CHAPTER XVI.Mr. Sheringham Lectures on Neo-Platonism“Alec,” interrupted Roger plaintively, “if you say one more word to me about bulls, cows, or any other farmyard impedimenta, I shall burst at once into loud tears. I warn you.”They were walking once more along the white, dusty road; but the springy exhilaration of the outward journey had gone out of their steps. A short but pithy conversation with the ancient rustic, conducted mostly in ear-splitting yells, had speedily shown the crestfallen Roger the precise nature of the wild goose (or should it be wild bull?) he had been chasing. Alec, it might be noticed in passing, was not being at all kind about it.“If ever anything could have been more obvious!” Roger pursued mournfully. “My reasoning was perfectly sound. It almost looks as if Mrs. William and that idiot of a landlord were trying deliberately to deceive me. Why couldn’t they have said straight out that the disgusting animal was a bull and have done with it?”“I don’t expect you gave them a chance,” Alec remarked with an undisguised grin.Roger gave him a dignified look and relapsed into silence.But not for long. “So here we are, back again at the precise point we had reached before we ever came across that miserable piece of paper,” he resumed unhappily. “A whole valuable hour wasted.”“You’ve had some exercise, at any rate,” Alec pointed out kindly. “Jolly good for you, too.”“The point is, what are we going to do next?”“Go back to tea,” said Alec promptly. “And talking about wasting valuable time, I believe that’s all we’re doing at all with regard to this business. If such a clear clue as that fizzles out in this way, why shouldn’t the whole thing be equally a mare’s nest? I don’t believe there everwasa murder, after all. Stanworth committed suicide.”“Let’s see,” Roger went on, completely disregarding this interruption, “we were setting out to get on the trail of a Mysterious Stranger, weren’t we? Well, that’s where we shall have to take the thing up from. Luckily I kept my wits about me enough to put a few questions about strangers to those two, and we drew a blank. We will now visit the station.”“Oh, no!” Alec groaned. “Tea!”“Station!” returned Roger firmly; and station it was.But even the station did not prove any more fruitful. On the plea of making inquiries for a friend, Roger succeeded in extracting with some difficulty, from a very bucolic porter, the information that only half-a-dozen trains in a day stopped there (the place was indeed little more than a halt), and none at all after seven o’clock in the evening. The earliest in the morning was soon after six, and no passengers had been picked up so far as he knew. No, he hadn’t seen a stranger arrive yesterday; leastways, not to notice one like.“After all, it’s only what we might have expected,” Roger remarked philosophically, as they set off homewards at last. “If the fellow came by train at all, he’d probably go to Elchester. He’s no fool, as we knew very well.”Alec, now that the prospect of tea and shade was definitely before him, was ready to discuss the matter rather more amicably.“You’re quite sure now that he is a stranger, then?” he asked. “You’ve given up the idea that it’s anybody actually in this neighbourhood?”“I’m nothing of the sort,” Roger retorted. “I’m not sure of any blessed thing about him, except that he wears large boots, is strong, and is no ordinary criminal; and that he corresponds closely with the quite distinct mental picture I had formed of the late lamented Mr. John Prince. He may be a stranger to the neighbourhood, and he may not. We know that he was still in it during the morning, because he managed to communicate with the occupants of the household. But as for anything more definite than that, we simply can’t say, not knowing his motive. By Jove, I do wish we could discover that! It would narrow things down immensely.”“I tell you something that never seems to have occurred to us,” Alec remarked suddenly. “Why shouldn’t it have been just an ordinary burglar, who got so panic-stricken when he found he’d actually killed his householder that he hadn’t the nerve to complete what he came for and simply hurried off? That seems to me as probable as anything, and it fits the facts perfectly.”“Ye-es; we did rather touch on the burglar idea at the very beginning, didn’t we? Do you realise that it was only five hours ago, by the way? It seems more like five weeks. But that was before the curious behaviour of all these other people impressed itself upon us.”“Upon you, you mean. I still think you’re making ever so much too much of that side of it. There’s probably some perfectly simple explanation, if we only knew it. I suppose you mean Jefferson and Mrs. Plant?”“AndLady Stanworth!”“And Lady Stanworth, then. Well, dash it all, you can’t expect them to take us into their confidence, can you? And that is the only way in which their part can be cleared up. Not that it seems to me in the least worth clearing up. I don’t see that it could possibly have anything to do with the murder. Good Lord, it’s practically the same thing as accusing them of the murder itself! I ask you, my dear chap,canyou imagine either Mrs. Plant or Lady Stanworth—we’ll leave Jefferson out for the moment—actually plotting old Stanworth’s murder! It’s really too ludicrous. You ought to have more sense.”“This particular topic always seems to excite you, Alexander,” observed Roger mildly.“Well, I mean, it’s so dashed absurd. You can’t really believe anything of the sort.”“Perhaps I don’t. Anyhow, we’ll shelve it till something more definite crops up. It’s quite hot enough already, without making each other still more heated. Look here, let’s give the whole thing a rest till we get back. It will clear our brains. I’ll give you a short lecture on the influence of the Platonic ethics on Hegelian philosophy instead, with a few sidelights on neo-Platonism.” Which, in spite of Alec’s spirited protests, he at once proceeded to do.In this way the time passed pleasantly and instructively till they had passed the lodge gates once more.“So you see,” concluded Roger happily, “that while in mediæval philosophy this mysticism is in powerful and ultimately successful opposition to rationalistic dogmatism, with its contemptuous disregard for all experience, the embryonic science of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was actually in itself a logical development of neo-Platonism in this same opposition to barren rationalism.”“Was it?” said Alec gloomily, registering a secret but none the less fervent prayer that he might never hear the word neo-Platonism again as long as he lived. “I see.”“You do? Good. Then let us seek out and have speech with friend William.”“Are you going to give him a short lecture on rationalistic dogmatism?” Alec asked carefully. “Because if so, I’m going indoors.”“I’m afraid it would be wasted on William,” Roger replied seriously. “William, I feel sure, is a dogmatist of the most bigoted type if ever there was one; and to lecture to him on the futility of dogma would be as ineffective as to harangue a hippopotamus on the subject of drawing-room etiquette. No, I just want to sound William a little. Not that I think it will really be of much help to us, but just at present I’m turning every stone I can see.”In due course William was run to earth in a large greenhouse. He was mounted unhappily on an exceedingly rickety pair of steps and engaged in tying up a vine. On seeing Roger he hastily descended to firm ground. William did not believe in taking chances.“Good-afternoon, William,” said Roger brightly.“Arternoon, sir,” William responded suspiciously.“I’ve just been having a chat with your wife, William.”William grunted noncommittally.“I was telling her that a friend of mine, whom I expected to come up to the house to see me last night, never turned up; and I was wondering if you’d seen anything of him down at the lodge.”William ostentatiously busied himself with a small plant.“Never see’d no one,” he observed with decision.“No? Never mind, then. It doesn’t really matter. That’s an interesting job you’ve got on hand, William. You take a plant out of its pot, sniff its roots and put it back again; is that it? Now what operation do you call that in the science of horticulture?”William hastily relinquished the plant and glowered at his interlocutor.“Some folks mayn’t have no work to do,” he remarked darkly; “but other folks ’ave.”“Meaning yourself, I take it?” Roger said approvingly. “That’s right. Work away. Nothing like it, is there? Keeps you cheerful and bright and contented. Great thing, work, I agree with you.”A flicker of interest passed across William’s countenance. “What did that there Mr. Stanworth want to shoot hisself for, eh?” he demanded suddenly.“I don’t know, to tell you the truth,” said Roger, somewhat taken aback at the unexpectedness of this query. “Why, have you got any ideas about it?”“I don’t ’old with it meself,” said William primly. “Not with sooeycide.”“You’re absolutely right, William,” Roger replied warmly. “If more people were like you, there’d be—there’d be less suicides, undoubtedly. It’s an untidy habit, to say the least.”“It ain’t acting right,” William pursued firmly. “That’s what it ain’t.”“You put it in a nutshell, William; it isn’t. In fact, it’s acting all wrong. By the way, William, somebody or other was telling me that a stranger had been seen about the grounds during the last day or two. You noticed him by any chance?”“Stranger? What sort of a stranger?”“Oh, the usual sort; a head and four pairs of fingers, you know. This particular one, they said, was a rather large man. Have you seen a rather large strange man round the house lately?”William cogitated deeply.“I ’ave an’ all.”“Have you, though? When?”William cogitated again. “It ’ud be a matter of ha’-past eight last night,” he announced at last. “Ha’-past eight it ’ud be, as near as anything. I was a-settin’ out in front o’ the lodge, an’ up he walks, bold as brass, an’ nods at me an’ goes on up the drive.”Roger exchanged glances with Alec.“Yes, William?” he said warmly. “A man you’d never seen before? A fairly large man?”“A very large man,” William corrected meticulously.“A very large man. Excellent! Go on. What happened?”“Well, I says to the missus, ‘Oo’s that?’ I says. ‘A-walkin’ up the drive as if he owned the place.’ ” William pondered. “ ‘As if heownedthe place,’ I says,” he repeated firmly.“And a very good thing to say, too. Well?”“ ‘Oh, ’im?’ she says. ‘’E’s the cook’s brother,’ she says. ‘I was interjuiced to ’im at Helchester the other day,’ she says. ‘At least, shesays’e’s ’er brother,’ she says.” A strange rasping noise in his throat appeared to indicate that William was amused. “ ‘At least, shesays’e’s ’er brother,’ she says,” he repeated with much enjoyment.“Oh!” Roger exclaimed, somewhat dashed. “Oh, did she? And did you see him again, William?”“That I did. Back ’e come nigh on a quarter of a hower later, an’ cook with ’im, a-hangin’ on ’is arm like what she ought to have known better not to ’ave done,” William rejoined, suddenly stern. “I don’t ’old with it meself, I don’t,” added this severe moralist. “Not at ’er age, I don’t.” His expression relaxed reminiscently. “ ‘At least, shesays’e’s ’er brother,’ she says,” he added, with a sudden rasp.“I see,” said Roger. “Thank you, William. Well, I suppose we mustn’t interrupt you any more. Come on, Alec.”Slowly and sadly they made their way back to the house.“William got his own back then, if he only knew it,” Roger said with a wry smile. “I did think for a moment that we might be getting at something at last.”“You really are a hell of an optimist, Roger,” Alec observed wonderingly.Their path took them past the library, and as they reached the bed in which the footprints had been discovered Roger instinctively paused. The next moment he darted forward and stared with incredulous eyes at the bed.“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, clutching Alec’s arm and pointing with an excited finger. “Look! They’ve gone, both of them! They’ve been smoothed out!”“Great Scott, so they have!”The two gazed at each other with wide eyes.“So Jeffersondidhear what we were talking about!” Roger almost whispered. “I have an idea that things are going to get rather exciting very soon, after all.”
“Alec,” interrupted Roger plaintively, “if you say one more word to me about bulls, cows, or any other farmyard impedimenta, I shall burst at once into loud tears. I warn you.”
They were walking once more along the white, dusty road; but the springy exhilaration of the outward journey had gone out of their steps. A short but pithy conversation with the ancient rustic, conducted mostly in ear-splitting yells, had speedily shown the crestfallen Roger the precise nature of the wild goose (or should it be wild bull?) he had been chasing. Alec, it might be noticed in passing, was not being at all kind about it.
“If ever anything could have been more obvious!” Roger pursued mournfully. “My reasoning was perfectly sound. It almost looks as if Mrs. William and that idiot of a landlord were trying deliberately to deceive me. Why couldn’t they have said straight out that the disgusting animal was a bull and have done with it?”
“I don’t expect you gave them a chance,” Alec remarked with an undisguised grin.
Roger gave him a dignified look and relapsed into silence.
But not for long. “So here we are, back again at the precise point we had reached before we ever came across that miserable piece of paper,” he resumed unhappily. “A whole valuable hour wasted.”
“You’ve had some exercise, at any rate,” Alec pointed out kindly. “Jolly good for you, too.”
“The point is, what are we going to do next?”
“Go back to tea,” said Alec promptly. “And talking about wasting valuable time, I believe that’s all we’re doing at all with regard to this business. If such a clear clue as that fizzles out in this way, why shouldn’t the whole thing be equally a mare’s nest? I don’t believe there everwasa murder, after all. Stanworth committed suicide.”
“Let’s see,” Roger went on, completely disregarding this interruption, “we were setting out to get on the trail of a Mysterious Stranger, weren’t we? Well, that’s where we shall have to take the thing up from. Luckily I kept my wits about me enough to put a few questions about strangers to those two, and we drew a blank. We will now visit the station.”
“Oh, no!” Alec groaned. “Tea!”
“Station!” returned Roger firmly; and station it was.
But even the station did not prove any more fruitful. On the plea of making inquiries for a friend, Roger succeeded in extracting with some difficulty, from a very bucolic porter, the information that only half-a-dozen trains in a day stopped there (the place was indeed little more than a halt), and none at all after seven o’clock in the evening. The earliest in the morning was soon after six, and no passengers had been picked up so far as he knew. No, he hadn’t seen a stranger arrive yesterday; leastways, not to notice one like.
“After all, it’s only what we might have expected,” Roger remarked philosophically, as they set off homewards at last. “If the fellow came by train at all, he’d probably go to Elchester. He’s no fool, as we knew very well.”
Alec, now that the prospect of tea and shade was definitely before him, was ready to discuss the matter rather more amicably.
“You’re quite sure now that he is a stranger, then?” he asked. “You’ve given up the idea that it’s anybody actually in this neighbourhood?”
“I’m nothing of the sort,” Roger retorted. “I’m not sure of any blessed thing about him, except that he wears large boots, is strong, and is no ordinary criminal; and that he corresponds closely with the quite distinct mental picture I had formed of the late lamented Mr. John Prince. He may be a stranger to the neighbourhood, and he may not. We know that he was still in it during the morning, because he managed to communicate with the occupants of the household. But as for anything more definite than that, we simply can’t say, not knowing his motive. By Jove, I do wish we could discover that! It would narrow things down immensely.”
“I tell you something that never seems to have occurred to us,” Alec remarked suddenly. “Why shouldn’t it have been just an ordinary burglar, who got so panic-stricken when he found he’d actually killed his householder that he hadn’t the nerve to complete what he came for and simply hurried off? That seems to me as probable as anything, and it fits the facts perfectly.”
“Ye-es; we did rather touch on the burglar idea at the very beginning, didn’t we? Do you realise that it was only five hours ago, by the way? It seems more like five weeks. But that was before the curious behaviour of all these other people impressed itself upon us.”
“Upon you, you mean. I still think you’re making ever so much too much of that side of it. There’s probably some perfectly simple explanation, if we only knew it. I suppose you mean Jefferson and Mrs. Plant?”
“AndLady Stanworth!”
“And Lady Stanworth, then. Well, dash it all, you can’t expect them to take us into their confidence, can you? And that is the only way in which their part can be cleared up. Not that it seems to me in the least worth clearing up. I don’t see that it could possibly have anything to do with the murder. Good Lord, it’s practically the same thing as accusing them of the murder itself! I ask you, my dear chap,canyou imagine either Mrs. Plant or Lady Stanworth—we’ll leave Jefferson out for the moment—actually plotting old Stanworth’s murder! It’s really too ludicrous. You ought to have more sense.”
“This particular topic always seems to excite you, Alexander,” observed Roger mildly.
“Well, I mean, it’s so dashed absurd. You can’t really believe anything of the sort.”
“Perhaps I don’t. Anyhow, we’ll shelve it till something more definite crops up. It’s quite hot enough already, without making each other still more heated. Look here, let’s give the whole thing a rest till we get back. It will clear our brains. I’ll give you a short lecture on the influence of the Platonic ethics on Hegelian philosophy instead, with a few sidelights on neo-Platonism.” Which, in spite of Alec’s spirited protests, he at once proceeded to do.
In this way the time passed pleasantly and instructively till they had passed the lodge gates once more.
“So you see,” concluded Roger happily, “that while in mediæval philosophy this mysticism is in powerful and ultimately successful opposition to rationalistic dogmatism, with its contemptuous disregard for all experience, the embryonic science of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was actually in itself a logical development of neo-Platonism in this same opposition to barren rationalism.”
“Was it?” said Alec gloomily, registering a secret but none the less fervent prayer that he might never hear the word neo-Platonism again as long as he lived. “I see.”
“You do? Good. Then let us seek out and have speech with friend William.”
“Are you going to give him a short lecture on rationalistic dogmatism?” Alec asked carefully. “Because if so, I’m going indoors.”
“I’m afraid it would be wasted on William,” Roger replied seriously. “William, I feel sure, is a dogmatist of the most bigoted type if ever there was one; and to lecture to him on the futility of dogma would be as ineffective as to harangue a hippopotamus on the subject of drawing-room etiquette. No, I just want to sound William a little. Not that I think it will really be of much help to us, but just at present I’m turning every stone I can see.”
In due course William was run to earth in a large greenhouse. He was mounted unhappily on an exceedingly rickety pair of steps and engaged in tying up a vine. On seeing Roger he hastily descended to firm ground. William did not believe in taking chances.
“Good-afternoon, William,” said Roger brightly.
“Arternoon, sir,” William responded suspiciously.
“I’ve just been having a chat with your wife, William.”
William grunted noncommittally.
“I was telling her that a friend of mine, whom I expected to come up to the house to see me last night, never turned up; and I was wondering if you’d seen anything of him down at the lodge.”
William ostentatiously busied himself with a small plant.
“Never see’d no one,” he observed with decision.
“No? Never mind, then. It doesn’t really matter. That’s an interesting job you’ve got on hand, William. You take a plant out of its pot, sniff its roots and put it back again; is that it? Now what operation do you call that in the science of horticulture?”
William hastily relinquished the plant and glowered at his interlocutor.
“Some folks mayn’t have no work to do,” he remarked darkly; “but other folks ’ave.”
“Meaning yourself, I take it?” Roger said approvingly. “That’s right. Work away. Nothing like it, is there? Keeps you cheerful and bright and contented. Great thing, work, I agree with you.”
A flicker of interest passed across William’s countenance. “What did that there Mr. Stanworth want to shoot hisself for, eh?” he demanded suddenly.
“I don’t know, to tell you the truth,” said Roger, somewhat taken aback at the unexpectedness of this query. “Why, have you got any ideas about it?”
“I don’t ’old with it meself,” said William primly. “Not with sooeycide.”
“You’re absolutely right, William,” Roger replied warmly. “If more people were like you, there’d be—there’d be less suicides, undoubtedly. It’s an untidy habit, to say the least.”
“It ain’t acting right,” William pursued firmly. “That’s what it ain’t.”
“You put it in a nutshell, William; it isn’t. In fact, it’s acting all wrong. By the way, William, somebody or other was telling me that a stranger had been seen about the grounds during the last day or two. You noticed him by any chance?”
“Stranger? What sort of a stranger?”
“Oh, the usual sort; a head and four pairs of fingers, you know. This particular one, they said, was a rather large man. Have you seen a rather large strange man round the house lately?”
William cogitated deeply.
“I ’ave an’ all.”
“Have you, though? When?”
William cogitated again. “It ’ud be a matter of ha’-past eight last night,” he announced at last. “Ha’-past eight it ’ud be, as near as anything. I was a-settin’ out in front o’ the lodge, an’ up he walks, bold as brass, an’ nods at me an’ goes on up the drive.”
Roger exchanged glances with Alec.
“Yes, William?” he said warmly. “A man you’d never seen before? A fairly large man?”
“A very large man,” William corrected meticulously.
“A very large man. Excellent! Go on. What happened?”
“Well, I says to the missus, ‘Oo’s that?’ I says. ‘A-walkin’ up the drive as if he owned the place.’ ” William pondered. “ ‘As if heownedthe place,’ I says,” he repeated firmly.
“And a very good thing to say, too. Well?”
“ ‘Oh, ’im?’ she says. ‘’E’s the cook’s brother,’ she says. ‘I was interjuiced to ’im at Helchester the other day,’ she says. ‘At least, shesays’e’s ’er brother,’ she says.” A strange rasping noise in his throat appeared to indicate that William was amused. “ ‘At least, shesays’e’s ’er brother,’ she says,” he repeated with much enjoyment.
“Oh!” Roger exclaimed, somewhat dashed. “Oh, did she? And did you see him again, William?”
“That I did. Back ’e come nigh on a quarter of a hower later, an’ cook with ’im, a-hangin’ on ’is arm like what she ought to have known better not to ’ave done,” William rejoined, suddenly stern. “I don’t ’old with it meself, I don’t,” added this severe moralist. “Not at ’er age, I don’t.” His expression relaxed reminiscently. “ ‘At least, shesays’e’s ’er brother,’ she says,” he added, with a sudden rasp.
“I see,” said Roger. “Thank you, William. Well, I suppose we mustn’t interrupt you any more. Come on, Alec.”
Slowly and sadly they made their way back to the house.
“William got his own back then, if he only knew it,” Roger said with a wry smile. “I did think for a moment that we might be getting at something at last.”
“You really are a hell of an optimist, Roger,” Alec observed wonderingly.
Their path took them past the library, and as they reached the bed in which the footprints had been discovered Roger instinctively paused. The next moment he darted forward and stared with incredulous eyes at the bed.
“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, clutching Alec’s arm and pointing with an excited finger. “Look! They’ve gone, both of them! They’ve been smoothed out!”
“Great Scott, so they have!”
The two gazed at each other with wide eyes.
“So Jeffersondidhear what we were talking about!” Roger almost whispered. “I have an idea that things are going to get rather exciting very soon, after all.”