blue eyes were eerie now.
'Listen. That paper-it gives directions for something. What? If father was killed, murdered by somebody — no curse, but deliberately murdered — what then?'
'I don't know.'
'But I think I do. If father was murdered, he wasn't murdered for following out directions in those verses. But maybe somebody else had fathomed the verses. Maybe there's something hidden — something those verses have a clue to-and the murderer killed father because father had surprised him at work…!'
Rampole stared at her tense face, and her hand groping before her as though she touched a secret, lightly. He said':
'You're — you're not talking about anything so wild as buried treasure?'
She nodded. 'I don't care about that… What I mean is, if that is true, don't you see, there isn't any curse — there isn't any madness-I'm not tainted, nor any of us. That's what 1 care about.' In an even lower voice: 'You've only got to wonder whether there's any horrible seed in your blood, and brood about it, to go through the worst hell”
He touched her hand. There was a pent-up silence, a sense of fears pattering in a dark room, and windows that needed to be opened to daylight.
'— that's why I say I hope to God it's true. My father is dead, and so is my brother, and that can't be helped now. But at least it was something clean; it was something you could understand, like an auto wreck. Do you see?'
'Yes. And we've got to find the secret of that cryptogram, if there is a secret. Will you let me have a copy?'
'Come back and copy it now, before the rest of them get away. I mustn't see you for a while….'
'But you can't — I mean, you've got to! We've got to see each other, if only for a few minutes-!'
She looked up slowly. 'We can't. People would talk.' Then, as he nodded blankly, she put out the palms of her hands as though she would put them against his breast, and went on in a strained voice: 'Oh, do you think I don't want to as much as you? I do. More! But we can't. They'd talk. They'd say all sorts of horrible things, and that I was an unnatural sister, and maybe I am.' She shivered.
'They always said I was a strange one, and I'm beginning to think it's true. I shouldn't be talking like this, with my 'brother just dead, but I'm human — I — Never mind! Please go and copy out that paper. I'll get it for you.'
They said no more as they went down to the little office, where Rampole scribbled down the verses on the back of an envelope. When they returned to the hall everybody had disappeared except a shocked and open-eyed Budge, who passed them with an air of not having seen them at all.
'You see?' she enquired, lifting her eyebrows.
'I know. I'll go, and I won't try to see you until you give the word. But — do you mind if I show this thing to Dr. Fell? He'll keep it a secret. And you know from today how good he is at this sort of thing.'
'Yes, show it to Dr. Fell. Do! I hadn't thought of that. But not to anybody else — please. And now you must hurry along… '
When she opened the great door for him, it seemed surprising to find the placid sunlight on the lawns as though this were only an English Sunday and no dead man lay upstairs. We are not touched so deeply by tragedy as we think. As he went down the drive to join his companions, he glanced back once over his shoulder. She was standing in the doorway, motionless, the breeze stirring her hair. He could hear doves in the tall elms, and sparrows bickering among the vines. Up on its white cupola, the gilt weather-vane had turned fiery against the noonday.
Chapter 12
'We find,' said the inquest, 'that the deceased met his death as the result of?' The formal words had a habit of singing through Rampole's mind with thoughtless and irritating refrain. What they meant was that Herbert Starberth had killed his cousin Martin by throwing him from the balcony of the Governor's Room. Since the autopsy revealed blood in the nostrils and mouth, and a contusion at the base of the brain not explicable by the position in which he had fallen, it was pointed out by Dr. Markley that the deceased had in all likelihood been rendered insensible by a heavy blow before the actual murder took place. Martin's neck and right hip had been broken, and there were other pleasant details which had hung with cold ugliness in the stolid air of the inquest room.
It was over now. In the London press Chatterham's wonder had not even lasted nine days; it blossomed into pictures, speculations, and hectic news stories, and then sank back among the advertisements. There remained only a man-hunt, baying after Herbert, and Herbert had not been found. That enigmatic figure on the green bicycle slid through England as through a mist. He was seen, of course, in a dozen places, but it never turned out to be Herbert Starberth. Assuming that he had ridden in the direction of Lincoln to take a train, it had been so far found impossible to trace his movements, nor was there any trace of the green motor-bike. Scotland Yard moved so quietly that it was as invisible as the fugitive, but there was no word of capture from the grim building above Westminster Pier.
A week after the inquest, and Chatterham slept again. All day the rain fell, sheeting these lowlands, droning on the eaves, and sputtering in chimneys where fires had been lighted against the damp. The ancient rain of England, which brought out old odours like ghosts, so that blackletter books, and engravings on the wall, seemed more alive than real people. Rampole sat before a coal fire in the grate of Dr. Fell's study. But for its creakings, Yew Cottage was quiet. Dr. and Mrs. Fell had gone to Chatterham for the afternoon; their guest, alone in an easy chair by firelight, wanted no lamps. He could see the rain thickening beyond grey windows, and he could see things in the fire.
The arch of the grate, black-shining; the flames, and Dorothy Starberth's face at the inquest-never turned towards him. There were too many rumours. Chairs rasping on the sanded floor; the voices that struck across the inquest-room sharply, like voices inside a stone jug. She had gone home, afterwards, in an old car driven by Payne, with its side curtains down. He had watched the dust that followed its jolting passage, and he had seen faces peering out slyly from the windows of houses along the way. Gossip had been a sly postman tapping at every door. The damned fools, he thought, and suddenly felt very miserable.
But the rustle of the shower deepened, a few drops hissing in the fire. He stared at the paper across his knee — those inane verses he had copied from the paper she had shown him. He had mentioned them to Dr. Fell, but the old lexicographer had not seen them yet. Decently, in view of the turmoil and later the funeral, they had been able to drop the puzzle for the time being. Yet now Martin Starberth was tucked away, out there under the rain… Rampole shivered. Platitudes went through his brain; he knew them now to be terrifyingly true. And other words.
'Though worms destroy this body…the strong, calm words uttered under an empty sky. Again in his memory the earth fell upon the coffin, thrown as with the motion of a sower of grain. He saw the sodden willows tossing against a grey horizon, and the sing-song intonation of the service was as weirdly moving as when once-long ago, as a child — he had heard at twilight distant voices singing 'Auld Lang Syne.'
What was that? He had been almost hearing again things lost far back in childhood, when he knew that there had been a real noise. Somebody was knocking at the outer door of Yew Cottage.
He got up, kindled the lamp on the table beside him, and carried it to light his way out into the hall. Raindrops blew into his face as he opened the door, and he held the lamp high.
'I came to see Mrs. Fell,' said the girl's voice. 'I wondered if she would offer me tea.'
She looked up seriously from under her sodden hat-brim. The lamplight brought her close out of the rain. She spoke with an innocent, apologetic glance past him into the hall.
'They're out,' he said. 'But please don't let that stop you from coming in. I–I don't know whether I can manage making tea the right way…
'I can,' she told him.
All the stiffness vanished. She smiled. So presently the wet hat and coat were hanging in the hall, and she was hurrying about the kitchen in a highly practical manner while he tried to give a decent appearance of being busy. There is never, he reflected, such a guilty feeling as standing in the middle of a kitchen during the preparation
