Kitabı oku: «Witching Hill», sayfa 9
CHAPTER VII
The Locked Room
It was no great coincidence that we should have been speaking of Edgar Nettleton that night. Uvo Delavoye was full of him just then, and I had the man on my mind for other reasons. Besides, I had to talk to Uvo about something, since he was down with a quinsy caught from the perfect sanitation in advertised vogue on the Estate, and could hardly open his own mouth. And perhaps I had to talk to somebody about the unpleasant duty hanging over me in connection with this fellow Nettleton, who had taken his house about the same time as Colonel Cheffins and his gang, had made up to Delavoye over that affair, and was himself almost as undesirable a tenant from my point of view.
"I know he's a friend of yours, and I haven't come to curse him to your face," I had been saying. "But if you would just tell Nettleton, when you see him again, that we're in dead earnest this time, you might be doing both him and us a service. I sent him a final demand yesterday; if he doesn't pay up within the week, my orders are to distrain without further notice. Muskett's furious about the whole thing. He blames me for ever having truck with such a fellow in the first instance. But when a man has been science beak in a public school – and such a school – it sounds good enough for Witching Hill, doesn't it? Who would have thought he'd had the sack? Public-school masters don't often get it."
"They've got to do something pretty desperate first, I fancy," whispered Uvo, with a gleam in his sunken eyes. He had not denied the fact. I felt encouraged to elaborate my grievance against Edgar Nettleton.
"Besides, I had his banker's reference. That was all right; yet we had trouble to get our very first rent, more trouble over the second, and this time there's going to be a devil of a row. I shouldn't wonder if Nettleton had a bill of sale over every stick. I know he's owing all the tradesmen. He may be a very clever chap, and all that, but I can't help saying that he strikes me as a bit of a wrong 'un, Uvo."
Of course I had not started with the intention of saying quite so much. But the brunt of the unpleasantness was falling on my shoulders; and the fellow had made friends with my friend, whose shoes he was not fit to black. Uvo, moreover, was still according me a patient, interested hearing, as he lay like a bright-eyed log in his bed at the top of No. 7. Altogether it was not in my allowance of human nature to lose such an opportunity of showing him his new friend in his true colours.
"He is clever," whispered Uvo, as though that was the bond between them. "He knows something about everything, and he's a wonderful carpenter and mechanic. You must really see the burglar-trap that he concocted after the scare. If another Cheffins paid him a visit, he'd put his foot in it with a vengeance."
"It would be six of one and very nearly half a dozen of the other," said I with hardihood. "Set a Nettleton to catch a Cheffins, as you might say, Uvo!"
But he only smiled, as though he would not have hesitated to say it in fun. "Of course you're only joking, Gilly, but I could quite understand it if you weren't. There's no vice in old Nettleton, let alone crime; but there's a chuckle-headed irresponsibility that might almost let him in for either before he knew it. He never does seem to know what he's doing, and I'm sure he never worries about anything he's once done. If he did, he'd have gone further afield from the scene of his downfall, or else taken rooms in town instead of a red elephant of a house that he evidently can't afford. As a tenant, I quite agree that he is hopeless."
"If only he hadn't come here!" I grumbled. "What on earth can have brought him to Witching Hill, of all places?"
Uvo's eyes were dancing in the light of the reading gas-lamp, with the smelly tube, which had been connected up with his bedroom bracket.
"Of course," he whispered, "you wouldn't admit for a moment that it might be the call of the soil, and all there's in it, Gilly?"
"No, I wouldn't; but I'll tell you one thing," I exclaimed, as it struck me for the first time: "the man you describe is not the man to trust with all those morbid superstitions of yours! I know he enters into them, because you told me he did, and I know how much you wanted to find some one who would. But so much the worse for you both, if he's the kind you say he is. An idle man, too, and apparently alone in the world! I don't envy you if Nettleton really does come under the influence of your old man of the soil, and plays down to him!"
"My dear Gilly, this is a great concession," whispered Uvo, on his elbow with surprise.
"I don't mean it for one," said I sturdily. "I only mean the influence of your own conception of your old man and his powers. I disbelieve in him and them as much as ever, but I don't disbelieve in your ability to make both exist in some weaker mind than your own. And where they do catch on, remember, those wild ideas of yours may always get the upper hand. It isn't everybody who can think the things you do, Uvo, and never look like doing 'em!"
"I don't agree with you a bit, Gilly. I never believe those blithering blighters who attribute their crimes to the bad example of some criminal hero of the magazines or of the stage. Villain-worship doesn't carry you to that length unless you're a bit of a villain in the first instance."
"But suppose you are?" I argued, almost before I saw the point that I was making. "Suppose you have as few scruples, principles, 'pangs and fears' – call them what you like – as this fellow Nettleton. Suppose you're full of fire of sorts, but also as irresponsible and chuckle-headed as you yourself say he is. Well, then, I say, it's taking responsibility for two to go pumping your theories into as sensitive an engine as all that!"
Uvo clapped his thin hands softly as there came a knock at the door. "Well, he's a practical man, Gilly, I must admit, so let's leave it at that. Come in! What is it, Jane?"
"The servant from Mr. Nettleton's, sir, wants to see Mr. Gillon," said the maid.
I began by explaining why this scarcely comes into the category of Witching Hill coincidences. Yet it was rather startling at the time, and Uvo Delavoye looked as though his evil ancestor had materialised at the foot of the bed.
"All right, Jane! Mr. Gillon will be down directly."
It was the first time his voice had risen to more than a whisper, and it was shaky. The maid seemed to catch some echo of an alarm already communicated to herself, and faintly sounded in her own announcement.
"Sarah seems very anxious to see you, sir," she ventured, turning to me, and then withdrew in some embarrassment.
I rose to follow. Sarah was almost as great a character as her master, and I for one liked her the better of the two. She was a simple, faithful, incompetent old body, who once told me that she had known Mr. Nettleton, man and boy, most of his life, but without betraying a page of his past. She had come with him to Witching Hill Road as cook-general. There had been a succession of auxiliary servants who had never in any instance outstayed their month. The last of them had left precipitately, threatening a summons, to the scandal of the neighbours; but beyond that fact the matter had been hushed up, and even I only knew that Sarah was now practically single-handed through her coming to me about a charwoman. I thought I ought to see her at once, but Uvo detained me with an almost piteous face.
"Do wait a moment! Of course it's probably nothing at all; but you've given me an idea that certainly never crossed my mind before. I won't say you've put the fear of God on me, Gilly, but you have put me in rather a funk about old Nettleton! He is a rum 'un – I must admit it. If he should have done anything that could possibly be traced to … all that… I'll never open my mouth about it again."
"Oh, bless your life, it's only more servant troubles," I reassured him. "I shouldn't wonder if old Sarah herself finds him more than she can stick. They do say he assaulted that last girl, so that she could hardly limp into her cab!"
Uvo rolled his head on the pillow.
"It wasn't an assault, Gilly. I know what happened to her. But I must know what's happened to old Sarah, or to Nettleton himself. Will you promise to come back and tell me?"
"Certainly."
"Then off you go, my dear fellow, and I'll hang on to my soul till you get back. You may have to go along with her, if he's been doing anything very mad. Take my key, and tell them downstairs not to lock you out."
Sarah was waiting for me on the front-door mat, but she refused to make any communication before we left the house. She really was what she herself would have described as an elderly party, though it is doubtful whether even Sarah would have considered the epithet appropriate to her years. She certainly wore a rather jaunty bonnet on her walks abroad. It had a garish plume that nodded violently with her funny old head, and simply danced with mystery as she signified the utter impossibility of speech within reach of other ears.
"I'm very sorry to trouble you, sir, very," said the old lady, as she trotted beside me up Mulcaster Park. "But I never did know such a thing to 'appen before, and I don't like it, sir, not at all I don't, I'm sure."
"But what has happened, Sarah?"
As a witness Sarah would not have been a success; she believed in beginning her story very far back, in following it into every by-way and blind alley of immaterial fact, in reporting every scrap of dialogue that she could remember or improvise, and in eschewing the oblique oration as an unworthy economy of time and breath. If interrupted, she would invariably answer a question that had not been asked, and on getting up to any real point she would shy at it like a fractious old steed. It was then impossible to spur her on, and we had to retrace much ground at her pleasure. The ípsíssíma verba of this innocent creature are therefore frankly unprintable. But towards the top of Mulcaster Park I did make out that a number of pointless speeches, delivered by Mr. Nettleton at his lunch, had culminated in the announcement that he was going to the theatre that night.
"The theatre!" I cried. "I thought he never even went up to town?"
I had gathered that from Delavoye, and Sarah confirmed it with much embroidery. I was also told his reasons for making such a sudden exception, and as given by Sarah they were certainly not convincing.
"Then he's in the theatre now, or ought to be?" I suggested; for it was then just after nine o'clock.
"Ah, that's where it is, sir!" said Sarah, weightily. "He ought to be, as you say, sir. But he's locked his lib'ry, and there's a light under the door, and I can't get no answer, not though I knock, knock, knock, till I'm tired of knocking!"
I now ascertained that Sarah also had been given money to make a night of it, in her case at the Parish Hall, where one of the church entertainments was going on. Sarah made mention of every item on the programme, as far as she had heard it out. But then it seemed she had become anxious about her kitchen fire, which she had been ordered to keep up for elaborate reasons connected with the master's bath. There had been no fire in the lib'ry that day; it was late in February, but exceptionally mild for the time of year. She knew her master sometimes left his lib'ry locked, after that what happened the last house-parlourmaid, and serve people right for going where they had no business. She could not say that he had left it locked on this occasion; she only knew it was so now, and a light under the door, though he had gone away in broad daylight.
This room, in which Nettleton certainly kept his books, but also his carpenter's bench, test-tubes and retorts, and a rack of stoppered bottles, was the one at the back leading into the garden. It was meant for the drawing-room in this particular type of house, was of considerable size, but only divided from the kitchen by a jerry-built wall. Sarah could not say that she had heard a sound in the lib'ry – though she often did hear master, as she was setting there of a evening – since he went away without his tea. Of course she had not noticed the light under the door till after dark; not, in fact, till she came back from her entertainment. No; she had not thought of going into the room to draw the curtains. The less she went in there, without orders, the better, Sarah always thought. And yet, when she trotted in front of me through her kitchen and scullery, and so round to the French windows of the sealed chamber, we found them closely shuttered, as they must have been left early in the afternoon, unless Nettleton had returned from his theatre and locked himself in.
It was with rather too vivid a recollection of the finding of Abercromby Royle, in a corresponding room in Mulcaster Park, that I went on to my office for an assortment of keys.
"Now, Sarah, you stand sentinel at the gate," I said on my return. "If Mr. Nettleton should come back while I'm busy, keep him in conversation while I slip out through your kitchen. I don't much like my job, Sarah, but neither do I think for a moment that there's anything wrong."
Yet there was a really bright layer of light under the door in which I now tried key after key, while the old body relieved me of her presence in order to keep a rather unwilling eye up the road.
At last a key fitted, turned, and the door was open for me to enter if I dared; and never shall I forget the scene that presented itself when I did.
The room was unoccupied. That was one thing. Neither the quick nor the dead lay in wait for me this time. A mere glance explored every corner; the scanty furniture was that of a joiner's shop and a laboratory in one; all the library to be seen was a couple of standing bookcases, not nearly full. But my eyes were rooted in horror to the floor. It also was bare, in the sense that there was no carpet, though a rug or two had been roughly folded and piled on the carpenter's bench. In their place, from skirting-board to skirting-board, the floor was ankle-deep in shavings. And among the shavings, like so many lighthouses in a yellow sea, burnt four or five fat ecclesiastical candles. They were not in candlesticks; at first I thought that they were mounted merely in their own grease. But Nettleton had run no such risk of one toppling before its time. Their innocent little flames were within an inch or so of the shavings – one was nearer still – but before I could probe the simple secret of the vile device, there was a rustle at my elbow, and there stood Sarah with her nodding plume.
"Well, I never did!" she exclaimed in a scandalised whisper. "Trying to set fire to the 'ouse – oh, fie!"
The grotesque inadequacy of these comments, taken in conjunction with her comparative composure, made me suspect for one wild moment that Sarah herself was an accomplice in the horrible design. She grasped it at a glance, much quicker than I had done, and it seemed to shock her very much less. I snatched up one of the candles – they were pinned in place with black-headed toilet pins – and I lit the gas with it before stalking through the shavings and setting a careful foot upon the rest in turn.
When I had extinguished the last of them, I turned to find my innocent old suspect snivelling on the threshold, and nodding her gay plume more emphatically than ever.
"'Ow awful!" she ejaculated in hushed tones. "Madness, I call it. Setting fire to a nice 'ouse like this! But there, he's been getting queer for a long time. I've often said so – to myself, you know, sir – I wouldn't say it to nobody else. That burgular business was the beginning."
"Well, Sarah," I said, "he's got so queer that we must think what's to be done, and think quickly, and do it double-quick! But I shall be obliged if you'll stick to your excellent rule of not talking to outsiders. We've had scenes enough at Witching Hill, without this getting about."
"Oh! I shan't say a word, sir," said Sarah, solemnly. "Even pore Mr. Nettleton, he shall never know from me how I found him out!"
I could hardly believe my ears. "Good God, woman! Do you dream of spending another night under this maniac's roof?"
"Why, of course I do, sir," cried old Sarah, bridling. "Who's to look after him, if I go away and leave him, I should like to know? The very idea!"
"I'll see that he's looked after," said I, grimly, and went and bolted the front door, lest he should return before I had decided on my tactics.
In the few seconds that my back was turned, Sarah seemed to have acquired yet another new and novel point of view. I found the old heroine almost gloating over her master's dreadful handiwork.
"Well, there, I never did see anything so artful! Him at his theatre, to come home and look on at the fire, and me at my concert, safe and sound as if I was at church! Oh, he'd see to that, sir; he wouldn't've done it if he 'adn't've arranged to put me out of 'arm's way. That's Mr. Nettleton, every inch. Not that I say it was a right thing to do, sir, even with the 'ouse empty as it is. But what can you expect when a pore gentleman goes out of 'is 'ead? There's not many would care what 'appened to nobody else! But the artfulness of 'im: in another minute the whole 'ouse might've been blazing like a bonfire! Well, there, you do 'ear of such things, and now we know 'ow they 'appen."
To this extraordinary tune, with many such variations, I was meanwhile making up my mind. The first necessity was to place the intrepid old fool really out of harm's way, and the next was to save the house if possible, but also and at all costs the good name of the Witching Hill Estate. We had had one suicide, and it had not been hushed up quite as successfully as some of us flattered ourselves at the time; one case of gross intemperance, most scandalous while it lasted, and one gang of burglars actually established on the Estate. People were beginning to talk about us as it was; a case of attempted arson, even if the incendiary were proved a criminal lunatic, might be the end of us as a flourishing concern. It is true that I had no stake in the Company whose servant I was; but one does not follow the dullest avocation for three years without taking a certain interest of another kind. At any rate I intended the secret of this locked room to remain as much a secret as I could keep it, and this gave me an immediate leverage over Sarah. Unless she took herself off before her master returned, I assured her I would have him sent, not to an asylum, but to the felon's cell which I described as the proper place for him. I was not so sure in my own mind that I meant him to go to one or the other. But this was the bargain that I proposed to Sarah.
It came out that she had friends, in the shape of a labouring brother and his wife and family, whom I strongly suspected of having migrated on purpose to keep in touch with Sarah's kitchen, no further away than the Village. I succeeded in packing the old thing off in that direction, after making her lock her door at the top of the house. Previously I had removed the marks of my boot from the extinguished candles, and had left the locked room locked once more and in total darkness. Sarah and I quitted the house together before ten o'clock.
"I'll see that your master doesn't do himself any damage to-night," were my last words to her. "He'll think the candles have been blown out by a draught under the door – which really wouldn't catch them till they burnt quite low – and that you are asleep in your bed at the top of the house. You've left everything as though you were; and that alone, as you yourself have pointed out, is enough to guarantee his not trying it on again to-night. You see, the fire was timed to break out before you left your entertainment, as it would have done if you'd seen the programme through. Tell your people that Mr. Nettleton's away for the night, and you've gone and locked yourself out by mistake. Above all, don't come back, unless you want to give the whole show away; he'd know at once that you'd discovered everything, and even your life wouldn't be safe for another minute. Unless you promise, Sarah, I'll just wait for him myself – with a policeman!"
My reasoning was cogent enough for that simple mind; on the other hand, the word of such an obviously faithful soul was better than the bond of most; and altogether it was with considerable satisfaction that I heard old Sarah trot off into the night, and then myself ran every yard of the way back to the Delavoyes' house.
Up to this point, as I still think, I had done better than many might have done in my place. But for my promise to Uvo, and the fact that he was even then lying waiting for me to redeem it, I would not have rushed to a sick man with my tale. Yet I must say that I was thankful I had no other choice, as matters stood. And I will even own that I had formed no definite plans beyond the point at which Uvo, having heard all, was to give me the benefit of his sound judgment in any definite dilemma.
To my sorrow he took the whole thing in an absolutely different way from any that I had anticipated. He took it terribly to heart. I had entirely forgotten the gist of our conversation before I left him; he had been thinking of nothing else. The thing that I had expected to thrill him to the marrow, that would have done nothing else at any other time, simply harrowed him after what it seemed that I had said three-quarters of an hour before. Whatever I had said was overlaid in my mind, for the moment, by all that I had since seen and heard. But Uvo Delavoye might have been brooding over every syllable.
"You said you wouldn't envy me," he cried, huskily, "if poor old Nettleton fell under the influence in his turn. You spoke as if it was my influence; it isn't, but it may be that I'm a sort of medium for its transmission! Sole agent, eh, Gilly? My God, that's an awful thought, but you gave it me just now and I sha'n't get shot of it in a hurry! None of these beastly things happened before I came here – I, the legitimate son of this infernal soil! I'm the lightning-conductor, I'm the middleman in every deal!"
"My dear Uvo, we've no time for all that," I said. He had started up in bed, painfully excited and distressed, and I began to fear that I might have my work cut out to keep him there. "We agreed to differ about that long ago," I reminded him.
"It's only another way of putting what you said just now," he answered. "You said you did believe in my power of infecting another fellow with my ideas; you spoke of my responsibility if the other fellow put them into practice; and now he's done this hideous thing, had done it even when we were talking!"
"He hasn't done it yet, and I mean to know the reason if he ever does," said I, perhaps with rather more confidence than I really felt. I went on to outline my various notions of prevention. Uvo found no comfort in any of them.
"You can't trust him alone there for the night, after this, Gilly! He'll pull it off, Sarah or no Sarah, if you do. And if you send him either to prison or an asylum – but you won't be sending him! That's just it, Gilly. He'll have been sent by me!"
It was a case of the devil quoting scripture, but I was obliged to tell Uvo, as though I had found it out for myself, that criminals and criminal lunatics were not made that way. Villain-worshippers did not go to such lengths unless they had the seeds of madness or of crime already in them. Uvo could not repudiate his own thesis, but he said that if that were so he had watered those seeds in a way that made him the worst of the two. There was no arguing with him, no taking his part against this ruthless self-criticism. He owned that in Nettleton he had found a sympathetic listener at last, that he had poured the whole virus of his ideas into those willing ears, and now here was the result. He threatened to get up and dress, and to stagger into the breach with me or instead of me. No need to recount our contest on that point. I prevailed by undertaking to do any mortal thing he liked, as long as he lay where he was with that quinsy.
"Then save the fellow somehow, Gilly," he cried, "only don't you go near Nettleton to-night! He obviously isn't safe; take the other risk instead. Since the old soul's out of the house, let him set fire to it if he likes; that's better than his murdering you on the spot. Then we must get him quietly examined, without letting him know that we know anything at all; and if a private attendant's all he wants, I swear I'm his man. It's about the least I can do for him, and it would give me a job in life at last!"
I did not smile at my dear old lad. I gave him the assurance his generosity required, and I meant to carry it out, subject to a plan of my own for watching Nettleton's house all night. But all my proposals suffered a proverbial fate within ten minutes, when I was about to pass the still dark house, and was suddenly confronted by Nettleton himself, leaning over the gate as though in wait for me.
And here I feel an almost apologetic sense of the inadequacy of Nettleton's personality to the part that he was playing that night; for there was nothing terrifying about him, nothing sinister or grotesque. The outward man was flabbily restless and ineffective, distinguished from the herd by no stronger features than a goatee beard and the light, quick, instantaneously responsive eye of an uncannily intelligent child. And no more than a child did I fear him; man to man, I could have twisted his arm out of its socket, or felled him like an ox with one blow from mine. So I thought to myself, the very moment I stopped to speak to him; and perhaps, by so thinking, recognised some subtler quality, and confessed a subtle fear.
"I was looking for my old servant," said Nettleton, after a civil greeting. "She's not come in yet."
"Oh! hasn't she?" I answered, and I liked the ring of my own voice even less than his.
"Anyhow I can't make her hear, and the old fool's left her door locked," said Nettleton.
"That's a bad plan," said I, not to score a silly point, but simply because I had to say something with conviction. It was a mistake. Nettleton peered at me by the light from the nearest lamp-post.
"Have you seen anything of her?" he asked suspiciously.
"Yes!" I answered, in obedience to the same necessity of temperament.
"Well?" he cried.
"Well, she seemed nervous about something, and I believe she has gone to her own people for the night."
We stood without speaking for nearly a minute. A soft step came marching round the asphalt curve, throwing a bright beam now upon its indigo surface, and now over the fussy fronts of the red houses, as a child plays with a bit of looking-glass in the sun. "Good-night, officer," said Nettleton as the step and the light passed on. And I caught myself thinking what an improvement the asphalt was in Witching Hill Road, and how we did want it in Mulcaster Park.
"We can't talk out here, and I wish to explain about this wretched rent," said Nettleton. "Come in – or are you nervous too?"
I gave the gate a push, and he had to lead the way. I should not have been so anxious to see a real child in front of me. But Nettleton turned his back with an absence of hesitation that reassured me as to his own suspicions, and indeed none were to be gleaned from his unthoughtful countenance when he had lit up his hall without waiting for me to shut the front door. At that I did shut it, and accepted his invitation to smoke a pipe in his den; for I thought I could see exactly how it was.
Nettleton, having found his candles out and his servant flown, having even guessed that I knew something and perhaps suspected more, was about to show me my mistake by taking me into the very room where the conflagration had been laid for lighting. Of course I should see no signs of it, and would presently depart at peace with a tenant whose worst crime was his unpunctuality over the rent. Nothing could suit me better. It would show that the house really was safe for the night, while it would give time for due consideration, and for any amount of conferences with Uvo Delavoye.
So I congratulated myself as I followed Nettleton into the room that had been locked; of course it was unlocked now that he was at home, but it was still in perfect darkness as I myself had left it. The shavings rustled about our ankles; but no doubt he would think there was nothing suspicious about the shavings in themselves. Yet there was one difference, perceptible at once and in the dark. There was a smell that I thought might have been there before, but unnoticed by Sarah and me in our excitement. It was a strong smell, however, and it reminded me of toy steamers and of picnic teas.
"One moment, and I'll light the gas. We're getting in each other's way," said Nettleton. I moved instinctively, in obedience to a light touch on the arm, and I heard him fumbling in the dark behind me. Then I let out the yell of a lifetime. I am not ashamed of it to this day. I had received a lifetime's dose of agony and amazement.
My right foot had gone through the floor, gone into the jaws of some frightful monster that bit it to the bone above the ankle!
"Why, what's the matter?" cried Nettleton, but not from the part of the room where I had heard him fumbling, neither had he yet struck a light.
"You know, you blackguard!" I roared, with a few worse words than that. "I'll sort you for this, you see if I don't! Strike a light and let me loose this instant! It's taking my foot off, I tell you!"
"Dear, dear!" he exclaimed, striking a match at once. "Why, if you haven't gone and got into my best burglar-trap!"
He stood regarding me from a safe distance, with a sly pale smile, and the wax vesta held on high. I dropped my eyes to my tortured leg: a couple of boards had opened downward on hinges, and I could see the rusty teeth of an ancient man-trap embedded in my trousers, and my trousers already darkening as though with ink, where the pierced cloth pressed into quivering flesh and bone.
