“’I can’t tell you,’ she answered me; she might have once been pretty. ‘But something dreadful is going to happen! I know it!’
“Mr. Brooke, it developed, had returned from the bank at three o’clock with his brief-case full of money. He told his wife that he meant to have what he called a show-down with Fay Seton, and that he had arranged to meet her at the tower at four o’clock.
“He then asked Mama Brooke where Harry was, because he said he wanted Harry to be present at the show-down. She replied that Harry was upstairs in his room, writing a letter, so the father went upstairs to get him. He didn’t find Harry?who, actually, was tinkering with a motor in the garage?and presently he came downstairs again. ‘So
“Not five minutes later, Harry himself turned up from the garage and asked where his father was. Mama Brooke told him, rather hysterically. Harry stood for a moment thinking to himself, murmuring, and then he went out of the house towards Henri Quatre’s tower. During this time there was no sign of Fay Seton.
“’Professor Rigaud,’ the mother cried to me, ‘you’ve got to follow them and do something. You’re the only friend we have here, and you’ve got to follow them!”
“A job, eh, for old Uncle Rigaud?”
“My word!
“And yet I followed them.
“There was a crack of thunder as I left the house, but still it would not rain in earnest. I walked northwards along the east bank of the river, until I came to the stone bridge. There I crossed the bridge to the west bank. The tower stood on that side, overhanging the bank a little farther up.
“It looks desolate enough, I tell you, when you stumble across the few old bits of blackened stone?fire- razed, overgrown in earth with weeds?which are all that remained of the original building. The entrance to the tower is only a rounded arch cut in the wall. This doorway faces west, away from the river, towards open grass and a wood of chestnut trees beyond. I approached there with the sky darkening, and the wind blowing still harder.
“In the doorway, looking at me, stood Fay Seton.
“Fay Seton, in a thin flowered-silk frock, stocking less, with white openwork leather sandals. She carried over her arm a bathing-dress, a towel, and a bathing-cap; but she had not been in to swim, since not even the edges of the shining dark-red hair were damp or tumbled. She breathed slowly and heavily.
“’Mademoiselle,’ I said to her, not at all certain what I was supposed to do, ‘I am looking for Harry Brooke and his father.’
“For some five seconds, which can seem a very long time, she did not answer.
“’They’re here,’ she told me. ‘Upstairs. On the roof of the tower.’ All of a sudden her eyes (I swear it!) wee the eyes of one who remembers a horrible experience of some kind. ‘They seem to be having an argument. I don’t think I shall intrude just now. Excuse me.’
“’But, mademoiselle!?
“’Please excuse me!’
“Then she was gone, keeping her face turned away from me. One or two raindrops stung the wind-blown grass, followed by others.
“I put my head inside the doorway. As I told you, that tower was no more than a stone shell, up whose wall a spiraling stone staircase climbed to a square opening giving on the flat roof. It smelt inside of age and the river. It was empty, as bare as your and, except for a couple of wooden benches and a broken chair. Long narrow windows along the staircase lighted it fairly well, though there was a wild enough stormlight flying over the sky now.
“Angry voice were speaking up there. I could hear them faintly. I gave them a shout, my voice making a hollow echo in that stone jug, and the voices stopped instantly.
“So I plodded up the corkscrew stair?a dizzy business, also very bad for one scan of breath?and emerged through the square opening on the roof.
“Harry Brooke and his father stood facing each other on a circular stone platform, with a high parapet, well above the trees. The father, in his raincoat and tweed cap, had his mouth set implacably. The son pleaded with him; Harry was hatless and coatless, in a corduroy suit whose windblown tie emphasized his state of mind. Both of them were pale and worked up, but both seemed rather relieved it was I who had interrupted them.
“’I tell you, sir?!’ Harry was beginning.
“’For the last time,’ said Mr. Brooke in a cold buttoned-up voice, ‘will you allow me to deal with this matter in my own way?’ He turned to me and added: ‘Professor Rigaud!’
“’Yes, my dear fellow?’
“’Will you take my son away from here until I have adjusted certain matters to my own satisfaction?’
“’Take him where, my dear fellow?’
“’Take him anywhere,’ replied Mr. Brooke, and turned his back on us.
“It was now, as I saw by a surreptitious glance at my watch, ten minutes to four o-clock. Mr. Brooke was due to meet Fay Seton there at four o’clock, and he meant to wait. Harry was beaten and deflated; that leapt to the eyes. I said nothing about having met Miss Fay a moment before, since I wanted to pour ointment on the situation instead of inflaming it. Harry allowed me to lead him away.
“Now I wish to impress on you?very clearly!?the last thing we saw as we went downstairs.
“Mr. Brook was standing by the parapet, his back uncompromisingly turned. On one side of him his cane, of light yellowish-colored wood, was propped upright against the parapet. On the other side of him, also resting against the parapet, was the bulging brief-case. Round the tower-top this battlemented parapet ran breast-high; its stone broken, crumbling, and scored with whitish hieroglyphics where people had cut their initials.
“That is clear? Good!
“I took Harry downstairs. I led him across the open space of grass, into the shelter of the big wood of chestnut trees stretching westwards and northwards. For the rain was beginning to sprinkle pretty heavily now, and we had no cover. Under the hissing and pattering leaves, where it was almost dark, my curiosity reached a point of mania. I begged Harry, as his friend and in a sense his tutor, to tell me the meaning of these suggestions against Fay Seton.
“At first he would hardly listen to me. He kept opening and shutting his hands, this handsome mentally unformed young man, and replied that it was all too ridiculous to be talked about.
“’Harry,’ said Uncle Rigaud, lifting an impressive forefinger like this. ‘Harry, I have spoken to you much of French literature. I have spoken to you of crime and the occult. I have covered a broad field of human experience. And I tell you that the things which cause the most trouble in this world are the things which are too ridiculous to talk about.’
“He regarded me quickly, with a strange, sullen, shining eye.
“’Have you,’ he asked, ‘have you heard about Jules Fresnac, the market gardener?’
“’Your mother mentioned him,’ I said, ‘but I have yet to hear what is wrong with Jules Fresnac.’
“’Jules Fresnac,’ said Harry, ‘has a son aged sixteen.’
“’Well?’
“That was the point where?in the twilight woods, out of sight of the tower?we heard a child screaming.
“Yes: a child screaming.
“I tell you,it scared me until I felt my scalp crawl. A drop of rain filtered through the thick leaves overhead, and landed on my bald head, and I jumped throughout every muscle in my body. For I had been congratulating myself that trouble was averted: that Howard Brooke and Harry Brooke and Fay Seton were for the moment separated, and that these three elements were not dangerous unless they came together all at once. And now . . .
“The screaming came from the direction of the tower. Harry and I ran out of the woods, and emerged into the open grassy space with the tower and the curve of the riverbank in front of us. That whole open space now seemed to be full o people.
“What had happened we learned soon enough.
“Inside the fringe of the wood there had been, for some half an hour, a picnic-party composed of a
