Chapter IVI am now driven to attempt the task, which I had hoped to escape, of a topographical description. To begin with what is of least importance for the present. The village of Long Wilton lies in the valley of a little stream, and two roads run Northwards from the village along the opposite sides of the valley. The road along the Western side leads up a steep hill to the church, built at some distance from the village for the benefit of the former owners of the manor house. Just beyond the church lies a house which was the manor house, but has now lost its identity in improvements and extensions and become a new and not very beautiful hotel. This hotel owes its origin to the South-Western Counties Development Company, Limited, which discovered in its neighbourhood promising golf links, whose promise may be fulfilled when the extension of the railway is completed. I ought to but do not thank the Company for a liberal contribution made for the reseating of the church in the days of my predecessor. The hotel spoils the view from Grenvile Combe, across the valley. Its upper windows command a prospect of the whole of Peters’ grounds. This, however, does not concern us yet.The road on the other side of the valley leads to some outlying hamlets which form part of the parish. On the right hand of it, as you go Northwards, the ground rises steeply towards a wide tract of moorland. About a quarter of a mile out of the village a grass lane diverges from the road and leads in a North-Westerly direction. Grenvile Combe is a little property of some ten acres lying between the grass lane and the road, and bordered on the North by a fir plantation which extends from the road to the lane. The cottage, or lodge, which was then Trethewy’s, stands close to the Southern corner of the grounds, where the grass lane turns off; and the gate of the drive is close by. The stables, which Peters had not used of late, stand on a detached piece of the property across the road. The house itself is near the fir plantation. The back of it looks out upon a steeply rising pasture field which lies along the grass lane. The front looks (across the drive, a strip of lawn and the road) to the stream and to the church and that ugly hotel on the little hill beyond. Peters’ study was in the front of the house at the North-East corner of the main block of the building, in other words, it was on your left as you entered at the front door; and his bedroom was just above it. A path leads from the drive under the North wall of the house to the kitchen entrance, and on the left of this path, as one goes towards the kitchen, stands an out-building in which is the pump. A shrubbery of berberis and box and laurel, starting near the house, just across the path, skirts round the blind end of the drive, and straggling along under the low brick wall, which separates the drive and front lawn from the fir plantation, ends at a fine old yew tree which stands just by the road. All along the front of the house there is a narrow “half area,” intended to give so much light and air, as servants were once held to deserve, to the now disused dungeons where the dinners of former owners had been cooked.In that area right below the unlatched window we saw a ladder lying, a short light ladder, but just long enough for an active man to have reached the window by it. Now the snow had come with a North-East wind, and any one who may have wrestled with my essay in topography will readily understand that just here was a narrow tract where very little snow had fallen and the frozen ground was mostly bare. There was accordingly no clear indication that the ladder had ever actually been reared towards the window, but it might have been. The path to the kitchen door was clear enough too, and a man might have picked his way just thereabouts and left not a footprint behind. Casting about like a hound, the Superintendent had found some footprints near, before his companions had begun seeking; footprints pointing both ways. He immediately returned to the house and got some bundles of chips for kindling, with which to mark the place of the footprints he discovered. Callaghan had joined us, and he and I and the Sergeant followed the Superintendent, keeping, as he bade us, carefully a little behind him. In a moment it was plain that some man had climbed the wall out of the fir plantation, not far from the yew tree, that he had crept along the edge of the lawn, planting his feet most of the way under the edge of the berberis shrub, but now and then, for no obvious cause, but perhaps in guilty haste, deviating on to the lawn where his tracks now showed in the snow. He had made his stealthy way, not quite stealthy enough for him, round the end of the drive; no doubt he had found the ladder somewhere up that side path, no doubt he had opened the latch in the well-known way, entered through the window, done the deed, slipped out and left his ladder where we found it; and there were his footprints, returning by the way he came to the same point in the wall.Here we paused for a moment. Not a word was said as to the inferences that we all drew from those few footprints, but the Superintendent sharply asked the Sergeant, “Why was that trail not found and followed to an end this morning?” Poor Sergeant Speke looked for an instant like a detected criminal, but he pulled himself together and made sturdy answer: “I think, sir, it was not there this morning”. “Think!” said the Superintendent, and in a very few minutes from the discovery of the first footprint, he and all of us were over the wall and in the fir plantation. And there we paused again, for the fir boughs also had kept out the snow, and the carpet of fir needles showed no distinct traces of feet. Eventually—it seemed a long time but it was a short time—we found where the fugitive had emerged from the fir plantation over some iron hurdles into Peters’ field and along a little sort of gulley that there ran from the plantation half-way along the field. “Not the best place to break cover, but their wits are not always about them,” said the Superintendent, and he pointed to a wedge-shaped snowless tract which, caused by some extra shelter from the wind, extended from the wall, tapering towards a clump of gorse bushes. Then he sped on the trail, making the rest of us spread out to make sure that there were no other tracks across the field. Southwards, right along the field, the trail led till he, and we rejoining him, scrambled out of the field, where our quarry must have scrambled, into the green lane about two hundred yards from Trethewy’s cottage. Thus far, but no farther; along the now well-trodden snow of the lane it was idle to look for the print of any particular foot. “I am thinking of the hours of lost daylight,” said the Superintendent, now depressed. “Was this a likely way for a man making for the moors, Rector?” “You need not look that far,” said Callaghan; “those footprints were the man Trethewy’s. Down at the cottage yonder,” he added for the Superintendent’s benefit. “They are the track of hobnailed boots, sir,” said the Superintendent, “that’s all that they are.” “Do you see that pattern?” said Callaghan; and there was something odd about the pattern of the nails in the last footprint just beneath our eyes. “You never saw it in any footprint before, but I did, and it is the pattern I saw in Trethewy’s footmark not a fortnight ago when last there was snow.” He was strung up again now, and he had strangely quick eyes when he was strung up. “That is the man’s footprint,” he said, “and there are the man’s boots.” Some way along the ditch, under brambles and among old kettles and sardine tins and worn-out boots (for plentiful rubbish had been dumped just here), lay quite a good pair of boots, old boots truly, but not boots that I should have thrown away, whatever a poorer man might do. The Superintendent had them instantly. “Odd they are so full of snow,” said Callaghan; “he did not lace them or they were much too big for him. But what possessed him to throw them away, anyhow?” “Oh,” said the Superintendent, “they mostly have plenty of half-clever ideas. It takes a stupid one to escape me, sir,” he interposed to me with a sort of chuckle, for he had lost no more time in appropriating the discovery than he had done in picking up the boots. “The clever idea this time,” he added, “was just this—the lane is trampled enough now, but in the morning, when fewer feet had been along it, you might have picked out the print of a particular boot by careful looking. But a fellow in his socks could shuffle along among the few footmarks and make no trace that you could swear to; only he would not go far like that by daylight when the people he passed would notice his feet. Of course it was madness not to hide the boots better, but I expect he had taken a good deal of liquor to screw himself up to his work. Is that Mr. Trethewy’s house, sir?” for we were by this time close to it.I had been keen enough, as any man would have been, from the moment we saw the ladder till now, but I hope it will be easily understood why I did not accompany the hunters to Trethewy’s cottage. I went back to the house to find Vane-Cartwright, who had stayed there, as it seemed, reading gloomily and intently all the afternoon, and to arrange for the prompt removal of him and Callaghan from that now cheerless house to the Rectory. The housekeeper, oddly enough, was quite ready to stay, and she kept the housemaid with her.Callaghan, who soon came back, said that Trethewy had come to the door of his house when they knocked. “Mr. Trethewy,” said the Superintendent, “do you know these boots?” He answered composedly enough, “They look like my boots, but I do not know where you found them”. Here Mrs. Trethewy came forward and said in a very unconvincing tone (so Callaghan insisted), “Why, that is the pair I have looked for high and low these three days. Do not you remember, Reuben, how angry you were they were lost?”We left the house for the Rectory soon (my man was to come with a barrow for the luggage), but before we left, one further piece of evidence had accidentally come to my knowledge. I learnt from something which the housekeeper was saying to the maid that the ladder was one which was always kept in the pump-house, that the pump-house was always kept locked, and that Trethewy kept the key.
I am now driven to attempt the task, which I had hoped to escape, of a topographical description. To begin with what is of least importance for the present. The village of Long Wilton lies in the valley of a little stream, and two roads run Northwards from the village along the opposite sides of the valley. The road along the Western side leads up a steep hill to the church, built at some distance from the village for the benefit of the former owners of the manor house. Just beyond the church lies a house which was the manor house, but has now lost its identity in improvements and extensions and become a new and not very beautiful hotel. This hotel owes its origin to the South-Western Counties Development Company, Limited, which discovered in its neighbourhood promising golf links, whose promise may be fulfilled when the extension of the railway is completed. I ought to but do not thank the Company for a liberal contribution made for the reseating of the church in the days of my predecessor. The hotel spoils the view from Grenvile Combe, across the valley. Its upper windows command a prospect of the whole of Peters’ grounds. This, however, does not concern us yet.
The road on the other side of the valley leads to some outlying hamlets which form part of the parish. On the right hand of it, as you go Northwards, the ground rises steeply towards a wide tract of moorland. About a quarter of a mile out of the village a grass lane diverges from the road and leads in a North-Westerly direction. Grenvile Combe is a little property of some ten acres lying between the grass lane and the road, and bordered on the North by a fir plantation which extends from the road to the lane. The cottage, or lodge, which was then Trethewy’s, stands close to the Southern corner of the grounds, where the grass lane turns off; and the gate of the drive is close by. The stables, which Peters had not used of late, stand on a detached piece of the property across the road. The house itself is near the fir plantation. The back of it looks out upon a steeply rising pasture field which lies along the grass lane. The front looks (across the drive, a strip of lawn and the road) to the stream and to the church and that ugly hotel on the little hill beyond. Peters’ study was in the front of the house at the North-East corner of the main block of the building, in other words, it was on your left as you entered at the front door; and his bedroom was just above it. A path leads from the drive under the North wall of the house to the kitchen entrance, and on the left of this path, as one goes towards the kitchen, stands an out-building in which is the pump. A shrubbery of berberis and box and laurel, starting near the house, just across the path, skirts round the blind end of the drive, and straggling along under the low brick wall, which separates the drive and front lawn from the fir plantation, ends at a fine old yew tree which stands just by the road. All along the front of the house there is a narrow “half area,” intended to give so much light and air, as servants were once held to deserve, to the now disused dungeons where the dinners of former owners had been cooked.
In that area right below the unlatched window we saw a ladder lying, a short light ladder, but just long enough for an active man to have reached the window by it. Now the snow had come with a North-East wind, and any one who may have wrestled with my essay in topography will readily understand that just here was a narrow tract where very little snow had fallen and the frozen ground was mostly bare. There was accordingly no clear indication that the ladder had ever actually been reared towards the window, but it might have been. The path to the kitchen door was clear enough too, and a man might have picked his way just thereabouts and left not a footprint behind. Casting about like a hound, the Superintendent had found some footprints near, before his companions had begun seeking; footprints pointing both ways. He immediately returned to the house and got some bundles of chips for kindling, with which to mark the place of the footprints he discovered. Callaghan had joined us, and he and I and the Sergeant followed the Superintendent, keeping, as he bade us, carefully a little behind him. In a moment it was plain that some man had climbed the wall out of the fir plantation, not far from the yew tree, that he had crept along the edge of the lawn, planting his feet most of the way under the edge of the berberis shrub, but now and then, for no obvious cause, but perhaps in guilty haste, deviating on to the lawn where his tracks now showed in the snow. He had made his stealthy way, not quite stealthy enough for him, round the end of the drive; no doubt he had found the ladder somewhere up that side path, no doubt he had opened the latch in the well-known way, entered through the window, done the deed, slipped out and left his ladder where we found it; and there were his footprints, returning by the way he came to the same point in the wall.
Here we paused for a moment. Not a word was said as to the inferences that we all drew from those few footprints, but the Superintendent sharply asked the Sergeant, “Why was that trail not found and followed to an end this morning?” Poor Sergeant Speke looked for an instant like a detected criminal, but he pulled himself together and made sturdy answer: “I think, sir, it was not there this morning”. “Think!” said the Superintendent, and in a very few minutes from the discovery of the first footprint, he and all of us were over the wall and in the fir plantation. And there we paused again, for the fir boughs also had kept out the snow, and the carpet of fir needles showed no distinct traces of feet. Eventually—it seemed a long time but it was a short time—we found where the fugitive had emerged from the fir plantation over some iron hurdles into Peters’ field and along a little sort of gulley that there ran from the plantation half-way along the field. “Not the best place to break cover, but their wits are not always about them,” said the Superintendent, and he pointed to a wedge-shaped snowless tract which, caused by some extra shelter from the wind, extended from the wall, tapering towards a clump of gorse bushes. Then he sped on the trail, making the rest of us spread out to make sure that there were no other tracks across the field. Southwards, right along the field, the trail led till he, and we rejoining him, scrambled out of the field, where our quarry must have scrambled, into the green lane about two hundred yards from Trethewy’s cottage. Thus far, but no farther; along the now well-trodden snow of the lane it was idle to look for the print of any particular foot. “I am thinking of the hours of lost daylight,” said the Superintendent, now depressed. “Was this a likely way for a man making for the moors, Rector?” “You need not look that far,” said Callaghan; “those footprints were the man Trethewy’s. Down at the cottage yonder,” he added for the Superintendent’s benefit. “They are the track of hobnailed boots, sir,” said the Superintendent, “that’s all that they are.” “Do you see that pattern?” said Callaghan; and there was something odd about the pattern of the nails in the last footprint just beneath our eyes. “You never saw it in any footprint before, but I did, and it is the pattern I saw in Trethewy’s footmark not a fortnight ago when last there was snow.” He was strung up again now, and he had strangely quick eyes when he was strung up. “That is the man’s footprint,” he said, “and there are the man’s boots.” Some way along the ditch, under brambles and among old kettles and sardine tins and worn-out boots (for plentiful rubbish had been dumped just here), lay quite a good pair of boots, old boots truly, but not boots that I should have thrown away, whatever a poorer man might do. The Superintendent had them instantly. “Odd they are so full of snow,” said Callaghan; “he did not lace them or they were much too big for him. But what possessed him to throw them away, anyhow?” “Oh,” said the Superintendent, “they mostly have plenty of half-clever ideas. It takes a stupid one to escape me, sir,” he interposed to me with a sort of chuckle, for he had lost no more time in appropriating the discovery than he had done in picking up the boots. “The clever idea this time,” he added, “was just this—the lane is trampled enough now, but in the morning, when fewer feet had been along it, you might have picked out the print of a particular boot by careful looking. But a fellow in his socks could shuffle along among the few footmarks and make no trace that you could swear to; only he would not go far like that by daylight when the people he passed would notice his feet. Of course it was madness not to hide the boots better, but I expect he had taken a good deal of liquor to screw himself up to his work. Is that Mr. Trethewy’s house, sir?” for we were by this time close to it.
I had been keen enough, as any man would have been, from the moment we saw the ladder till now, but I hope it will be easily understood why I did not accompany the hunters to Trethewy’s cottage. I went back to the house to find Vane-Cartwright, who had stayed there, as it seemed, reading gloomily and intently all the afternoon, and to arrange for the prompt removal of him and Callaghan from that now cheerless house to the Rectory. The housekeeper, oddly enough, was quite ready to stay, and she kept the housemaid with her.
Callaghan, who soon came back, said that Trethewy had come to the door of his house when they knocked. “Mr. Trethewy,” said the Superintendent, “do you know these boots?” He answered composedly enough, “They look like my boots, but I do not know where you found them”. Here Mrs. Trethewy came forward and said in a very unconvincing tone (so Callaghan insisted), “Why, that is the pair I have looked for high and low these three days. Do not you remember, Reuben, how angry you were they were lost?”
We left the house for the Rectory soon (my man was to come with a barrow for the luggage), but before we left, one further piece of evidence had accidentally come to my knowledge. I learnt from something which the housekeeper was saying to the maid that the ladder was one which was always kept in the pump-house, that the pump-house was always kept locked, and that Trethewy kept the key.