III
Thursday Night
I went up to my room early in the evening. Eileen had been very silent, and about nine o’clock she bade us good night and left us. To sit alone with Tiel, feeling as I did and yet bound by a promise not to upbraid him, was intolerable, and so I left the parlour a few minutes after she did. As I went down the passage to the back, my way lit only by the candle I was carrying, I was struck with a sound I had heard in that house before, only never so loudly. It was the droning of the wind through the crevices of some door, and the whining melancholy note in the stillness of that house of divided plotters and confidences withheld, did nothing to raise my spirits.
When I reached my room I realised what had caused the droning. The wind had changed to a new quarter, and as another consequence my chimney was smoking badly and the room was filled with a pungent blue cloud. It is curious how events arise as consequences of trifling and utterly different circumstances. I tried opening my door and then my window, but still the fire smoked and the cloud refused to disperse. Then I had an inspiration. I have mentioned a large cupboard. It was so large as almost to be a minute room, and I remembered that it had a skylight in its sloping roof. I opened this, and as the room at once began to clear, I left it open.
And then I paced the floor and smoked and thought. What was to be made of these very disquieting events? Clearly Tiel was either a much less capable and clever man than he was reputed—a bit of a fraud in fact—or else he was carrying his fondness for mystery and for suddenly springing brilliant surprises, like conjuring tricks, upon people, to the most extreme lengths. If he were really carrying out a cunning deliberate policy in not preaching last Sunday, good and well, but it was intolerable that he should have deceived me about it. It seemed quite a feasible theory to suppose that he had got out of conducting the service on some excuse in order that he might be asked to stay longer and preach next Sunday instead. But then he had deliberately told me he had preached, and that the people had been so pleased that they had invited him to preach again. It sounded like a schoolboy’s boastfulness!
Of course if he were the sort of man who would (like myself) have drawn the line at conducting a bogus religious service, I could quite well understand his getting out of it somehow. But when I remembered his tale of the murder of the real Mr. Burnett, I dismissed that hypothesis. Besides, why deceive me in any case? I daresay I should have felt a little anxious as to the result if he had evaded the duty he had professed to come up and perform, but would he care twopence about that? I did not believe it.
And then his method of getting Eileen into the islands, though ingenious enough (if not very original), had been marred by the most inconceivable recklessness. Surely some better scheme could have been devised for getting her out of the Craigies’ house than a sudden flight without a word of explanation—and a flight, moreover, to another house in the same island where gossip would certainly spread in the course of a very few days. Of course Mr. Craigie’s extraordinary character gave the scheme a chance it never deserved, but was Tiel really so diabolically clever that he actually counted on that? How could he have known so much of Craigie’s character? Indeed, that explanation was inconceivable.
And then again, why had Eileen consented to such a wild plan? That neither of them should have realised its drawbacks seemed quite extraordinary. There must be some deep cunning about it that escaped me altogether. If it were not so, we were lost indeed! And so I resolved to believe that there was more wisdom in the scheme than I realised, and simply leave it at that.
Thereupon I sat down and wrote for an hour or two to keep me from thinking further on the subject, and at last about midnight I resolved to go to bed. The want of fresh air had been troubling me greatly, and it struck me that a safe way of getting a little would be to put my head through the open skylight for a few minutes. It was quite dark in the cupboard, so that no light could escape; and I brought a chair along, stood on it, and looked out, with my head projecting from the midst of the sloping slates, and a beautiful cool breeze refreshing my face.
So cool was the wind that there was evidently north in it, and this was confirmed by the sky, which literally blazed with stars. I could see dimly but pretty distinctly the outbuildings at the back of the house, and the road that led to the highway, and the dark rim of hills beyond. Suddenly I heard the back door gently open, and still as I had stood on my chair before, I became like a statue now. In a moment the figure of Tiel appeared, and from a flash of light I saw that he carried his electric torch. He walked slowly towards the highroad till he came to a low wall that divided the fields at the side, and then from behind the wall up jumped the form of a man, illuminated for an instant by a flash from the torch, and then just distinguishable in the gloom.
I held my breath and waited for the crack of a pistol-shot, gently withdrawing my head a little, and prepared to rush down and take part in the fray. But
