just while I was there. I — er — I pointed out the deleterious effect of so much tobacco — No, thanks; I won't smoke — on his system, and he flew at me.'
They all fell silent. Rampole found himself listening for the clock. Martin Starberth would be watching it, too, in another house.
Inside the house, the telephone rang stridently.
'There it is. Will you get the message, my boy?' asked Dr. Fell, breathing a little faster. 'You're more spry than I am.'
Rampole almost fell over the front steps in his hurry. The telephone was of the ancient type you crank up, and Mrs. Fell was already holding out the receiver to him.
'He's on his way,' the voice of Dorothy Starberth told him. It was admirably calm now. 'Watch the road for him. He's carrying a big bicycle lamp.'
'How is he?'
'A little thick-spoken, but sober enough.' She added, rather wildly, 'You're all right, aren't you?'
'Yes. Now don't worry, please! We'll take care of it. He's in no danger, dear.'
It was not until he was on his way out of the house that he remembered the last word he had quite unconsciously used over the phone. Even in the turmoil it startled him. He had no recollection whatever of using it at the time.
'Well, Mr. Rampole?' the rector boomed out of the dark.
'He's started. How far is the Hall from the prison?'
'A quarter of a mile beyond, in the direction of the railway station. You must have passed it last night.' Saunders spoke absently, but he seemed more at his ease now that the thing was begun. He and the doctor had both come round to the front of the house. He turned, big and bold-shining in the moonlight. 'I've been imagining- dreadful things-all day. When this business was far off, I laughed at it. Now that it's here… well, old Mr. Timothy Starberth…'
Something was worrying the good rector's Eton conscience. He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. He added:
'I say, Mr. Rampole, was Herbert there?'
'Why Herbert?' the doctor asked, sharply
'It's — ah — it's only that I wish he were here. That young man is dependable. Solid and dependable. No nerves. Admirable; very English, and admirable.'
Again the rumble of thunder, prowling stealthily and low down along the sky. A fresh breeze went swishing through the garden, and white blossoms danced. There was a flicker of lightning, so very brief that it was like an electrician flashing on footlights momentarily to test them before the beginning of a play.
'We'd better watch to see that he gets in safely,' the doctor suggested, gruffly. 'If he's drunk, he may get a bad fall. Did she say he was drunk?'
'Not very.'
They tramped up along the lane. The prison lay in its own shadow on that side, but Dr. Fell pointed out the approximate position of the gateway. 'No door on it, of course,' he explained. But the rocky hill leading up to it was fairly well lighted by the moon; a cow-path meandered almost into the shadow of the prison. For what seemed nearly ten minutes nobody spoke. Rampole kept trying to time the pulse of a cricket, counting between rasps, and got lost in a maze of numbers. The breeze belled out his shirt with grateful coolness.
'There it is,' Saunders said, abruptly.
A beam of white light struck up over the hill. Then a figure, moving slowly but steadily, appeared on the crest with such weird effect that it seemed to be rising from the ground. It tried to move with a jaunty swing, but the light kept flickering and darting-as though at every slight noise Martin Starberth were flashing it in that direction. Watching it, Rampole felt the terror which must be running in the slight, contemptuous, tipsy figure. Very tiny at that distance, it hesitated at the gates. The light stood motionless, playing on a gaping archway. Then it was swallowed inside.
The watchers went back and sank heavily into their chairs.
Inside the house, the clock began to strike eleven.
'— if she only told him,' the rector had been running on for some time, but Rampole only heard him now, 'to sit near that window!' He threw out his hands. 'But, after all, we must be sensi — we must — What can happen to him? You know as well as I do, gentlemen….'
- Bong, hammered the clock slowly. Bong, three, four, five
'Have some more beer,' said Dr. Fell. The rector's smooth, unctuous voice, now raised shrilly, seemed to irritate him.
Again they waited. An echo of footfalls in the prison, a scurry of rats and lizards as the light probed; in Rampole's taut fancy he could almost hear them. Some lines in Dickens came back to him, a sketch of prowling past Newgate on a drizzly night and seeing through. a barred window the turnkeys sitting over their fire, and their shadows on the whitewashed wall.
A gleam sprang up now in the Governor's Room. It did not waver. The bicycle lamp was very powerful, cutting a straight horizontal band against which the bars of the window leapt out. Evidently it had been put down on a table, where it remained, sending its beam into one comer of the room without further movement. That was all — the tiny shaft of brightness behind ivy-fouled bars, lonely against the great ivy-fouled hulk of the prison. The shadow of a man hovered there, and then vanished.
It seemed to have an incredibly long neck, that shadow.
To his surprise, Rampole discovered that his heart was bumping. You had to do something; you had to concentrate….
'If you don't mind, sir,' he said to his host, 'I'd like to go up to my room and look at these journals of the two governors. I can keep my eye on the window from there. And I want to know.'
It suddenly seemed vitally important to know how these men had come to death. He fingered the sheets, which were damp from his hand. They had been there, he remembered, even when he held the receiver of the telephone in the same hand. Dr. Fell grunted, without seeming to hear him.
The thunder went rattling, with a suggestion of heavy carts shaking the window panes, when he ascended the stairs. His room was now swept by a thick breeze, but still exhaling heat. Lighting the lamp, he drew the table before the window and put down the manuscript sheets. He glanced round once before he sat down. There were the copies of those comic songs, lying scattered on the bed, which he had bought this afternoon; and there was the church-warden pipe.
He had a queer, vague idea that if he were to smoke that pipe, the relic of lightheartedness, it might bring him closer to Dorothy Starberth. But he felt foolish, and cursed himself, the moment he picked it up. When he was about to replace it there was some noise; the brittle clay slipped through his fingers and smashed on the floor.
It shocked him, like breaking a living thing. He stared at it for a moment, and then hurried over to sit down facing the windows. Bugs were beginning to tick and swarm against the screen. Far across the meadow was that tiny, steady lamp in the window of the prison, and he could hear the voices of the rector and Dr. Fell mumbling in conversation just below.
A. Starberth, Esquire, His Journal.
PRIVATE.
(Eighth September, 1797. This being the First Year in the Good Works of Chatterham Gaol, in the Shire of Lincoln; like-wise the Thirty-Seventh in the Reign of His Sovereign Majesty, George III).
Quae Infra Nos Nihil Ad Nos.
These typwriter sheets carried a more vivid suggestion, Rampole felt, than would have the yellowed originals. You imagined the handwriting to have been small, sharp, and precise, like the tight-lipped writer. There followed some fancy composition, in the best literary style of the day, on the majesty of justice and the nobility of punishing evil-doers. Suddenly it became business-like:
