Bab Bab 6 · THE HOLE IN THE WALL

. THE HOLE IN THE WALL

Two men, the one an architect and the other an archaeologist, met on

the steps of the great house at Prior's Park; and their host, Lord

Bulmer, in his breezy way, thought it natural to introduce them. It

must be confessed that he was hazy as well as breezy, and had no

very clear connection in his mind, beyond the sense that an

architect and an archaeologist begin with the same series of

letters. The world must remain in a reverent doubt as to whether he

would, on the same principles, have presented a diplomatist to a

dipsomaniac or a ratiocinator to a rat catcher. He was a big, fair,

bull-necked young man, abounding in outward gestures, unconsciously

flapping his gloves and flourishing his stick.

"You two ought to have something to talk about," he said,

cheerfully. "Old buildings and all that sort of thing; this is

rather an old building, by the way, though I say it who shouldn't. I

must ask you to excuse me a moment; I've got to go and see about the

cards for this Christmas romp my sister's arranging. We hope to see

you all there, of course. Juliet wants it to be a fancy-dress

affair--abbots and crusaders and all that. My ancestors, I suppose,

after all."

"I trust the abbot was not an ancestor," said the archaeological

gentleman, with a smile.

"Only a sort of great-uncle, I imagine," answered the other,

laughing; then his rather rambling eye rolled round the ordered

landscape in front of the house; an artificial sheet of water

ornamented with an antiquated nymph in the center and surrounded by

a park of tall trees now gray and black and frosty, for it was in

the depth of a severe winter.

"It's getting jolly cold," his lordship continued. "My sister hopes

we shall have some skating as well as dancing."

"If the crusaders come in full armor," said the other, "you must be

careful not to drown your ancestors."

"Oh, there's no fear of that," answered Bulmer; "this precious lake

of ours is not two feet deep anywhere." And with one of his

flourishing gestures he stuck his stick into the water to

demonstrate its shallowness. They could see the short end bent in

the water, so that he seemed for a moment to lean his large weight

on a breaking staff.

"The worst you can expect is to see an abbot sit down rather

suddenly," he added, turning away. "Well, au revoir; I'll let you

know about it later."

The archaeologist and the architect were left on the great stone

steps smiling at each other; but whatever their common interests,

they presented a considerable personal contrast, and the fanciful

might even have found some contradiction in each considered

individually. The former, a Mr. James Haddow, came from a drowsy den

in the Inns of Court, full of leather and parchment, for the law was

his profession and history only his hobby; he was indeed, among

other things, the solicitor and agent of the Prior's Park estate.

But he himself was far from drowsy and seemed remarkably wide awake,

with shrewd and prominent blue eyes, and red hair brushed as neatly

as his very neat costume. The latter, whose name was Leonard Crane,

came straight from a crude and almost cockney office of builders and

house agents in the neighboring suburb, sunning itself at the end of

a new row of jerry-built houses with plans in very bright colors and

notices in very large letters. But a serious observer, at a second

glance, might have seen in his eyes something of that shining sleep

that is called vision; and his yellow hair, while not affectedly

long, was unaffectedly untidy. It was a manifest if melancholy truth

that the architect was an artist. But the artistic temperament was

far from explaining him; there was something else about him that was

not definable, but which some even felt to be dangerous. Despite his

dreaminess, he would sometimes surprise his friends with arts and

even sports apart from his ordinary life, like memories of some

previous existence. On this occasion, nevertheless, he hastened to

disclaim any authority on the other man's hobby.

"I mustn't appear on false pretences," he said, with a smile. "I

hardly even know what an archaeologist is, except that a rather

rusty remnant of Greek suggests that he is a man who studies old

things."

"Yes," replied Haddow, grimly. "An archaeologist is a man who

studies old things and finds they are new."

Crane looked at him steadily for a moment and then smiled again.

"Dare one suggest," he said, "that some of the things we have been

talking about are among the old things that turn out not to be old?"

His companion also was silent for a moment, and the smile on his

rugged face was fainter as he replied, quietly:

"The wall round the park is really old. The one gate in it is

Gothic, and I cannot find any trace of destruction or restoration.

But the house and the estate generally--well the romantic ideas read

into these things are often rather recent romances, things almost

like fashionable novels. For instance, the very name of this place,

Prior's Park, makes everybody think of it as a moonlit mediaeval

abbey; I dare say the spiritualists by this time have discovered the

ghost of a monk there. But, according to the only authoritative

study of the matter I can find, the place was simply called Prior's

as any rural place is called Podger's. It was the house of a Mr.

Prior, a farmhouse, probably, that stood here at some time or other

and was a local landmark. Oh, there are a great many examples of the

same thing, here and everywhere else. This suburb of ours used to be

a village, and because some of the people slurred the name and

pronounced it Holliwell, many a minor poet indulged in fancies about

a Holy Well, with spells and fairies and all the rest of it, filling

the suburban drawing-rooms with the Celtic twilight. Whereas anyone

acquainted with the facts knows that 'Hollinwall' simply means 'the

hole in the wall,' and probably referred to some quite trivial

accident. That's what I mean when I say that we don't so much find

old things as we find new ones."

Crane seemed to have grown somewhat inattentive to the little

lecture on antiquities and novelties, and the cause of his

restlessness was soon apparent, and indeed approaching. Lord

Bulmer's sister, Juliet Bray, was coming slowly across the lawn,

accompanied by one gentleman and followed by two others. The young

architect was in the illogical condition of mind in which he

preferred three to one.

The man walking with the lady was no other than the eminent Prince

Borodino, who was at least as famous as a distinguished diplomatist

ought to be, in the interests of what is called secret diplomacy. He

had been paying a round of visits at various English country houses,

and exactly what he was doing for diplomacy at Prior's Park was as

much a secret as any diplomatist could desire. The obvious thing to

say of his appearance was that he would have been extremely handsome

if he had not been entirely bald. But, indeed, that would itself be

a rather bald way of putting it. Fantastic as it sounds, it would

fit the case better to say that people would have been surprised to

see hair growing on him; as surprised as if they had found hair

growing on the bust of a Roman emperor. His tall figure was buttoned

up in a tight-waisted fashion that rather accentuated his potential

bulk, and he wore a red flower in his buttonhole. Of the two men

walking behind one was also bald, but in a more partial and also a

more premature fashion, for his drooping mustache was still yellow,

and if his eyes were somewhat heavy it was with languor and not with

age. It was Horne Fisher, and he was talking as easily and idly

about everything as he always did. His companion was a more

striking, and even more sinister, figure, and he had the added

importance of being Lord Bulmer's oldest and most intimate friend. He

was generally known with a severe simplicity as Mr. Brain; but it was

understood that he had been a judge and police official in India, and

that he had enemies, who had represented his measures against crime as

themselves almost criminal. He was a brown skeleton of a man with dark,

deep, sunken eyes and a black mustache that hid the meaning of his

mouth. Though he had the look of one wasted by some tropical disease,

his movements were much more alert than those of his lounging companion.

"It's all settled," announced the lady, with great animation, when

they came within hailing distance. "You've all got to put on

masquerade things and very likely skates as well, though the prince

says they don't go with it; but we don't care about that. It's

freezing already, and we don't often get such a chance in England."

"Even in India we don't exactly skate all the year round," observed

Mr. Brain.

"And even Italy is not primarily associated with ice," said the

Italian.

"Italy is primarily associated with ices," remarked Mr. Horne

Fisher. "I mean with ice cream men. Most people in this country

imagine that Italy is entirely populated with ice cream men and

organ grinders. There certainly are a lot of them; perhaps they're

an invading army in disguise."

"How do you know they are not the secret emissaries of our

diplomacy?" asked the prince, with a slightly scornful smile. "An

army of organ grinders might pick up hints, and their monkeys might

pick up all sort of things."

"The organs are organized in fact," said the flippant Mr. Fisher.

"Well, I've known it pretty cold before now in Italy and even in

India, up on the Himalayan slopes. The ice on our own little round

pond will be quite cozy by comparison."

Juliet Bray was an attractive lady with dark hair and eyebrows and

dancing eyes, and there was a geniality and even generosity in her

rather imperious ways. In most matters she could command her

brother, though that nobleman, like many other men of vague ideas,

was not without a touch of the bully when he was at bay. She could

certainly command her guests, even to the extent of decking out the

most respectable and reluctant of them with her mediaeval

masquerade. And it really seemed as if she could command the

elements also, like a witch. For the weather steadily hardened and

sharpened; that night the ice of the lake, glimmering in the

moonlight, was like a marble floor, and they had begun to dance and

skate on it before it was dark.

Prior's Park, or, more properly, the surrounding district of

Holinwall, was a country seat that had become a suburb; having once

had only a dependent village at its doors, it now found outside all

its doors the signals of the expansion of London. Mr. Haddow, who

was engaged in historical researches both in the library and the

locality, could find little assistance in the latter. He had already

realized, from the documents, that Prior's Park had originally been

something like Prior's Farm, named after some local figure, but the

new social conditions were all against his tracing the story by its

traditions. Had any of the real rustics remained, he would probably

have found some lingering legend of Mr. Prior, however remote he

might be. But the new nomadic population of clerks and artisans,

constantly shifting their homes from one suburb to another, or their

children from one school to another, could have no corporate

continuity. They had all that forgetfulness of history that goes

everywhere with the extension of education.

Nevertheless, when he came out of the library next morning and saw

the wintry trees standing round the frozen pond like a black forest,

he felt he might well have been far in the depths of the country.

The old wall running round the park kept that inclosure itself still

entirely rural and romantic, and one could easily imagine that the

depths of that dark forest faded away indefinitely into distant

vales and hills. The gray and black and silver of the wintry wood

were all the more severe or somber as a contrast to the colored

carnival groups that already stood on and around the frozen pool.

For the house party had already flung themselves impatiently into

fancy dress, and the lawyer, with his neat black suit and red hair,

was the only modern figure among them.

"Aren't you going to dress up?" asked Juliet, indignantly shaking at

him a horned and towering blue headdress of the fourteenth century

which framed her face very becomingly, fantastic as it was.

"Everybody here has to be in the Middle Ages. Even Mr. Brain has put

on a sort of brown dressing gown and says he's a monk; and Mr.

Fisher got hold of some old potato sacks in the kitchen and sewed

them together; he's supposed to be a monk, too. As to the prince,

he's perfectly glorious, in great crimson robes as a cardinal. He

looks as if he could poison everybody. You simply must be

something."

"I will be something later in the day," he replied. "At present I am

nothing but an antiquary and an attorney. I have to see your brother

presently, about some legal business and also some local

investigations he asked me to make. I must look a little like a

steward when I give an account of my stewardship."

"Oh, but my brother has dressed up!" cried the girl. "Very much so.

No end, if I may say so. Why he's bearing down on you now in all his

glory."

The noble lord was indeed marching toward them in a magnificent

sixteenth-century costume of purple and gold, with a gold-hilted

sword and a plumed cap, and manners to match. Indeed, there was

something more than his usual expansiveness of bodily action in his

appearance at that moment. It almost seemed, so to speak, that the

plumes on his hat had gone to his head. He flapped his great,

gold-lined cloak like the wings of a fairy king in a pantomime; he

even drew his sword with a flourish and waved it about as he did his

walking stick. In the light of after events there seemed to be

something monstrous and ominous about that exuberance, something of

the spirit that is called fey. At the time it merely crossed a few

people's minds that he might possibly be drunk.

As he strode toward his sister the first figure he passed was that

of Leonard Crane, clad in Lincoln green, with the horn and baldrick

and sword appropriate to Robin Hood; for he was standing nearest to

the lady, where, indeed, he might have been found during a

disproportionate part of the time. He had displayed one of his

buried talents in the matter of skating, and now that the skating

was over seemed disposed to prolong the partnership. The boisterous

Bulmer playfully made a pass at him with his drawn sword, going

forward with the lunge in the proper fencing fashion, and making a

somewhat too familiar Shakespearean quotation about a rodent and a

Venetian coin.

Probably in Crane also there was a subdued excitement just then;

anyhow, in one flash he had drawn his own sword and parried; and

then suddenly, to the surprise of everyone, Bulmer's weapon seemed

to spring out of his hand into the air and rolled away on the

ringing ice.

"Well, I never!" said the lady, as if with justifiable indignation.

"You never told me you could fence, too."

Bulmer put up his sword with an air rather bewildered than annoyed,

which increased the impression of something irresponsible in his

mood at the moment; then he turned rather abruptly to his lawyer,

saying:

"We can settle up about the estate after dinner; I've missed nearly

all the skating as it is, and I doubt if the ice will hold till

to-morrow night. I think I shall get up early and have a spin by

myself."

"You won't be disturbed with my company," said Horne Fisher, in his

weary fashion. "If I have to begin the day with ice, in the American

fashion, I prefer it in smaller quantities. But no early hours for

me in December. The early bird catches the cold."

"Oh, I shan't die of catching a cold," answered Bulmer, and

laughed.

* * *

A considerable group of the skating party had consisted of the

guests staying at the house, and the rest had tailed off in twos and

threes some time before most of the guests began to retire for the

night. Neighbors, always invited to Prior's Park on such occasions,

went back to their own houses in motors or on foot; the legal and

archeological gentleman had returned to the Inns of Court by a late

train, to get a paper called for during his consultation with his

client; and most of the other guests were drifting and lingering at

various stages on their way up to bed. Horne Fisher, as if to

deprive himself of any excuse for his refusal of early rising, had

been the first to retire to his room; but, sleepy as he looked, he

could not sleep. He had picked up from a table the book of

antiquarian topography, in which Haddow had found his first hints

about the origin of the local name, and, being a man with a quiet

and quaint capacity for being interested in anything, he began to

read it steadily, making notes now and then of details on which his

previous reading left him with a certain doubt about his present

conclusions. His room was the one nearest to the lake in the center

of the woods, and was therefore the quietest, and none of the last

echoes of the evening's festivity could reach him. He had followed

carefully the argument which established the derivation from Mr.

Prior's farm and the hole in the wall, and disposed of any

fashionable fancy about monks and magic wells, when he began to be

conscious of a noise audible in the frozen silence of the night. It

was not a particularly loud noise, but it seemed to consist of a

series of thuds or heavy blows, such as might be struck on a wooden

door by a man seeking to enter. They were followed by something like

a faint creak or crack, as if the obstacle had either been opened or

had given way. He opened his own bedroom door and listened, but as

he heard talk and laughter all over the lower floors, he had no

reason to fear that a summons would be neglected or the house left

without protection. He went to his open window, looking out over the

frozen pond and the moonlit statue in the middle of their circle of

darkling woods, and listened again. But silence had returned to that

silent place, and, after straining his ears for a considerable time,

he could hear nothing but the solitary hoot of a distant departing

train. Then he reminded himself how many nameless noises can be

heard by the wakeful during the most ordinary night, and shrugging

his shoulders, went wearily to bed.

He awoke suddenly and sat up in bed with his ears filled, as with

thunder, with the throbbing echoes of a rending cry. He remained

rigid for a moment, and then sprang out of bed, throwing on the

loose gown of sacking he had worn all day. He went first to the

window, which was open, but covered with a thick curtain, so that

his room was still completely dark; but when he tossed the curtain

aside and put his head out, he saw that a gray and silver daybreak

had already appeared behind the black woods that surrounded the

little lake, and that was all that he did see. Though the sound had

certainly come in through the open window from this direction, the

whole scene was still and empty under the morning light as under the

moonlight. Then the long, rather lackadaisical hand he had laid on a

window sill gripped it tighter, as if to master a tremor, and his

peering blue eyes grew bleak with fear. It may seem that his emotion

was exaggerated and needless, considering the effort of common sense

by which he had conquered his nervousness about the noise on the

previous night. But that had been a very different sort of noise. It

might have been made by half a hundred things, from the chopping of

wood to the breaking of bottles. There was only one thing in nature

from which could come the sound that echoed through the dark house

at daybreak. It was the awful articulate voice of man; and it was

something worse, for he knew what man.

He knew also that it had been a shout for help. It seemed to him

that he had heard the very word; but the word, short as it was, had

been swallowed up, as if the man had been stifled or snatched away

even as he spoke. Only the mocking reverberations of it remained

even in his memory, but he had no doubt of the original voice. He

had no doubt that the great bull's voice of Francis Bray, Baron

Bulmer, had been heard for the last time between the darkness and

the lifting dawn.

How long he stood there he never knew, but he was startled into life

by the first living thing that he saw stirring in that half-frozen

landscape. Along the path beside the lake, and immediately under his

window, a figure was walking slowly and softly, but with great

composure--a stately figure in robes of a splendid scarlet; it was

the Italian prince, still in his cardinal's costume. Most of the

company had indeed lived in their costumes for the last day or two,

and Fisher himself had assumed his frock of sacking as a convenient

dressing gown; but there seemed, nevertheless, something unusually

finished and formal, in the way of an early bird, about this

magnificent red cockatoo. It was as if the early bird had been up

all night.

"What is the matter?" he called, sharply, leaning out of the window,

and the Italian turned up his great yellow face like a mask of

brass.

"We had better discuss it downstairs," said Prince Borodino.

Fisher ran downstairs, and encountered the great, red-robed figure

entering the doorway and blocking the entrance with his bulk.

"Did you hear that cry?" demanded Fisher.

"I heard a noise and I came out," answered the diplomatist, and his

face was too dark in the shadow for its expression to be read.

"It was Bulmer's voice," insisted Fisher. "I'll swear it was

Bulmer's voice."

"Did you know him well?" asked the other.

The question seemed irrelevant, though it was not illogical, and

Fisher could only answer in a random fashion that he knew Lord

Bulmer only slightly.

"Nobody seems to have known him well," continued the Italian, in

level tones. "Nobody except that man Brain. Brain is rather older

than Bulmer, but I fancy they shared a good many secrets."

Fisher moved abruptly, as if waking from a momentary trance, and

said, in a new and more vigorous voice, "But look here, hadn't we

better get outside and see if anything has happened."

"The ice seems to be thawing," said the other, almost with

indifference.

When they emerged from the house, dark stains and stars in the gray

field of ice did indeed indicate that the frost was breaking up, as

their host had prophesied the day before, and the very memory of

yesterday brought back the mystery of to-day.

"He knew there would be a thaw," observed the prince. "He went out

skating quite early on purpose. Did he call out because he landed in

the water, do you think?"

Fisher looked puzzled. "Bulmer was the last man to bellow like that

because he got his boots wet. And that's all he could do here; the

water would hardly come up to the calf of a man of his size. You can

see the flat weeds on the floor of the lake, as if it were through a

thin pane of glass. No, if Bulmer had only broken the ice he

wouldn't have said much at the moment, though possibly a good deal

afterward. We should have found him stamping and damning up and down

this path, and calling for clean boots."

"Let us hope we shall find him as happily employed," remarked the

diplomatist. "In that case the voice must have come out of the

wood."

"I'll swear it didn't come out of the house," said Fisher; and the

two disappeared together into the twilight of wintry trees.

The plantation stood dark against the fiery colors of sunrise, a

black fringe having that feathery appearance which makes trees when

they are bare the very reverse of rugged. Hours and hours afterward,

when the same dense, but delicate, margin was dark against the

greenish colors opposite the sunset, the search thus begun at

sunrise had not come to an end. By successive stages, and to slowly

gathering groups of the company, it became apparent that the most

extraordinary of all gaps had appeared in the party; the guests

could find no trace of their host anywhere. The servants reported

that his bed had been slept in and his skates and his fancy costume

were gone, as if he had risen early for the purpose he had himself

avowed. But from the top of the house to the bottom, from the walls

round the park to the pond in the center, there was no trace of Lord

Bulmer, dead or alive. Horne Fisher realized that a chilling

premonition had already prevented him from expecting to find the man

alive. But his bald brow was wrinkled over an entirely new and

unnatural problem, in not finding the man at all.

He considered the possibility of Bulmer having gone off of his own

accord, for some reason; but after fully weighing it he finally

dismissed it. It was inconsistent with the unmistakable voice heard

at daybreak, and with many other practical obstacles. There was only

one gateway in the ancient and lofty wall round the small park; the

lodge keeper kept it locked till late in the morning, and the lodge

keeper had seen no one pass. Fisher was fairly sure that he had

before him a mathematical problem in an inclosed space. His instinct

had been from the first so attuned to the tragedy that it would have

been almost a relief to him to find the corpse. He would have been

grieved, but not horrified, to come on the nobleman's body dangling

from one of his own trees as from a gibbet, or floating in his own

pool like a pallid weed. What horrified him was to find nothing.

He soon become conscious that he was not alone even in his most

individual and isolated experiments. He often found a figure

following him like his shadow, in silent and almost secret clearings

in the plantation or outlying nooks and corners of the old wall. The

dark-mustached mouth was as mute as the deep eyes were mobile,

darting incessantly hither and thither, but it was clear that Brain

of the Indian police had taken up the trail like an old hunter after

a tiger. Seeing that he was the only personal friend of the vanished

man, this seemed natural enough, and Fisher resolved to deal frankly

with him.

"This silence is rather a social strain," he said. "May I break the

ice by talking about the weather?--which, by the way, has already

broken the ice. I know that breaking the ice might be a rather

melancholy metaphor in this case."

"I don't think so," replied Brain, shortly. "I don't fancy the ice

had much to do with it. I don't see how it could."

"What would you propose doing?" asked Fisher.

"Well, we've sent for the authorities, of course, but I hope to find

something out before they come," replied the Anglo-Indian. "I can't

say I have much hope from police methods in this country. Too much

red tape, habeas corpus and that sort of thing. What we want is to

see that nobody bolts; the nearest we could get to it would be to

collect the company and count them, so to speak. Nobody's left

lately, except that lawyer who was poking about for antiquities."

"Oh, he's out of it; he left last night," answered the other. "Eight

hours after Bulmer's chauffeur saw his lawyer off by the train I

heard Bulmer's own voice as plain as I hear yours now."

"I suppose you don't believe in spirits?" said the man from India.

After a pause he added: "There's somebody else I should like to

find, before we go after a fellow with an alibi in the Inner Temple.

What's become of that fellow in green--the architect dressed up as

a forester? I haven't seem him about."

Mr. Brain managed to secure his assembly of all the distracted

company before the arrival of the police. But when he first began

to comment once more on the young architect's delay in putting in

an appearance, he found himself in the presence of a minor mystery,

and a psychological development of an entirely unexpected kind.

Juliet Bray had confronted the catastrophe of her brother's

disappearance with a somber stoicism in which there was, perhaps,

more paralysis than pain; but when the other question came to the

surface she was both agitated and angry.

"We don't want to jump to any conclusions about anybody," Brain was

saying in his staccato style. "But we should like to know a little

more about Mr. Crane. Nobody seems to know much about him, or where

he comes from. And it seems a sort of coincidence that yesterday he

actually crossed swords with poor Bulmer, and could have stuck him,

too, since he showed himself the better swordsman. Of course, that

may be an accident and couldn't possibly be called a case against

anybody; but then we haven't the means to make a real case against

anybody. Till the police come we are only a pack of very amateur

sleuthhounds."

"And I think you're a pack of snobs," said Juliet. "Because Mr.

Crane is a genius who's made his own way, you try to suggest he's a

murderer without daring to say so. Because he wore a toy sword and

happened to know how to use it, you want us to believe he used it

like a bloodthirsty maniac for no reason in the world. And because

he could have hit my brother and didn't, you deduce that he did.

That's the sort of way you argue. And as for his having disappeared,

you're wrong in that as you are in everything else, for here he

comes."

And, indeed, the green figure of the fictitious Robin Hood slowly

detached itself from the gray background of the trees, and came

toward them as she spoke.

He approached the group slowly, but with composure; but he was

decidedly pale, and the eyes of Brain and Fisher had already taken

in one detail of the green-clad figure more clearly than all the

rest. The horn still swung from his baldrick, but the sword was

gone.

Rather to the surprise of the company, Brain did not follow up the

question thus suggested; but, while retaining an air of leading the

inquiry, had also an appearance of changing the subject.

"Now we're all assembled," he observed, quietly, "there is a

question I want to ask to begin with. Did anybody here actually see

Lord Bulmer this morning?"

Leonard Crane turned his pale face round the circle of faces till he

came to Juliet's; then he compressed his lips a little and said:

"Yes, I saw him."

"Was he alive and well?" asked Brain, quickly. "How was he

dressed?"

"He appeared exceedingly well," replied Crane, with a curious

intonation. "He was dressed as he was yesterday, in that purple

costume copied from the portrait of his ancestor in the sixteenth

century. He had his skates in his hand."

"And his sword at his side, I suppose," added the questioner. "Where

is your own sword, Mr. Crane?"

"I threw it away."

In the singular silence that ensued, the train of thought in many

minds became involuntarily a series of colored pictures.

They had grown used to their fanciful garments looking more gay and

gorgeous against the dark gray and streaky silver of the forest, so

that the moving figures glowed like stained-glass saints walking.

The effect had been more fitting because so many of them had idly

parodied pontifical or monastic dress. But the most arresting

attitude that remained in their memories had been anything but

merely monastic; that of the moment when the figure in bright green

and the other in vivid violet had for a moment made a silver cross

of their crossing swords. Even when it was a jest it had been

something of a drama; and it was a strange and sinister thought that

in the gray daybreak the same figures in the same posture might have

been repeated as a tragedy.

"Did you quarrel with him?" asked Brain, suddenly.

"Yes," replied the immovable man in green. "Or he quarreled with

me."

"Why did he quarrel with you?" asked the investigator; and Leonard

Crane made no reply.

Horne Fisher, curiously enough, had only given half his attention to

this crucial cross-examination. His heavy-lidded eyes had languidly

followed the figure of Prince Borodino, who at this stage had

strolled away toward the fringe of the wood; and, after a pause, as

of meditation, had disappeared into the darkness of the trees.

He was recalled from his irrelevance by the voice of Juliet Bray,

which rang out with an altogether new note of decision:

"If that is the difficulty, it had best be cleared up. I am engaged

to Mr. Crane, and when we told my brother he did not approve of it;

that is all."

Neither Brain nor Fisher exhibited any surprise, but the former

added, quietly:

"Except, I suppose, that he and your brother went off into the wood

to discuss it, where Mr. Crane mislaid his sword, not to mention his

companion."

"And may I ask," inquired Crane, with a certain flicker of mockery

passing over his pallid features, "what I am supposed to have done

with either of them? Let us adopt the cheerful thesis that I am a

murderer; it has yet to be shown that I am a magician. If I ran your

unfortunate friend through the body, what did I do with the body?

Did I have it carried away by seven flying dragons, or was it merely

a trifling matter of turning it into a milk-white hind?"

"It is no occasion for sneering," said the Anglo-Indian judge, with

abrupt authority. "It doesn't make it look better for you that you

can joke about the loss."

Fisher's dreamy, and even dreary, eye was still on the edge of the

wood behind, and he became conscious of masses of dark red, like a

stormy sunset cloud, glowing through the gray network of the thin

trees, and the prince in his cardinal's robes reemerged on to the

pathway. Brain had had half a notion that the prince might have gone

to look for the lost rapier. But when he reappeared he was carrying

in his hand, not a sword, but an ax.

The incongruity between the masquerade and the mystery had created a

curious psychological atmosphere. At first they had all felt

horribly ashamed at being caught in the foolish disguises of a

festival, by an event that had only too much the character of a

funeral. Many of them would have already gone back and dressed in

clothes that were more funereal or at least more formal. But somehow

at the moment this seemed like a second masquerade, more artificial

and frivolous than the first. And as they reconciled themselves to

their ridiculous trappings, a curious sensation had come over some

of them, notably over the more sensitive, like Crane and Fisher and

Juliet, but in some degree over everybody except the practical Mr.

Brain. It was almost as if they were the ghosts of their own

ancestors haunting that dark wood and dismal lake, and playing some

old part that they only half remembered. The movements of those

colored figures seemed to mean something that had been settled long

before, like a silent heraldry. Acts, attitudes, external objects,

were accepted as an allegory even without the key; and they knew

when a crisis had come, when they did not know what it was. And

somehow they knew subconsciously that the whole tale had taken a new

and terrible turn, when they saw the prince stand in the gap of the

gaunt trees, in his robes of angry crimson and with his lowering

face of bronze, bearing in his hand a new shape of death. They could

not have named a reason, but the two swords seemed indeed to have

become toy swords and the whole tale of them broken and tossed away

like a toy. Borodino looked like the Old World headsman, clad in

terrible red, and carrying the ax for the execution of the criminal.

And the criminal was not Crane.

Mr. Brain of the Indian police was glaring at the new object, and it

was a moment or two before he spoke, harshly and almost hoarsely.

"What are you doing with that?" he asked. "Seems to be a woodman's

chopper."

"A natural association of ideas," observed Horne Fisher. "If you

meet a cat in a wood you think it's a wildcat, though it may have

just strolled from the drawing-room sofa. As a matter of fact, I

happen to know that is not the woodman's chopper. It's the kitchen

chopper, or meat ax, or something like that, that somebody has

thrown away in the wood. I saw it in the kitchen myself when I was

getting the potato sacks with which I reconstructed a mediaeval

hermit."

"All the same, it is not without interest," remarked the prince,

holding out the instrument to Fisher, who took it and examined it

carefully. "A butcher's cleaver that has done butcher's work."

"It was certainly the instrument of the crime," assented Fisher, in

a low voice.

Brain was staring at the dull blue gleam of the ax head with fierce

and fascinated eyes. "I don't understand you," he said. "There is

no--there are no marks on it."

"It has shed no blood," answered Fisher, "but for all that it has

committed a crime. This is as near as the criminal came to the crime

when he committed it."

"What do you mean?"

"He was not there when he did it," explained Fisher. "It's a poor

sort of murderer who can't murder people when he isn't there."

"You seem to be talking merely for the sake of mystification," said

Brain. "If you have any practical advice to give you might as well

make it intelligible."

"The only practical advice I can suggest," said Fisher,

thoughtfully, "is a little research into local topography and

nomenclature. They say there used to be a Mr. Prior, who had a farm

in this neighborhood. I think some details about the domestic life

of the late Mr. Prior would throw a light on this terrible

business."

"And you have nothing more immediate than your topography to offer,"

said Brain, with a sneer, "to help me avenge my friend?"

"Well," said Fisher, "I should find out the truth about the Hole in

the Wall."

* * *

That night, at the close of a stormy twilight and under a strong

west wind that followed the breaking of the frost, Leonard Crane was

wending his way in a wild rotatory walk round and round the high,

continuous wall that inclosed the little wood. He was driven by a

desperate idea of solving for himself the riddle that had clouded

his reputation and already even threatened his liberty. The police

authorities, now in charge of the inquiry, had not arrested him, but

he knew well enough that if he tried to move far afield he would be

instantly arrested. Horne Fisher's fragmentary hints, though he had

refused to expand them as yet, had stirred the artistic temperament

of the architect to a sort of wild analysis, and he was resolved to

read the hieroglyph upside down and every way until it made sense.

If it was something connected with a hole in the wall he would find

the hole in the wall; but, as a matter of fact, he was unable to

find the faintest crack in the wall. His professional knowledge told

him that the masonry was all of one workmanship and one date, and,

except for the regular entrance, which threw no light on the

mystery, he found nothing suggesting any sort of hiding place or

means of escape. Walking a narrow path between the winding wall and

the wild eastward bend and sweep of the gray and feathery trees,

seeing shifting gleams of a lost sunset winking almost like

lightning as the clouds of tempest scudded across the sky and

mingling with the first faint blue light from a slowly strengthened

moon behind him, he began to feel his head going round as his heels

were going round and round the blind recurrent barrier. He had

thoughts on the border of thought; fancies about a fourth dimension

which was itself a hole to hide anything, of seeing everything from

a new angle out of a new window in the senses; or of some mystical

light and transparency, like the new rays of chemistry, in which he

could see Bulmer's body, horrible and glaring, floating in a lurid

halo over the woods and the wall. He was haunted also with the hint,

which somehow seemed to be equally horrifying, that it all had

something to do with Mr. Prior. There seemed even to be something

creepy in the fact that he was always respectfully referred to as

Mr. Prior, and that it was in the domestic life of the dead farmer

that he had been bidden to seek the seed of these dreadful things.

As a matter of fact, he had found that no local inquiries had

revealed anything at all about the Prior family.

The moonlight had broadened and brightened, the wind had driven off

the clouds and itself died fitfully away, when he came round again

to the artificial lake in front of the house. For some reason it

looked a very artificial lake; indeed, the whole scene was like a

classical landscape with a touch of Watteau; the Palladian facade of

the house pale in the moon, and the same silver touching the very

pagan and naked marble nymph in the middle of the pond. Rather to

his surprise, he found another figure there beside the statue,

sitting almost equally motionless; and the same silver pencil traced

the wrinkled brow and patient face of Horne Fisher, still dressed as

a hermit and apparently practicing something of the solitude of a

hermit. Nevertheless, he looked up at Leonard Crane and smiled,

almost as if he had expected him.

"Look here," said Crane, planting himself in front of him, "can you

tell me anything about this business?"

"I shall soon have to tell everybody everything about it," replied

Fisher, "but I've no objection to telling you something first. But,

to begin with, will you tell me something? What really happened when

you met Bulmer this morning? You did throw away your sword, but you

didn't kill him."

"I didn't kill him because I threw away my sword," said the other.

"I did it on purpose--or I'm not sure what might have happened."

After a pause he went on, quietly: "The late Lord Bulmer was a very

breezy gentleman, extremely breezy. He was very genial with his

inferiors, and would have his lawyer and his architect staying in

his house for all sorts of holidays and amusements. But there was

another side to him, which they found out when they tried to be his

equals. When I told him that his sister and I were engaged,

something happened which I simply can't and won't describe. It

seemed to me like some monstrous upheaval of madness. But I suppose

the truth is painfully simple. There is such a thing as the

coarseness of a gentleman. And it is the most horrible thing in

humanity."

"I know," said Fisher. "The Renaissance nobles of the Tudor time

were like that."

"It is odd that you should say that," Crane went on. "For while we

were talking there came on me a curious feeling that we were

repeating some scene of the past, and that I was really some outlaw,

found in the woods like Robin Hood, and that he had really stepped

in all his plumes and purple out of the picture frame of the

ancestral portrait. Anyhow, he was the man in possession, and he

neither feared God nor regarded man. I defied him, of course, and

walked away. I might really have killed him if I had not walked

away."

"Yes," said Fisher, nodding, "his ancestor was in possession and he

was in possession, and this is the end of the story. It all fits

in."

"Fits in with what?" cried his companion, with sudden impatience. "I

can't make head or tail of it. You tell me to look for the secret in

the hole in the wall, but I can't find any hole in the wall."

"There isn't any," said Fisher. "That's the secret." After

reflecting a moment, he added: "Unless you call it a hole in the

wall of the world. Look here; I'll tell you if you like, but I'm

afraid it involves an introduction. You've got to understand one of

the tricks of the modern mind, a tendency that most people obey

without noticing it. In the village or suburb outside there's an inn

with the sign of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose I went about

telling everybody that this was only a corruption of King George and

the Dragoon. Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry,

from a vague feeling that it's probable because it's prosaic. It

turns something romantic and legendary into something recent and

ordinary. And that somehow makes it sound rational, though it is

unsupported by reason. Of course some people would have the sense to

remember having seen St. George in old Italian pictures and French

romances, but a good many wouldn't think about it at all. They would

just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern

intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept

anything without authority. That's exactly what has happened here.

"When some critic or other chose to say that Prior's Park was not a

priory, but was named after some quite modern man named Prior,

nobody really tested the theory at all. It never occurred to anybody

repeating the story to ask if there _was_ any Mr. Prior, if anybody

had ever seen him or heard of him. As a matter of fact, it was a

priory, and shared the fate of most priories--that is, the Tudor

gentleman with the plumes simply stole it by brute force and turned

it into his own private house; he did worse things, as you shall

hear. But the point here is that this is how the trick works, and

the trick works in the same way in the other part of the tale. The

name of this district is printed Holinwall in all the best maps

produced by the scholars; and they allude lightly, not without a

smile, to the fact that it was pronounced Holiwell by the most

ignorant and old-fashioned of the poor. But it is spelled wrong and

pronounced right."

"Do you mean to say," asked Crane, quickly, "that there really was a

well?"

"There is a well," said Fisher, "and the truth lies at the bottom of

it."

As he spoke he stretched out his hand and pointed toward the sheet

of water in front of him.

"The well is under that water somewhere," he said, "and this is not

the first tragedy connected with it. The founder of this house did

something which his fellow ruffians very seldom did; something that

had to be hushed up even in the anarchy of the pillage of the

monasteries. The well was connected with the miracles of some saint,

and the last prior that guarded it was something like a saint

himself; certainly he was something very like a martyr. He defied

the new owner and dared him to pollute the place, till the noble, in

a fury, stabbed him and flung his body into the well, whither, after

four hundred years, it has been followed by an heir of the usurper,

clad in the same purple and walking the world with the same pride."

"But how did it happen," demanded Crane, "that for the first time

Bulmer fell in at that particular spot?"

"Because the ice was only loosened at that particular spot, by the

only man who knew it," answered Horne Fisher. "It was cracked

deliberately, with the kitchen chopper, at that special place; and I

myself heard the hammering and did not understand it. The place had

been covered with an artificial lake, if only because the whole

truth had to be covered with an artificial legend. But don't you see

that it is exactly what those pagan nobles would have done, to

desecrate it with a sort of heathen goddess, as the Roman Emperor

built a temple to Venus on the Holy Sepulchre. But the truth could

still be traced out, by any scholarly man determined to trace it.

And this man was determined to trace it."

"What man?" asked the other, with a shadow of the answer in his

mind.

"The only man who has an alibi," replied Fisher. "James Haddow, the

antiquarian lawyer, left the night before the fatality, but he left

that black star of death on the ice. He left abruptly, having

previously proposed to stay; probably, I think, after an ugly scene

with Bulmer, at their legal interview. As you know yourself, Bulmer

could make a man feel pretty murderous, and I rather fancy the

lawyer had himself irregularities to confess, and was in danger of

exposure by his client. But it's my reading of human nature that a

man will cheat in his trade, but not in his hobby. Haddow may have

been a dishonest lawyer, but he couldn't help being an honest

antiquary. When he got on the track of the truth about the Holy Well

he had to follow it up; he was not to be bamboozled with newspaper

anecdotes about Mr. Prior and a hole in the wall; he found out

everything, even to the exact location of the well, and he was

rewarded, if being a successful assassin can be regarded as a

reward."

"And how did you get on the track of all this hidden history?" asked

the young architect.

A cloud came across the brow of Horne Fisher. "I knew only too much

about it already," he said, "and, after all, it's shameful for me to

be speaking lightly of poor Bulmer, who has paid his penalty; but

the rest of us haven't. I dare say every cigar I smoke and every

liqueur I drink comes directly or indirectly from the harrying of

the holy places and the persecution of the poor. After all, it needs

very little poking about in the past to find that hole in the wall,

that great breach in the defenses of English history. It lies just

under the surface of a thin sheet of sham information and

instruction, just as the black and blood-stained well lies just

under that floor of shallow water and flat weeds. Oh, the ice is

thin, but it bears; it is strong enough to support us when we dress

up as monks and dance on it, in mockery of the dear, quaint old

Middle Ages. They told me I must put on fancy dress; so I did put on

fancy dress, according to my own taste and fancy. I put on the only

costume I think fit for a man who has inherited the position of a

gentleman, and yet has not entirely lost the feelings of one."

In answer to a look of inquiry, he rose with a sweeping and downward

gesture.

"Sackcloth," he said; "and I would wear the ashes as well if they

would stay on my bald head."