CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT
"My boy?" Sir Philip Clavering made answer, in a wrung voice, a voice that clearly showed where all his thoughts were, and that he had had ears for nothing, care for nothing, heart for nothing, from the moment he had been told that Geoff had left the Grange hours and hours ago. "What has become of my boy? Where did he go? What has happened to him? He never came back! He never came back!"
The agony of the man was so intense, so apparent, that Cleek's heart ached for him, and he made haste to spare him any greater pain.
"Oh, as for that, Sir Philip, you needn't worry an atom," he said. "I think Miss Lorne has something to tell you about him, and just where he went, and why he hasn't returned. In fact, I know she has, for he left a message with her. Went to town on some special matter for Lady Katharine Fordham, didn't he, and is likely to be very late indeed in returning?"
"Yes," said Ailsa, taking her cue and remembering. "In fact, it is a matter that may keep him so late it is possible he will stop in town until morning, Sir Philip. He asked me to send word over to you and Lady Clavering to relieve you of any possible anxiety; and, indeed, I should have done so long ago, only – "
"Only that I volunteered to walk over the Common and back with her if she'd carry the message herself instead of sending it by some one," supplemented Cleek, coming to the rescue. "And then, like an idiot, I sat so long after dinner with young Mr. Raynor that I forgot all about it until she sent me in word. We were going to start at once, and would have done so but for this hubbub. Happened to think, however, that as it was late and the Common very lonely, it would be wisest to carry something for protection in case of necessity, so ran up to my room to get a pistol I had given me. That's why you heard me making such a clatter in running up and down stairs, General, when you popped out of the library and asked what was up."
The General made no reply, but the expression of his mouth and eyes told plainly what he thought of a man who had to rely upon firearms for protection in case of assault by footpads. He gave his shoulders a significant twitch.
But Sir Philip was too greatly relieved by the good news of his son's safety to give thought to other details.
"You can't think what a load you've taken off my mind, Mr. Barch," he said. "I can go home now feeling satisfied. My mind is at rest."
"I wish mine were, then," put in the General. "But to have one's place invaded – and secretly invaded – by the police! God! If I only knew what it means. That thing last night, and now this! Who under this roof has fallen under suspicion —could fall under suspicion? The thing is as mysterious as it is appalling. Clavering, you know this man Narkom. You must introduce him to me; he must tell me upon what evidence, what pretext, this thing has been done. The police do not take action without some shadow of reason, some good cause, for what they do; and that my garden door should be secretly unfastened that one of their spies may enter these grounds – It is abominable. Why didn't he apply to me for permission to enter the place if he thought it necessary to do so? I have my rights as well as any other subject of the king. Why, then, should he break open my garden door without warrant or privilege and send his spies in here?"
"Maybe he didn't, General." It was Cleek that spoke. "Come to think of it, the explanation of that chap who claimed to be attached to the police was rather fishy, and he was precious sharp about cutting his lucky when I sent him off. Besides, why should he take orders from me, anyway?"
"My dear Mr. Barch – "
"Catch the point? We've had one sneak thief visit the Grange already, General. What's the odds that they are not identical? We never knew how the first one managed to get into the place nor where he went when he got out of it. Well, then, what about that garden door being the answer? Why shouldn't it have been he that unfastened it? Why shouldn't this business of pouncing upon Sir Philip and making an outcry be a clever dodge to make a safe getaway?"
The General looked up, brightening, as if a load had been lifted from his shoulders, and breathed a deep sigh of relief.
"I hadn't thought of that, Mr. Barch," he said, caught by the feasibility of an argument backed up so plausibly. "We did have a thief pay us a visit earlier in the evening, to be sure; and, as you say, very possibly – Yes, yes, it must be so. There could be no shadow of a reason for the police coming here, because – Eh? What's that, Hamer?" facing round as he heard his name mentioned, and discovering the second footman, who had just put in an appearance. "Telephone, did you say?"
"Yessir. Somebody asking to speak to Mr. Barch, sir; and I requested him to hold the line while I came to call the gentleman."
"Somebody calling for me over the telephone?" inquired Cleek, with sudden deep interest. "You are sure it is for me, Hamer? Sure that the name was Barch?"
"Yessir, quite. Mr. Philip Barch was the name given, and I was to say that it's a most important message."
Cleek turned and looked inquiringly at the General.
"Yes, certainly, Mr. Barch, certainly," he said, replying to that look. "The instrument is in the library, which opens directly off my study. Hamer will show you the way."
"No, I will," put in Ailsa. "I shall have to be running up to see how Kathie is, and it will be on my way. Good-night, Sir Philip. Good-night, General. Come, Mr. Barch, I'll show you the way." She went with him out of the moonlight in the open to the dark of the shrubbery and the trees that shut in the path to the house.
"Tell me," she whispered eagerly as they hurried along. "Are you nearer the end? Is the solution anywhere in sight?"
"I think so," he answered.
"Oh!" with a sharp intaking of the breath. "You found it out at the garden door, then? You saw the woman and you saw the person she came to meet?"
"To the contrary, I saw neither. I merely heard the woman speak. It was a voice I had never heard before. The man said nothing, and never once showed himself. He might have done both but that they heard you returning and separated like a shot. But please, we will not speak of that at present. Wait for me by the shrubbery; I'll tell you a lot when I meet you there. Just now I am anxious to know who it is that is telephoning to 'Mr. Philip Barch' and for what. Only two persons outside of Dollops and yourself know that name and whose identity it covers. One is Geoffrey Clavering, the other Mr. Narkom. No, please! Don't ask me any questions now, I can't stop to answer them. But this you may know if it will ease your mind at all: Lady Katharine Fordham never had anything to do with it, although she was there. Oh, yes, she was, Miss Lorne; for all your protestations, I tell you that she was! And, what is more, I know the man, although I do not as yet know the motive!"
"Oh! You found it out, then, at the garden door?"
"No, I did not. I daren't stop to explain, but believe me, Miss Lorne, I begin to see light. I only wonder at one thing: What makes Sir Philip Clavering use black cosmetic? Sheer vanity, I suppose."
"Does he?" cried Ailsa, in surprise.
"Yes, on his moustache. It's wonderful why some of these old men hate gray moustaches so. Wait for me, I'll be back as quickly as possible," and he dived into the house to answer the mysterious telephone call.
Cleek went straight to the library, flashed an inquiring look all round it as he closed the door, made sure that nobody else was there, and walking to the telephone took up the receiver and put it to his ear.
"Hallo!" he said somewhat cautiously; then, after a moment: "Yes, Barch," he added in response to a query from the other end. "What's that? Speak a little louder, please; I can't hear clearly. And, I say, I don't recognize your voice. Who are you?"
The voice in question underwent a complete change, showing that the owner of it had, in the first instance, carefully altered it until sure of his man, and then over the wire came promptly the two words: "Geoff Clavering!"
"Eh, what?" exclaimed Cleek, not a little surprised by this revelation, and not doubting the truth of the statement for an instant now that the real voice of the speaker sounded. "Why, what the dickens – I say, where are you?"
"In London, at the Savoy Hotel, speaking from one of the booths. Got here twenty minutes ago, and as soon as I registered and got a room, I hunted up one of the clerks who knew me by sight, and then came in here and rang you up."
"Why?"
"I wanted you to know that I'd kept faith with you; that I really have come to London as I promised. If you doubt it, there's the clerk to prove it any time you like."
"Why, you ripping young – By George! Well, well! See here: as open confession's good for the soul, let me say that I don't doubt it, and, what's more, I never did doubt it, you splendid young pepper pot!"
"Thanks very much, that's jolly nice of you. But listen here, Mr. – er – Barch. Can't you get word to my pater somehow? He'll worry himself dotty when midnight comes on and I don't turn up. And I say: how long have I got to stop up here, anyhow? I hear there's a down train at four in the morning. Can't I take that, and put on end to the dad's anxiety as soon as possible?"
"He hasn't any anxiety on the subject whatsoever, my boy. Miss Lorne and I have seen him, and trumped up a story to cover everything. He doesn't expect you back until morning. But – Would you like a pleasant surprise? Well, you can come back at once if you like and get it. Take your own time, however; only be sure that you turn up here not later than twelve, and are waiting just outside the lodge gates of the Grange when I go there to meet you. What's that? Yes, quite satisfied, quite. She did come out on the Common to-night, and – What's that? To look for you? Yes, of course. What other motive could she have, you silly fellow? She came out, and your father came out; and – listen and catch this, Clavering" – sinking his voice – "for it is very important. You said, did you not, that last night when Lady Katharine took you into that house she told you she would show you something that would 'light you back to the land of happiness'?"
"Yes. Those were her words. Why?"
"Well, you be outside the lodge gates at the time I want you, my boy, and I'll show both of you the way to that land to-night." And he hung up the receiver before Geoff could say a word.
"The soul of honour, just as I knew he was, the young beggar!" he said, putting his thoughts into words for once in a way. "A son for any man to be proud of, that!" And chuckling a little, he prepared to leave the room.
But as if the sight of that room, with its swinging French window, its reading desk with an open book upon it and an easy chair beside, brought back to his memory that other son and that other father, the smile faded suddenly from his lips, his jaw squared, and a pucker gathered between his level brows.
What a difference between the two sons of those two men he had left out there in the grounds! The one clean-lived, clean-minded, honour's very self. The other a wastrel, a sot, a liar, the consort of evil women and disreputable men, a poor, paltry worm living in an oak tree's shade.
And to-night the General had wondered why the police should be coming to Wuthering Grange; what trail from last night's tragedy led to the threshold of this house! Yet, while he sat here reading, his own son – Heigho! "'Tis a mad world, my masters," a mad, mad world indeed. Poor old chap! Poor, blind, unsuspecting old chap, sitting here all alone and reading! What was it he was reading while his unnatural son was slandering him to a stranger?
He walked to the reading desk and bent over the open book that lay upon it, with a pamphlet beside it and a litter of loose papers all round.
"Fruit Culture," by Adolph Bonnaise. And the pamphlet? He took it up to look at the title page, for the half of it was smothered under loose papers, one or two of which his act sent fluttering to the floor. The April number of The Gardener and Fruit Grower. Reading of flowers and of fruits, of Nature's good and beautiful things, and all the while – Yes, indeed, Shakespeare was right. It is a mad world! Worse than mad: it is wicked! And the sons of men are the wickedest things in it!
Oh, well, he mustn't stand wasting time here in moralizing and mooning. Ailsa was waiting.
The papers he had disturbed lay on the floor, close to a half-filled scrap basket. Unimportant things enough they were: seedsmen's circulars, soap advertisements, tailors' announcements, all the litter of loose-leaf insets that are thrust between the covers of monthly magazines; quite unimportant, and not worth the trouble he was taking to gather them up and replace them upon the desk. But – Oh, well, he shouldn't like the General to think that when he came into the library to use his telephone he'd been cad enough to look over his papers; so, of course – That all of them? Any drop into the waste basket by chance? Perhaps that bit of white paper with the red blob of sealing wax on each end might have fallen with the rest. He picked it out of the basket, turned it over, and decided that it hadn't; smelt it, smiled one of his curious one-sided smiles, and flung it back into the basket.
Even an old soldier may have his foibles and his weaknesses. It is on record that Bonaparte had a secret love of bonbons; that Washington had a passion for barley sugar; and that Drake slept always with anise seeds within easy reach.
He turned away as he tossed the paper back, walked to the door, opened it, and stepped out. The staircase down which he had run in such hot haste at the sound of Dollops's whistle was before him. He stopped an instant and looked up it, then nodded his head in the direction of Lord St. Ulmer's quarters, and if he had put his thoughts into actual words, would have said this:
"I'll know your part in it, and I'll see your face by hook or by crook before this night is over; I promise you that, my man!" Then he turned again, and went down the hall to the dining-room.
Harry Raynor was still there, lying with his arms sprawled out upon the table and his head sunk between them.
Cleek stood still and looked at him. Of a certainty, the man had moved since last he saw him; but whether that movement had been merely the unconscious stirring of a sleeping man or the fellow had been up and about in the meantime, it was impossible to say.
Cleek, taking no chances, closed and locked the door, and assuming once more his "Barch" tone and manner of expression, advanced to his side, shook him, and said:
"I say, Raynor, don't be a howling ass! Buck up and don't sleep the whole blessed night away. I'm jolly lonesome."
Young Raynor went on snoring serenely, and neither answered nor moved.
Still Cleek was taking no chances. He repeated the operation with greater force and louder spoken words, and finding it produced no effect, finally shook the man so hard that his head lolled over on one arm and let the hidden face come into sight.
The jaw hung loose, the scooped cheeks and pendulous lip gleamed pale as ivory, and the whites of his eyes shone like narrow bands of silver through the slits of their half-closed lids.
There was no question whatsoever regarding the man's condition. Satisfied now, Cleek felt his pulse, pushed up one of his eyelids and examined the eye itself. The pupil was largely dilated, the white suffused considerably, and both were slightly filmed.
"Hum-m-m!" he breathed conclusively, then turned from the man and looked at the decanters and glasses on the littered table. "Port, Brandy, Benedictine, Scotch. To be sure! to be sure! Who is to know the taste of a mere guest in the matter of his after-dinner drink? So, if it is put in all– " He took up the decanters one by one, sampled their contents in turn, and smiled one of his queer crooked smiles when he set the last one down.
"Clever, very clever, my friend," he said. "And who was to tell you that the guest would not drink at all?"
Then he turned on his heel suddenly and left the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE OPEN WINDOW
He had scarcely taken a dozen steps down the hallway, however, before he encountered General Raynor, who had just then reëntered the house by the front door.
His rugged old face wore a look of deep anxiety, as though the exciting scene through which he had so recently passed bore heavily upon his spirits, despite Cleek's attempt to allay his distress by branding Dollops as a possible sneak thief; but he brightened perceptibly and made a valiant effort to appear quite at his ease when he looked up and saw Cleek.
"Get your call over the telephone all right, Mr. Barch?" he inquired pleasantly.
"Yes, thanks," said Cleek serenely, still keeping up his "Johnnie" air. "Awfully obliged to you, I'm sure. Dickens of an important message. Should have been in no end of a hole if I hadn't received it. But I say, General, you ought to be more careful, you know, especially with sneak thieves about."
"As how, Mr. Barch?"
"Why, that blessed swing window in the library. I found the thing unfastened, don't you know."
He hadn't, of course, for he had not been near it. But his statement undeniably agitated the General, though he made a brave effort to disguise it.
"Did you?" he said. "That's peculiar. I never noticed it. I must speak to Johnston about it; it's his duty to see that it is locked, and I supposed he had done so. Still, it's of no great consequence as it happens. The sneak thief didn't enter by that way, I am sure."
"No, but he might easily have done so; and if he had come in there while you were alone you might have had a warm time of it; don't you think so, eh, what?"
"I fancy he would have had a warm time of it, as you express it, Mr. Barch. I'm not so old but I know how to take care of myself, believe me."
"No, I suppose not," said Cleek. "Had a jolly lot of practice in your young days – with the gloves and all that. Forty-fifth Queen's Own used to have a national reputation for the best boxers and wrestlers in the service, I'm told. Suppose it was the same in your day; and you got a lot of practice out there in Simla in your subaltern days."
"You are wrong in both particulars. I did not belong to the Forty-fifth Queen's Own, Mr. Barch, and I was not billeted to India. I passed out of Sandhurst into the Imperial Blues, and from the time I was twenty-two until I was twenty-six I was stationed at Malta."
Cleek made a mental tally of those two statements.
"Oh, I see; mistake on my part," he said serenely. "Malta was it? And the Imperial Blues? Thought Harry said the other. I've got a rotten memory. But it doesn't matter which, does it, so long as you learned the trick, and are able to put up a stiff fight and floor a burglar still? I'll lay you could floor one in short order, too, when I come to look at you," he went on, glancing the General up and down with apparent admiration. "Lord! shouldn't like to run foul of you when your temper's up. Built like a blessed gladiator. Shoulders on you like a giant; arms like – mind if I feel what they're like?"
Impudently taking hold of him before he could reply or resent the familiarity, Cleek moved the General's forearm up as if to see the swelling of the biceps.
"That's what I call muscle!" he exclaimed. "What a wrist! What a fist to floor a man or – Hullo! been flooring some one since I left you, General? Big green smudge on your cuff, as if you'd been up against a mossy wall? Didn't get into a scrap with Sir Philip after I left you, did you, eh?"
There was no gainsaying it, the General's face grew absolutely white as he looked down and saw that green smudge on the white cuff which protruded beyond the sleeve of his evening coat. It was evident he had not noticed it before.
"No, certainly I have not!" he rapped out sharply as he plucked away his arm. "Sir Philip Clavering has gone home. And if you will pardon my saying it, Mr. Barch, I object to being handled."
"Awful sorry; did it before I thought," said Cleek vacantly. "No offence, eh? Because, you know, none was meant. Ought to have remembered; ought to have remembered half a dozen things when I come to think of it. One of 'em is that you and Sir Philip weren't likely to scrap like a couple of drunken navvies; and t'other is that you couldn't have got wall-moss on your cuff if you had, when there wasn't any wall where I left you. So you couldn't have got it there, of course."
"And as that settles it, I think we can abandon the subject with profit to both, Mr. Barch," said the General stiffly. "As a matter of fact, I don't know where nor how I did get the smudge; and it's of no consequence anyway. And now, if you will pardon me, I'll ring for Johnston to lock up the house – we always retire to bed early at the Grange, Mr. Barch – and have a wee drappie o' whisky and turn in. The evening has been unpleasantly eventful, and I feel the need of something in the way of stimulant."
"So do I, by Jove! Never drank a blessed drop to-night, didn't feel up to it, don't you know; but if you don't mind my toddling into the dining-room and helping myself – "
"By all means do so, Mr. Barch, by all means!" interposed the General with something akin to eagerness. "You will find plenty there. Help yourself."
"Thanks very much. But come to think of it, you haven't had a drink to-night, either. Told Hawkins you didn't feel like it, I recollect."
"No, I didn't at the time, but I certainly require it now; so if – "
"Good business!" interjected Cleek airily. "Come in and let's have one together. Harry's asleep, so I shan't have any company; and as I never like to drink alone, and you are my host, and there's plenty in the dining-room – "
"Pray don't think me discourteous, Mr. Barch," interposed the General blandly, "but I think I will take my whisky hot this evening; and as I make a practice of never taking a hot whisky until I am safely between the sheets, will you pardon me if I do not join you, but have mine served in my bedroom to-night?"
"Yes, certainly," said Cleek. "Only if I'm left to drink alone I'm apt to take two or three instead of one, and my doctor says I oughtn't to, don't you know."
"Doctors are not infallible, Mr. Barch; they often make errors. Good-night."
"Good-night," said Cleek. "But if I have a headache in the morning – oh, well, I can't help it. If I have one I'll have it I suppose. Here goes!" He walked back along the hall and went into the dining-room and shut the door, leaning heavily against it and breathing through his shut teeth the one word, "God!"
The footsteps of the General clicked off down the hall, but Cleek never stirred, never moved a muscle, until their dwindling sound dropped off into sudden silence and all was still. Then, as softly as any cat, he twitched round, opened the door, closed it after him, and stood alone in the hall.
He moved on tiptoe to the library. The door was closed. He stopped and listened.
The faint rustling sound of papers told its own story. The General had not gone to his bedroom, he was in there!
With fleet, unsounding steps Cleek moved from that closed door to the open one of the drawing-room, remembering what Ailsa had said of how Mrs. Raynor had dozed over her coffee while they waited for him to come, and of how, after Hamer had carried in his note, the good lady had rallied the girl, and then gone off to bed because, she said, she was sleepy – sleepy at half-past eight o'clock!
Taking into consideration the events of the evening, he had counted upon the possibility of something happening; and the moment he entered that room and looked round him he knew that it had done so.
The butler's evening off; the excitement and distraction occasioned by that screaming police whistle sounding from the grounds and sending all the servants flocking out. These things had conspired to upset the routine of things as they should be in a well-regulated house; and lo! the silver tray and the coffee service and the cups, used and unused alike, had been overlooked, and there they still were, awaiting removal. And beside them stood a liqueur stand with Chartreuse, Benedictine, Crême de Menthe, and a half-dozen tiny Venetian glasses.
Liqueurs with coffee! He went over and looked at the glasses; so much, so very much, depended upon that. If more than one had been used; if Ailsa, too, had taken liqueur – No, she had not! Only one glass had been used, and Mrs. Raynor had gone to bed!
He rubbed the tip of his finger round the inner side of that one used glass, and put it to his tongue.
The wine and the spirits in the decanters on the table of the dining-room had all tasted alike. This liqueur tasted like them.
He made no comment, wasted no time. The instant he had decided that point he left the room and went back to the hall and to the gardens beyond the entrance.
Ailsa Lorne waited for him at the shrubbery; but it was not to the shrubbery he went! His way lay round the angle of the house, past the path to the ruin, past the windows of the dining-room where a drugged man lay, and on through the darkness, until he stood in the shelter of the trees directly opposite a broad stone terrace, upon which the swinging French window of the library gave.
It was bright with inner light, when first he came in sight of it; but he had barely halted before that light went out – and left it as black as pitch.
But a moment later Cleek drew farther back in the shadow of the trees.
He had warned General Raynor to be careful to lock that window, and now here he was not only disregarding that warning, but pushing the sashes wide apart.
"Coming again, is she, General?" said Cleek in the soundless words of thought. "A bad move, my friend, a very bad move. One may not recognize a man's voice from a simple 'Sh-h-h!' but when he steps out of a library with a black mud-spot on the toe of his house shoes and a green smudge on his cuff – "
He stopped and crouched back under the trees, and was very, very still.
Through the darkness a faint rustling sound had suddenly risen, the soft falling of a foot, the careful passage of a body between lines of leaves.
Some one was advancing cautiously toward that darkened and opened window.