I had addressed Miss Rendall at her own door in a German accent. Then I had abruptly dropped it and through all my deliberate mystifications one fact had been clear—that I spoke in the accents of an ordinary more or less educated Englishman. The Rendalls clearly had the material for coming to a conclusion, and now in their company I had all but ended my days on earth.
Yet somehow or other now that I saw all this so clearly, I found myself singularly reluctant to accept the logical conclusion that this gentleman of good lineage and standing and this attractive high-spirited girl were actually traitors of the basest sort, and murderous traitors too.
“Hang it, I may be wrong after all!” I said to myself. “I know I’m young: I am told I’m rash; I have made a fool of myself periodically as long as I’ve known myself, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt a little longer.”
At the door Mr. Rendall left us to resume his conscientious patrol. I said a brief and cool good night to Jean, went up to my room and tumbled straight into bed.
“In the morning I’ll think things over,” I decided.
XI
A Near Thing
Being an optimist has compensations. Indeed, it would need to have, for no virtue has ever landed anyone in more damnable scrapes than optimism has landed me. But before the crash comes it does help to keep one happy.
Next morning, after that nasty night, I was singing in my bath and full of wild hopes; the fact being that a new and consoling way of looking at things had suggested itself in the very act of shaving.
“They are afraid of me!” I said to myself.
After a night’s sleep the adventure by the shore had grown perhaps a little blurred in some of its details. I wished I could see that curved thing rising against the night sky a trifle more distinctly in my mind’s eye; so that I could take my oath in court it was a weapon. Still, I remained perfectly assured I had been attacked, and the sustaining conclusions I now drew were, firstly, that “they” (whoever they were; and I tried to keep an open mind on that point) were so afraid of me that they were ready to stick at nothing to lay me out; secondly, that they were afraid to tackle me by day but had to choose a dark night and a lonely place; and thirdly, that with such a splendid chance it must have been nerves that made them bungle it.
“People in that state of mind will do something or other to give themselves away,” I thought hopefully.
In this confident state of mind I came down for breakfast. My host, I found, was staying in bed after his night’s vigil, and my hostess was daintier and more inaccessible than ever. After breakfast I reflected for a little over a pipe and then I asked her for a bit of lunch to put in my pocket and told her I was going for a long walk. She got the lunch and gave it to me without wasting a superfluous word, and off I set.
It was a breezy morning with a lot of thin cloud in the sky and a ruffled sea; cool and stimulating; the very day for a walk. I followed the exact route we took the night before, trying to identify such landmarks as rises and falls in the ground and sharp curves in the shore and farms close to the coast, but I found it was practically impossible; every feature seemed so utterly altered in daylight. My object was to find the spot where I had been attacked, and at last I had to be content with knowing that it must have been one of three or four places where the feature of a low cliff immediately under the turf was to be seen.
At one such place there was a long stretch of wall following the shore line, which could have given shelter for anyone to stalk me practically from the start. At another I noticed a farm close by, and from this an assailant could easily have slipped down to the beach and run back again. At a third the configuration of the rocks was such that it would have been simple for him to have waited below the bank till he heard us coming, made a noise to bring me down, and then gone up above without exposing himself against the sky. In fact one could draw no definite conclusions at all.
Besides, there was the very distasteful alternative (and the more plausible it seemed, the more distasteful it grew) that there might well have been two people in it; one—who might have followed me, the stone thrower; and the other—who might, for instance, have been patrolling the shore from the opposite direction, the attacker.
Suspicious as I had felt at the moment, I shrank from this alternative, and in justification I asked myself,
“Why didn’t she use her pistol, and be done with it?”
But, on the other hand, it was a most extraordinary coincidence that her father should have passed that spot certainly within three or four minutes previously, and that he should have seen no sign of my enemy. So far as I could remember the length of time I had spent groping among the rocks, it was just possible for Mr. Rendall to pass by and for the other man then to begin his work of decoying me, but certainly it was an unpleasant coincidence.
And finally there was a last alternative: that I might have been mistaken in thinking I was actually assailed and instead of that—But what other conceivable explanation could there be? I tried hard but could think of none.
With the flame of optimism burning now somewhat low, I kept on following the shore till I was well past
