. And I think Sybil’s mislaying her ring gave him his big chance. He had got the chest out whilst she was in the library. He must have been inside somewhere looking for it when she passed through the hall. Then, hearing her approach from the library, he was forced to abandon his heavy ‘find’ and hide in the secret passage which communicates with his room. Directly she ran upstairs he returned for the chest!”
I looked him hard in the face.
“We don’t want a scene, Lorian,” I began. “Besides, it’s just possible you may be wrong.”
“I agree,” said Lorian. “Come up to his room, now.”
Passing quietly upstairs, we paused before the door of the Turret Room. A faint light showed under it. Lorian glanced at me—then knocked.
“Who’s there?” came sharply.
“Lorian,” answered my friend. “I want a chat with you about the secret passage and the old treasure chest—before speaking to the Colonel!”
There was a long silence, then:
“Just a moment,” came hoarsely. “Don’t come in until I call.”
We looked at one another doubtfully. A long minute passed. I could hear a faint sound within. At last came Hulme’s voice:
“All right. Come in.”
As Lorian threw the door open, a faintclicksounded from somewhere.
The Turret Room was empty!
“By heaven! he’s given us the slip!” cried my friend.
We glanced around the room. A candle burnt upon the table. And upon the bed stood an iron-barred chest, with a sheet of notepaper lying on its lid!
Lorian pounced upon the note. We read it together.
“Mr. Henry Lorian” (it went), “I realize thatyou have found me out. I will confess that I had no time to open the chest. But as matters stand I only ask you not to pursue me. I have taken nothing not my own. The ring, and an interesting document which I picked up some years ago, are on the table. Offer what explanation of my disappearance you please. I am in your hands.”
We turned again to the table. Upon a piece of worn parchment lay the missing ring. Lorian spread out the parchment and bent over it.
“Why,” I cried, “it is a plan of Ragstaff Park!”
“With a perfect network of secret passages!” added my friend, “and some instructions, apparently, as to how to enter them. It bears the initials ‘R. R.’ and, in brackets, ‘Capt. S.’ I begin to understand.”
He raised the candle and stepped across to the ancient chest. It bore a roughly designed skull and cross-bones, and, in nearly defaced red characters, the words:
“CAPTAIN SATAN.”
“Captain Satan!” I said. “He was one of the most bloodthirsty pirates who ever harried the Spanish Main!”
“He was,” agreed Lorian; “and his real name was Roderick Reynor. He evidently solved the riddle some generations earlier than Hulme—and stored his bloodstained hoard in the ancient hiding-place. Also, you see, he knew about the passages.”
“What shall we do?”
“Hulme has surrendered. You can see that the chest has not been opened. Therefore there is only one thing that wecando. We must keep what we know to ourselves, return the chest to its hiding-place, and proclaim that we have found the missing ring!”
Down to the hall we bore the heavy chest. The square knob on the ring fitted, as Lorian had predicted, into the hole half hidden among the oak leaves of the design. Without much difficulty we forced back the fastening (it proved to be of a very simple pattern), and slid the whole panel aside. A small, square chamber was revealed by the light of the candle—quite empty.
“As I had surmised,” said my friend; “a Priest’s Hole.”
We carried the chest within, and reclosed the panel, which came to with a sharpclick.
*****
The story which we invented to account for Hulme’s sudden departure passed muster; for one topic usurped the interests of all—the ghostly box, with its piratical emblem.
“My boy,” Colonel Reynor said to Lorian, “I cannot pretend to explain what Sybil saw. But it bears curiously upon a certain black page in the family history. If the chest had been tangible, and had contained a fortune, I would not have opened it. Let all pertaining to that part of our records remain buried, say I.”
“Which determines our course,” explained Lorian to me. “The chest is not ours, and the Colonel evidently would rather not know about it. I regret that I lack the morals of a burglar.”
Jack Dilloncame to Hollow Grange on a thunderous black evening when an ebony cloud crested the hill-top above, and, catching the upflung rays of sunset, glowed redly like the pall of Avalon in the torchlight. Through the dense ranks of firs cloaking the slopes a breeze, presaging the coming storm, whispered evilly, and here in the hollow the birds were still.
The man who had driven him from the station glanced at him, with a curiosity thinly veiled.
“What about your things, sir?” he inquired.
Dillon stared rather blankly at the ivy-covered lodge, which, if appearances were to be trusted, was unoccupied.
“Wait a moment; I will ring,” he said curtly; for this furtive curiosity, so ill concealed, had manifested itself in the manner of the taxi-driverfrom the moment that Dillon had directed him to drive to Hollow Grange.
He pushed open the gate and tugged at the iron ring which was suspended from the wall of the lodge. A discordant clangour rewarded his efforts, the cracked note of a bell that spoke from somewhere high up in the building, that seemed to be buffeted to and fro from fir to fir, until it died away, mournfully, in some place of shadows far up the slope. In the voice of the bell there was something furtive, something akin to the half-veiled curiosity in the eyes of the man who stood watching him; something fearful, too, in both, as though man and bell would whisper: “Return! Beware of disturbing the dwellers in this place.”
But Dillon angrily recalled himself to the realities. He felt that these ghostly imaginings were born of the Boche-maltreated flesh, were products of lowered tone; that he would have perceived no query in the glance of the taxi-driver and heard no monkish whisper in the clang of the bell had he been fit, had he been fully recovered from the effects of his wound. Monkish whisper? Yes, that was it—his mind had supplied, automatically, an aptly descriptiveterm: the cracked bell spoke with the voice of ancient monasteries, had in it the hush of cloisters and the sigh of renunciation.
“Hang it all!” muttered Dillon. “This won’t do.”
A second time he awoke the ghostly bell-voice, but nothing responded to its call; man, bird, and beast had seemingly deserted Hollow Grange. He was conscious of a sudden nervous irritation, as he turned brusquely and met the inquiring glance of the taxi-man.
“I have arrived before I was expected,” he said. “If you will put my things in the porch here I will go up to the house and get a servant to fetch them. They will be safe enough in the meantime.”
His own words increased his irritability; for were they not in the nature of an apology on behalf of his silent and unseen host? Were they not a concession to that nameless query in the man’s stare? Moreover, deep within his own consciousness, some vague thing was stirring; so that, the man dismissed and promptly departing, Dillon stood glancing from the little stack of baggage in the lodge porch up the gloomy, narrow, and over-arched drive, indignantly aware that he also carried a question in his eyes.
The throb of the motor mounting the steep, winding lane grew dim and more dim until it was borne away entirely upon the fitful breeze. Faintly he detected the lowing of cattle in some distant pasture; the ranks of firs whispered secretly one to another, and the pall above the hills grew blacker and began to extend over the valley.
Amid that ominous stillness of nature he began to ascend the cone-strewn path. Evidently enough, the extensive grounds had been neglected for years, and that few pedestrians, and fewer vehicles, ever sought Hollow Grange was demonstrated by the presence of luxuriant weeds in the carriage way. Having proceeded for some distance, until the sheer hillside seemed to loom over him like the wall of a tower, Dillon paused, peering about in the ever-growing darkness. He was aware of a physical chill; certainly no ray of sunlight ever penetrated to this tunnel through the firs. Could he have mistaken the path and be proceeding, not toward the house, but away from it and into the midnight of the woods mantling the hills?
There was something uncomfortable in that reflection; momentarily he knew a childishfear of the darkening woods, and walked forward rapidly, self-assertively. Ten paces brought him to one of the many bends in the winding road—and there, far ahead, as though out of some cavern in the very hillside, a yellow light shone.
He pressed on with greater assurance until the house became visible. Now he perceived that he had indeed strayed from the carriage-sweep in some way, for the path that he was following terminated at the foot of a short flight of moss-covered brick steps. He mounted the steps and found himself at the bottom of a terrace. The main entrance was far to his left and separated from the terrace by a neglected lawn. That portion of the place was Hanoverian and ugly, whilst the wing nearest to him was Tudor and picturesque. Excepting the yellow light shining out from a sunken window almost at his feet, no illuminations were visible about the house, although the brewing storm had already plunged the hollow into premature night.
Indeed, there was no sign of occupancy about the strange-looking mansion, which might have hidden forgotten for centuries in the horseshoe of the hills. He had sought for rest and quiet; here he should find them. The stillness of theplace was of that sort which almost seems to be palpable; that can be seen and felt. A humid chill arose apparently from the terrace, with its stone pavings outlined in moss, crept up from the wilderness below and down from the fir-woods above.
A thought struggled to assume form in his mind. There was something reminiscent about this house of the woods, this silent house which struck no chord of human companionship, in which was no warmth of life or love. Suddenly, the thought leapt into complete being.
This was the palace of the sleeping beauty to which he had penetrated. It was the fairy-tale dear to childhood which had been struggling for expression in his mind ever since he had emerged from the trees on to the desolate terrace. With the departure of the station cab had gone the last link with to-day, and now he was translated to the goblin realm of fable.
He had crossed the terrace and the lawn, and stood looking through an open French window into a room that evidently adjoined the hall. A great still darkness had come, and on a little table in the room a reading-lamp was burning. It had a quaint, mosaic shade which shut inmuch of the light, but threw a luminous patch directly on a heap of cushions strewn upon the floor. Face downward in this silken nest, her chin resting upon her hands and her elfin curly brown hair tousled bewitchingly, lay a girl so audaciously pretty that Dillon hesitated to accept the evidence of his eyes.
The crunching of a piece of gravel beneath his foot led to the awakening of the sleeping beauty. She raised her head quickly and then started upright, a lithe, divinely petite figure in a green velvet dress, having short fur-trimmed sleeves that displayed her pretty arms. For an instant it was a startled nymph that confronted him; then a distracting dimple appeared in one fair cheek, and:
“Oh! how you frightened me!” said the girl, speaking with a slight French accent which the visitor found wholly entrancing. “You must be Jack Dillon? I am Phryné.”
Dillon bowed.
“How I envy Hyperides!” he said.
A blush quickly stained the lovely face of Phryné, and the roguish eyes were lowered, whereby the penitent Dillon, who had jested in the not uncommon belief that a pretty girl isnecessarily brainless, knew that the story of the wonder-woman of Thespiæ was familiar to her modern namesake.
“I am afraid,” declared Phryné, with a return of her mischievous composure, “that you are very wicked.”
Dillon, who counted himself a man of the world, was temporarily at a loss for a suitable rejoinder. The cause of his hesitancy was twofold. In the first place he had reached the age of disillusionment, whereat a man ceases to believe that a perfectly lovely woman exists in the flesh, and in the second place he had found such a fabulous being in a house of gloom and silence to which, a few moments ago, he had deeply regretted having come.
His father, who had accepted the invitation from an old college friend on his son’s behalf, had made no mention of a Phryné, whereas Phryné clearly took herself for granted and evidently knew all about Jack Dillon. The latter experienced a volcanic change of sentiment; Hollow Grange was metamorphosed, and assumed magically the guise of a Golden House, an Emperor’s pleasure palace, a fair, old-world casket holding this lovely jewel. But who wasshe?—and in what spirit should he receive her bewildering coquetries?
“I trust,” he said, looking into the laughing eyes, “that you will learn to know me better.”
Phryné curtsied mockingly.
“You have either too much confidence in your own character or not enough in my wisdom,” she said.
Dillon stepped into the room, and, stooping, took up a book which lay open upon the floor. It was a French edition ofThe Golden Assof Apuleius.
The hollow was illuminated by a blinding flash of lightning, and Phryné’s musical laughter was drowned in the thunder that boomed and crashed in deepening peals over the hills. In a sudden tropical torrent the rain descended, as Dr. Kassimere entered the room.
Jack Dillon leant from his open window and looked out over the valley to where a dull red glow crowned the hill-top. There was a fire somewhere in the neighbourhood of the distant town; probably a building had been struck by lightning. The storm had passed, althoughthunder was still audible dimly, like the roll of muffled drums or a remote bombardment. Stillness had reclaimed Hollow Grange.
He was restless, uneasy; he sought to collate his impressions of the place and its master. Twelve years had elapsed since his one previous meeting with Dr. Kassimere, and little or no memory of the man had remained. So much had intervened; the war—and Phryné. Now that he was alone and could collect his ideas he knew of what Dr. Kassimere’s gaunt, wide-eyed face had reminded him: it was of Thoth, the Ibis-headed god whose figure he had seen on the walls of the temples during his service in Egypt.
“Kassimere was always a queer fish, Jack,” his father had said; “but most of his eccentricities were due to his passion for study. The Grange is the very place Sir Francis” (the specialist) “would have chosen for your convalescence, and you’ll find nothing dangerously exciting in Kassimere’s atmosphere!”
Yet there was that about Dr. Kassimere which he did not and could not like; his quietly cordial welcome, his courteous regret that his guest’s arrival by an earlier train (a circumstance due to reduced service) had led to his not beingmet at the station; the charming simplicity with which he confessed to the smallness of his household, and to the pleasure which it afforded him to have the son of an old chum beneath his roof—all these kindly overtures had left the bird-like eyes cold, hard, watchful, calculating. The voice was the voice of a friend and a gentleman, but the face was the face of Thoth.
The mystery of Phryné was solved in a measure. She was Dr. Kassimere’s adopted daughter and the orphaned child of Louis Devant, the famous Paris cartoonist, who had died penniless in 1911, at the height of his success. In his selection of a name for her, the brilliant and dissolute artist had exhibited a breadth of mind which Phryné inherited in an almost embarrassing degree.
Her mental equipment was bewildering: the erudition of an Oxford don spiced with more than a dash of Boul’ Mich’, which made for complexity. Her curious learning was doubtless due to the setting of a receptive mind amid such environment, but how she had retained her piquant vivacity in Hollow Grange was less comprehensible. The servants formed a small and saturnine company, only two—the housekeeper, Mrs. Harman, a black and forbiddingfigure, and Madame Charny, a French companion—sleeping in the house. Gawly, a surly creature who neglected the gardens and muttered savagely over other duties, together with his wife, who cooked, resided at the lodge. There were two maids, who lived in the village....
The glow from the distant fire seemed to be reflected upon the firs bordering the terrace below; then Dillon, watching the dull, red light, remembered that Dr. Kassimere’s laboratory adjoined the tiny chapel, and that, though midnight drew near, the doctor was still at work there.
Owls and other night birds hooted and shrieked among the trees and many bats were in flight. He found himself thinking of the pyramid bats of Egypt, and of the ibis-headed Thoth who was the scribe of the under-world.
Dr. Kassimere had made himself medically responsible for his case, and had read attentively the letters which Dillon had brought from his own physician. He was to prescribe on the following day, and to-night the visitor found Morpheus a treacherous god. Furtive activities disturbed the house, or so it seemed to the sleepless man tossing on his bed; alert intelligences within Hollow Grange responded to thenight-life of the owls without, and he seemed to lie in the shadow of a watchfulness that never slumbered.
“There’s many a fine walk hereabouts,” said the old man seated in the arm-chair in the corner of theThreshers’ Innbar-parlour.
Dillon nodded encouragingly.
“There’s Ganton-on-the-Hill,” continued the ancient. “You can see the sea from there in clear weather; and many’s the time I’ve heard the guns in France from Upper Crobury of a still night. Then, four mile away, there’s the haunted Grange, though nobody’s allowed past the gate. Not as nobody wants to be,” he added, reflectively.
“The haunted Grange?” questioned Dillon. “Where is that?”
“Hollow Grange?” said the old man. “Why, it lies——”
“Oh, Hollow Grange—yes! I know where Hollow Grange is, but I was unaware that it was reputed to be haunted.”
“Ah,” replied the other, pityingly, “you’re new to these parts; I see that the minute I seteyes on you. Maybe you was wounded in France, and you’re down here to get well, like?”
“Quite so. Your deductive reasoning is admirable.”
“Ah,” said the sage, chuckling with self-appreciation, “I ain’t lived in these here parts for nigh on seventy-five years without learning to use my eyes, I ain’t. For seventy-four years and seven months,” he added proudly, “I ain’t been outside this here county where I was born, and I can use my eyes, I can; I know a thing I do, when I see it. Maybe it was providence, as you might say, what brought you to theThreshersto-day.”
“Quite possibly,” Dillon admitted.
“He was just such another as you,” continued the old man with apparent irrelevance. “You don’t happen to be stopping at Hainingham Vicarage?”
“No,” replied Dillon.
“Ah! he was stopping at Hainingham Vicarage and he’d been wounded in France. How he got to know Dr. Kassimere I can’t tell you; not at parson’s, anyway. Parson won’t never speak to him. Only last Sunday week he preached agin him; not in so many words, but I could see his drift. He spoke about them heathenwomen livin’ on an island—sort of female Robinson Crusoes, I make ’em out, I do—as saves poor shipwrecked sailors from the sea and strangles of ’em ashore.”
Dillon glanced hard at the voluble old man.
“The sirens?” he suggested, conscious of a sudden hot surging about his heart.
“Ah, that’s the women I mean.”
“But where is the connection?”
“Ah, you’re new to these parts, you are. That Dr. Kassimere he keeps a siren down in Hollow Grange. They see her—these here strangers (same as the shipwrecked sailors parson told about)—and it’s all up with ’em.”
Dillon stifled a laugh, in which anger would have mingled with contempt. To think that in the twentieth century a man of science was like to meet with the fate of Dr. Dee in the days of Elizabeth! Truly there were dark spots in England. But could he credit the statement of this benighted elder that a modern clergyman had actually drawn an analogy between Phryné Devant and the sirens? It was unbelievable.
“What was the unhappy fate,” he asked, masking his intolerance, “of the young man staying at the Vicarage?”
“The same as them afore him,” came the startling reply; “for he warn’t the first, and maybe”—with a shrewd glance of the rheumy old eyes—“he won’t be the last. Them sirens has the powers of darkness. I know, ’cause I’ve seen one—her at the Grange; and though I’m an old man, nigh on seventy-five, I’ll never forget her face, I won’t, and the way she smiled at me!”
“But,” persisted Dillon, patiently, “what became of this particular young man, the one who was staying at the Vicarage?”
The ancient sage leant forward in his chair and tapped the speaker upon the knee with the stem of his clay pipe.
“Ask them as knows,” he said, with impressive solemnity. “Nobody else can tell you!”
And, having permitted an indiscreet laugh to escape him, not another word on the subject could Dillon induce the old man to utter, he strictly confining himself, in his ruffled dignity, to the climatic conditions and the crops.
When Dillon, finally, set out upon the four-mile walk back to the Grange, he realised, with annoyance, that the senile imaginings of his bar-parlour acquaintance lingered in his mind.That Dr. Kassimere dwelt outside the social life of the county he had speedily learnt; but for this he had been prepared. That he might possibly be, not a recluse, but a pariah, was a new point of view. Trivial things, to which hitherto he had paid scant attention, began to marshal themselves as evidence. The two village “helpers,” he knew, received extravagant wages, because, as Phryné had confessed, they had “found it almost impossible to get girls to stay.” Why?
Of the earlier guest, or guests, who had succumbed to the siren lure of Phryné, he had heard no mention. Why? Save at meal-times he rarely saw his host, who frankly left him to the society of Phryné. Again—why? Dr. Kassimere, in his jealously locked laboratory, was at work day and night upon his experiments. What were these experiments? What was the nature of the doctor’s studies?
He had now been for nearly three weeks at Hollow Grange, and never had Dr. Kassimere spoken of his work. And Phryné? The sudden, new thought of Phryné was so strange, so wonderful and overwhelming, that it reacted physically; and he pulled up short in the middle of a field-path,as though some palpable obstacle blocked the way.
Why had he set out alone that day, when all other days had been spent in the girl’s company? He had deliberately sought solitude—because of Phryné; because he wanted to think calmly, judicially, to arraign himself before his own judgment, remote from the witchery of her presence. He had tried to render his mind a void, wherein should linger not one fragrant memory of her delicate beauty and charm, so that he might return unbiased to his judgment. He had returned; he was judged.
He loved Phryné madly, insanely. His future, his life, lay in the hollow of her hands.