Afternoon Tea Mysteries [Vol Three] Read online

  “It is complete,” said Paynter, very pale. “I have nothing left against it but a faint, irrational feeling; a feeling that, somehow or other, if poor Vane could stand alive before us at this moment he might tell some other and even more incredible tale.”

  Ashe made a mournful gesture.

  “Can these dry bones live?” he said.

  “Lord Thou knowest,” answered the other mechanically. “Even these dry bones—”

  And he stopped suddenly with his mouth open, a blinding light of wonder in his pale eyes.

  “See here,” he said hoarsely and hastily. “You have said the word. What does it mean? What can it mean? Dry? Why are these bones dry?”

  The lawyer started and stared down at the heap.

  “Your case complete!” cried Paynter, in mounting excitement. “Where is the water in the well? The water I saw leap like a flame? Why did it leap? Where is it gone to? Complete! We are buried under riddles.”

  Ashe stooped, picked up a bone and looked at it.

  “You are right,” he said, in a low and shaken voice: “this bone is as dry—as a bone.”

  “Yes, I am right,” replied Cyprian. “And your mystic is still as mysterious as a mystic.”

  There was a long silence. Ashe laid down the bone, picked up the axe and studied it more closely. Beyond the dull stain at the corner of the steel there was nothing unusual about it save a broad white rag wrapped round the handle, perhaps to give a better grip. The lawyer thought it worth noting, however, that the rag was certainly newer and cleaner than the chopper. But both were quite dry.

  “Mr. Paynter,” he said at last, “I admit you have scored, in the spirit if not in the letter. In strict logic, this greater puzzle is not a reply to my case. If this axe has not been dipped in water, it has been dipped in blood; and the water jumping out of the well is not an explanation of the poet jumping out of the wood. But I admit that morally and practically it does make a vital difference. We are not faced with a colossal contradiction, and we don’t know how far it extends. The body might have been broken up or boiled down to its bones by the murderer, though it may be hard to connect it with the conditions of the murder. It might conceivably have been so reduced by some property in the water and soil, for decomposition varies vastly with these things. I should not dismiss my strong prima facie case against the likely person because of these difficulties. But here we have something entirely different. That the bones themselves should remain dry in a well full of water, or a well that yesterday was full of water—that brings us to the edge of something beyond which we can make no guess. There is a new factor, enormous and quite unknown. While we can’t fit together such prodigious facts, we can’t fit together a case against Treherne or against anybody. No; there is only one thing to be done now. Since we can’t accuse Treherne, we must appeal to him. We must put the case against him frankly before him, and trust he has an explanation—and will give it. I suggest we go back and do it now.”

  Paynter, beginning to follow, hesitated a moment, and then said: “Forgive me for a kind of liberty; as you say, you are an older friend of the family. I entirely agree with your suggestion, but before you act on your present suspicions, do you know, I think Miss Vane ought to be warned a little? I rather fear all this will be a new shock to her.”

  “Very well,” said Ashe, after looking at him steadily for an instant. “Let us go across to her first.”

  From the opening of the wood they could see Barbara Vane writing at the garden table, which was littered with correspondence, and the butler with his yellow face waiting behind her chair. As the lengths of grass lessened between them, and the little group at the table grew larger and clearer in the sunlight, Paynter had a painful sense of being part of an embassy of doom. It sharpened when the girl looked up from the table and smiled on seeing them.

  “I should like to speak to you rather particularly if I may,” said the lawyer, with a touch of authority in his respect; and when the butler was dismissed he laid open the whole matter before her, speaking sympathetically, but leaving out nothing, from the strange escape of the poet from the wood to the last detail of the dry bones out of the well. No fault could be found with any one of his tones or phrases, and yet Cyprian, tingling in every nerve with the fine delicacy of his nation about the other sex, felt as if she were faced with an inquisitor. He stood about uneasily, watched the few coloured clouds in the clear sky and the bright birds darting about the wood, and he heartily wished himself up the tree again.

  Soon, however, the way the girl took it began to move him to perplexity rather than pity. It was like nothing he had expected, and yet he could not name the shade of difference. The final identification of her father’s skull, by the hole in the hat, turned her a little pale, but left her composed; this was, perhaps, explicable, since she had from the first taken the pessimistic view. But during the rest of the tale there rested on her broad brows under her copper coils of hair, a brooding spirit that was itself a mystery. He could only tell himself that she was less merely receptive, either firmly or weakly, than he would have expected. It was as if she revolved, not their problem, but her own. She was silent a long time, and said at last:

  “Thank you, Mr. Ashe, I am really very grateful for this. After all, it brings things to the point where they must have come sooner or later.” She looked dreamily at the wood and sea, and went on: “I’ve not only had myself to consider, you see; but if you’re really thinking that, it’s time I spoke out, without asking anybody. You say, as if it were something very dreadful, ‘Mr. Treherne was in the wood that night.’ Well, it’s not quite so dreadful to me, you see, because I know he was. In fact, we were there together.”

  “Together!” repeated the lawyer.

  “We were together,” she said quietly, “because we had a right to be together.”

  “Do you mean,” stammered Ashe, surprised out of himself, “that you were engaged?”

  “No, no,” she said. “We were married.”

  Then, amid a startled silence, she added, as a kind of afterthought:

  “In fact, we are still.”

  Strong as was his composure, the lawyer sat back in his chair with a sort of solid stupefaction at which Paynter could not help smiling.

  “You will ask me, of course,” went on Barbara in the same measured manner, “why we should be married secretly, so that even my poor father did not know. Well, I answer you quite frankly to begin with; because, if he had known, he would certainly have cut me off with a shilling. He did not like my husband, and I rather fancy you do not like him either. And when I tell you this, I know perfectly well what you will say—the usual adventurer getting hold of the usual heiress. It is quite reasonable, and, as it happens, it is quite wrong. If I had deceived my father for the sake of the money, or even for the sake of a man, I should be a little ashamed to talk to you about it. And I think you can see that I am not ashamed.”

  “Yes,” said the American, with a grave inclination, “yes, I can see that.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, as if seeking words for an obscure matter, and then said:

  “Do you remember, Mr. Paynter, that day you first lunched here and told us about the African trees? Well, it was my birthday; I mean my first birthday. I was born then, or woke up or something. I had walked in this garden like a somnambulist in the sun. I think there are many such somnambulists in our set and our society; stunned with health, drugged with good manners, fitting their surroundings too well to be alive. Well, I came alive somehow; and you know how deep in us are the things we first realize when we were babies and began to take notice. I began to take notice. One of the first things I noticed was your own story, Mr. Paynter. I feel as if I heard of St. Securis as children hear of Santa Claus, and as if that big tree were a bogey I still believed in. For I do still believe in such things, or rather I believe in them more and more; I feel certain my poor father drove on the rocks by disbelieving, and you are all racing to ruin after him. That is
why I do honestly want the estate, and that is why I am not ashamed of wanting it. I am perfectly certain, Mr. Paynter, that nobody can save this perishing land and this perishing people but those who understand. I mean who understand a thousand little signs and guides in the very soil and lie of the land, and traces that are almost trampled out. My husband understands, and I have begun to understand; my father would never have understood. There are powers, there is the spirit of a place, there are presences that are not to be put by. Oh, don’t fancy I am sentimental and hanker after the good old days. The old days were not all good; that is just the point, and we must understand enough to know the good from the evil. We must understand enough to save the traces of a saint or a sacred tradition, or, where a wicked god has been worshiped, to destroy his altar and to cut down his grove.”

  “His grove,” said Paynter automatically, and looked toward the little wood, where the sunbright birds were flying.

  “Mrs. Treherne,” said Ashe, with a formidable quietness, “I am not so unsympathetic with all this as you may perhaps suppose. I will not even say it is all moonshine, for it is something better. It is, if I may say so, honeymoonshine. I will never deny the saying that it makes the world go round, if it makes people’s heads go round too. But there are other sentiments, madam, and other duties. I need not tell you your father was a good man, and that what has befallen him would be pitiable, even as the fate of the wicked. This is a horrible thing, and it is chiefly among horrors that we must keep our common sense. There are reasons for everything, and when my old friend lies butchered do not come to me with even the most beautiful fairy tales about a saint and his enchanted grove.”

  “Well, and you!” she cried, and rose radiantly and swiftly. “With what kind of fairy tales do you come to me? In what enchanted groves are you walking? You come and tell me that Mr. Paynter found a well where the water danced and then disappeared; but of course miracles are all moonshine! You tell me you yourself fished bones from under the same water, and every bone was as dry as a biscuit; but for Heaven’s sake let us say nothing that makes anybody’s head go round! Really, Mr. Ashe, you must try to preserve your common sense!”

  She was smiling, but with blazing eyes; and Ashe got to his feet with an involuntary laugh of surrender.

  “Well, we must be going,” he said. “May I say that a tribute is really due to your new transcendental training? If I may say so, I always knew you had brains; and you’ve been learning to use them.”

  The two amateur detectives went back to the wood for the moment, that Ashe might consider the removal of the unhappy Squire’s remains. As he pointed out, it was now legally possible to have an inquest, and, even at that early stage of investigations, he was in favour of having it at once.

  “I shall be the coroner,” he said, “and I think it will be a case of ‘some person or persons unknown.’ Don’t be surprised; it is often done to give the guilty a false security. This is not the first time the police have found it convenient to have the inquest first and the inquiry afterward.”

  But Paynter had paid little attention to the point; for his great gift of enthusiasm, long wasted on arts and affectations, was lifted to inspiration by the romance of real life into which he had just walked. He was really a great critic; he had a genius for admiration, and his admiration varied fittingly with everything he admired.

  “A splendid girl and a splendid story,” he cried. “I feel as if I were in love again myself, not so much with her as with Eve or Helen of Troy, or some such tower of beauty in the morning of the world. Don’t you love all heroic things, that gravity and great candour, and the way she took one step from a sort of throne to stand in a wilderness with a vagabond? Oh, believe me, it is she who is the poet; she has the higher reason, and honour and valour are at rest in her soul.”

  “In short, she is uncommonly pretty,” replied Ashe, with some cynicism. “I knew a murderess rather well who was very much like her, and had just that coloured hair.”

  “You talk as if a murderer could be caught red-haired instead of red-handed,” retorted Paynter. “Why, at this very minute, you could be caught red-haired yourself. Are you a murderer, by any chance?”

  Ashe looked up quickly, and then smiled.

  “I’m afraid I’m a connoisseur in murderers, as you are in poets,” he answered, “and I assure you they are of all colours in hair as well as temperament. I suppose it’s inhumane, but mine is a monstrously interesting trade, even in a little place like this. As for that girl, of course I’ve known her all her life, and—but—but that is just the question. Have I known her all her life? Have I known her at all? Was she even there to be known? You admire her for telling the truth; and so she did, by God, when she said that some people wake up late, who have never lived before. Do we know what they might do—we, who have only seen them asleep?”

  “Great heavens!” cried Paynter. “You don’t dare suggest that she—”

  “No, I don’t,” said the lawyer, with composure, “but there are other reasons… I don’t suggest anything fully, till we’ve had our interview with this poet of yours. I think I know where to find him.”

  They found him, in fact, before they expected him, sitting on the bench outside the Vane Arms, drinking a mug of cider and waiting for the return of his American friend; so it was not difficult to open conversation with him. Nor did he in any way avoid the subject of the tragedy; and the lawyer, seating himself also on the long bench that fronted the little market place, was soon putting the last developments as lucidly as he had put them to Barbara.

  “Well,” said Treherne at last, leaning back and frowning at the signboard, with the coloured birds and dolphins, just about his head; “suppose somebody did kill the Squire. He’d killed a good many people with his hygiene and his enlightened landlordism.”

  Paynter was considerably uneasy at this alarming opening; but the poet went on quite coolly, with his hands in his pockets and his feet thrust out into the street.

  “When a man has the power of a Sultan in Turkey, and uses it with the ideas of a spinster in Tooting, I often wonder that nobody puts a knife in him. I wish there were more sympathy for murderers, somehow. I’m very sorry the poor old fellow’s gone myself; but you gentlemen always seem to forget there are any other people in the world. He’s all right; he was a good fellow, and his soul, I fancy, has gone to the happiest paradise of all.”

  The anxious American could read nothing of the effect of this in the dark Napoleonic face of the lawyer, who merely said: “What do you mean?”

  “The fool’s paradise,” said Treherne, and drained his pot of cider.

  The lawyer rose. He did not look at Treherne, or speak to him; but looked and spoke straight across him to the American, who found the utterance not a little unexpected.

  “Mr. Paynter,” said Ashe, “you thought it rather morbid of me to collect murderers; but it’s fortunate for your own view of the case that I do. It may surprise you to know that Mr. Treherne has now, in my eyes, entirely cleared himself of suspicion. I have been intimate with several assassins, as I remarked; but there’s one thing none of them ever did. I never knew a murderer to talk about the murder, and then at once deny it and defend it. No, if a man is concealing his crime, why should he go out of his way to apologize for it?”

  “Well,” said Paynter, with his ready appreciation, “I always said you were a remarkable man; and that’s certainly a remarkable idea.”

  “Do I understand,” asked the poet, kicking his heels on the cobbles, “that both you gentlemen have been kindly directing me toward the gallows?”

  “No,” said Paynter thoughtfully. “I never thought you guilty; and even supposing I had, if you understand me, I should never have thought it quite so guilty to be guilty. It would not have been for money or any mean thing, but for something a little wilder and worthier of a man of genius. After all, I suppose, the poet has passions like great unearthly appetites; and the world has always judged more gently of his sins. But now that M
r. Ashe admits your innocence, I can honestly say I have always affirmed it.”

  The poet rose also. “Well, I am innocent, oddly enough,” he said. “I think I can make a guess about your vanishing well, but of the death and dry bones I know no more than the dead; if so much. And, by the way, my dear Paynter”—and he turned two bright eyes on the art critic—“I will excuse you from excusing me for all the things I haven’t done; and you, I hope, will excuse me if I differ from you altogether about the morality of poets. As you suggest, it is a fashionable view, but I think it is a fallacy. No man has less right to be lawless than a man of imagination. For he has spiritual adventures, and can take his holidays when he likes. I could picture the poor Squire carried off to elfland whenever I wanted him carried off, and that wood needed no crime to make it wicked for me. That red sunset the other night was all that a murder would have been to many men. No, Mr. Ashe; show, when next you sit in judgment, a little mercy to some wretched man who drinks and robs because he must drink beer to taste it, and take it to drink it. Have compassion on the next batch of poor thieves, who have to hold things in order to have them. But if ever you find me stealing one small farthing, when I can shut my eyes and see the city of El Dorado, then”—and he lifted his head like a falcon—“show me no mercy, for I shall deserve none.”

  “Well,” remarked Ashe, after a pause, “I must go and fix things up for the inquest. Mr. Treherne, your attitude is singularly interesting; I really almost wish I could add you to my collection of murderers. They are a varied and extraordinary set.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” asked Paynter, “that perhaps the men who have never committed murder are a varied and very extraordinary set? Perhaps every plain man’s life holds the real mystery, the secret of sins avoided.”

  “Possibly,” replied Ashe. “It would be a long business to stop the next man in the street and ask him what crimes he never committed and why not. And I happen to be busy, so you’ll excuse me.”