Without much difficulty he swarmed up the rope again, untied it from the balustrade, and coiled it over his arm.
“A nice little clue for Sir Clinton Driffield to puzzle over,” he assured himself. “Sherlock Holmes would have been on to it at once; found where it was sold in no time; discovered who bought it before five minutes had passed; and paralysed Watson with the whole story that same evening over a pipeful of shag. We shall see.”
He threw a last glance round the empty terrace and then moved off into the spinney. As he passed into the shadow of the trees he saw, a few yards to one side, the outline of the Fairy House dappled in the moonshine which filtered through the leaves overhead. Half-unconsciously, Michael halted and looked at the little building.
“They could never have overlooked that in the hunt, surely. Well, no harm in having a peep to make certain.”
He dropped his coil of rope, stepped across to the house, and, stooping down, flung open the door. Inside, he caught a flash of some white fabric.
“It’s the beggar after all! Here! Come out of that!”
He gripped the inmate roughly and hauled him by main force out of his retreat.
“Pierrot costume, right enough!” he said to himself as he extracted the man little by little from his refuge. Then, having got his victim into the open:
“Now we’ll turn you over and have a look at your face … Good God! Maurice!”
For as he turned the man on his back, it was the face of Maurice Chacewater that met his eyes. But it was not a normal Maurice whom he saw. The features were contorted by some excessive emotion the like of which Michael had never seen.
“Let me alone, damn you,” Maurice gasped, and turned over once more on his face, resting his brow on his arm as though to shut out the spectacle of Michael’s astonishment.
“Are you ill?” Michael inquired, solicitously.
“For God’s sake leave me alone. Don’t stand there gaping. Clear out, I tell you.”
Michael looked at him in amazement.
“I’m going to have a cheerful kind of brother-in-law before all’s done, it seems,” he thought to himself.
“Can I do anything for you, Maurice?”
“Oh, go to hell!”
Michael turned away.
“It’s fairly clear he doesn’t like my company,” he reflected, as he stepped across and picked up his coil of rope from the ground. “But I’ve known politer ways of showing it, I must say.”
With a final glance at the prostrate figure of Maurice, he walked on and took the road back to Ravensthorpe. But as he went a vision of Maurice’s face kept passing before his mind’s eye.
“There’s something damned far wrong with that beggar, whether it’s an evil conscience or cramp in the tummy. It might be either of them, by the look of him. He didn’t seem to want any assistance from me. That looks more like the evil conscience theory.”
He dismissed this with a laugh; but gradually he grew troubled.
“There he was, in white—same as the burglar. He’s in a bit of a bate at being discovered, that’s clear enough. He didn’t half like it, to judge by his chat.”
A discomforting hypothesis began to frame itself in his mind despite his efforts to stifle it.
“He’s the fellow, if there is one, who would know all these secret passages about here. Suppose there really is one leading out of that cave. He could have swarmed down the rope, got into the cave, sneaked up the subterranean passage, and got behind us that way.”
A fresh fact fitted suddenly in.
“And of course the other end of the passage may be in that Fairy House! That would explain his being there. He’d be waiting to see us off the premises before he could venture out in his white costume.”
He pondered over the problem as he hurried with long strides towards the house.
“Well,” he concluded, “I’m taking no further steps in the business. It’s no concern of mine to go probing into the private affairs of the family I’m going to marry into. And that’s that.”
Then, as a fresh aspect of the matter came to his mind, he gave a sigh of relief.
“I must be a stricken idiot! No man would ever dream of burgling his own house. What would he gain by it, if he did? The thing’s ridiculous.”
And the comfort which this view brought him was sufficient to lighten his steps for the rest of his way.
V
Sir Clinton in the Museum
“There’s the light on again in the museum,” Sir Clinton observed. “I think we’ll go in and have a look round, now, to see if the place suggests anything.”
Mold stood aside to let them pass, and then resumed his watch at the door to prevent anyone else from entering the room. The servant had just finished fitting the new globe in its place and was preparing to remove the steps which he had used, when Sir Clinton ordered him to leave them in position and to await further instructions.
The museum was a room about forty feet square, with a lofty ceiling. To judge by the panelling of the walls, it belonged to the older part of Ravensthorpe; but the parquet of the floor seemed to be much more modern. Round the sides were placed exhibition cases about six feet high; and others of the same kind jutted out at intervals to form a series of shallow bays. In the centre of the room, directly under the lamp, stood a long, flat-topped case; and the floor beside it was littered with broken glass.
“I think we’ll begin at the beginning,” said Sir Clinton.
He turned to the servant who stood waiting beside the steps.
“Have you got the remains of the broken lamp there?
“You can go now,” he added. “We shan’t need you further.”
When he had received the smashed lamp, he examined it.
“Not much to be made out of that,” he admitted. “It’s been one of these thousand candlepower gas-filled things;
