'Partly. 'For instance, why was Anthony so strong in the arms? He was rather puny when he became governor; nothing about him developed except his arms and shoulders. We know that…. Eh?'
'Yes, of course.'
The doctor nodded his big head. 'Then again, you saw that deeply worn groove in the stone railing of the balcony over there. Eh? It was about of a size to contain a man's thumb,' added the doctor, examining his own thumb reflectively.
'You mean a secret mechanism?' asked Rampole.
'Again,' said the doctor, 'again — and this is important — why did he leave, behind him a key to the balcony door? Why the balcony door? If he left those instructions in the vault, all that his heirs would need to get at them would be three keys: one to the corridor door of this room, one to the vault, and one to the iron box inside the vault. Why, then, include that fourth key?'
'Well, clearly because his instructions entailed going out on the balcony,' said Rampole. 'That was what Sir Benjamin said when he was talking about a death-trap out there…. Look here, sir! By that groove the size of a man's thumb, do you mean a spring, a mechanism, to be pressed so that?'
'Oh, nonsense!' said the doctor. 'I didn't say a man's thumb went there. A man's thumb, even in the course of thirty years, wouldn't have worn that groove. But I'll tell you what would have done it. A rope.'
Rampole slid off the edge of the table. He glanced over at the balcony door, closed and sinister in the faint light of the candle.
'Why,' he repeated aloud — 'why was Anthony so strong in the arms?'
'Or, if you want more questions,' boomed the doctor, sitting up straight, 'why is the destiny of everybody so intimately concerned with that well? Everything leads straight to the well. - There's Anthony's son, of course, the second Starberth who was a governor of this prison. He's the one who threw us all off the track. He died of a broken neck, like his father, and started the tradition. If he'd died in bed, there wouldn't have been any tradition, and we could examine the death of Anthony, his father, without any hocus-pocus. We could see it as the isolated problem it is. But it didn't happen that way. Anthony's son had to be governor of this prison when the cholera wiped out most of its inmates, and those poor devils went mad down in their airless cells. Well, the governor of the prison went mad from the same fever. He had it, too, and his delusions were too strong for him. You know what an effect that diary of his father's had on all of us? Then what sort of effect do you imagine it had on a nervous, bogey-ridden man who had been stricken with cholera in the bogey-ridden nineteenth century? What do you suppose is the effect on the brain of living just above the exhalations of a swamp where hanged men have been thrown to rot? — Anthony could hardly have hated his own son enough to want him to get up from his bed in delirium and throw himself from that balcony. But that's what the second governor did.'
Rumbling, Dr. Fell exhaled his breath so hard that it almost blew out the candle, and Rampole jumped. For a moment the big room was quiet: dead men's books, dead men's chairs, and now the ancient sickness of their brains had become as terrible here as the face of the Iron Maiden. A rat scurried across the floor. Dorothy Starberth had put her hand on Rampole's sleeve; you would have said that she saw ghosts.
'And Anthony-?' Rampole put in, with an effort.
For a time Dr. Fell sat with his big shock of hair bowed.
'It must have taken him a long time,' he remarked, vacantly, 'to have worn so deep a groove in the stone. He had to do it all alone, and in the dead of night-time, when nobody could see him. Of course, there were no guards on that side of the prison, so he could escape unnoticed… Still, I'm inclined to think he had a confederate for the first few years, until he could develop his own strength. His own terrific strength would come with patience, but until then he had to have a confederate up raise and lower him. Probably, afterwards, he did away with the man….'
'Wait, please!' said Rampole, hitting the table. 'You say that the groove was worn by a rope because Anthony spent years…'
'Hauling himself up and down it.'
'Into the well,' the other observed, slowly. He. had a sudden vision of a weird spiderish figure in black, swinging on a rope under the night sky. A lamp or two would be burning in the prison. The stars would be out. And Anthony would dangle by night where dead men dangled in daytime, working his way down to the well..
Yes. Somewhere down in that broad well, God knew where, he had spent year's in hollowing out a cache. Or possibly every night he had swung down to examine his treasures there. The reek from the well would dissolve his own sanity as it later dissolved his son's; but more subtly, for he was a harder man. He would see dead men climbing up from the well to knock at his balcony door. He would hear them whispering together at night, because he had decked their flesh with his wealth, and planted gold among their bones. Many nights he must have seen the rats eating in the well. It was only when he saw the rats in his own bed that he believed the dead men were coming to carry him down with them, soon.
Rampole's damp coat felt repulsive against him. The room was full of Anthony's presence.
Dorothy spoke in a clear voice. She did not look afraid now.
'And that,' she said, 'went on until-?'
'Until he grew careless,' answered Dr. Fell.
The rain, which had almost died away, crept up on the prison once more; it rustled in the ivy at the window, splattering the floor; it danced through the prison, as though it were washing things away.
'Or perhaps,' resumed the doctor, looking suddenly at the balcony door, 'perhaps he didn't grow careless. Perhaps somebody knew of his visits, without knowing what they were about, and cut that rope. Anyway, the knot of his rope slipped, or was cut. It was a wild night, full of wind and rain. The rope, freed, went down with him. Since its edge was on the inside lip of the well, it slid over into the well; nobody would have cared to examine anything down there, so they didn't suspect a rope. But Anthony didn't fall into the well.'
And Rampole thought: Yes, a rope that was cut. Much more probable than a noose that slipped. Perhaps there was a lamp burning in the Governor's Room, and the man with the knife was looking over the balcony rail, and saw Anthony's face momentarily as he went whirling down towards the spikes on the edge of the well. In Rampole's mind it was as horribly vivid as a Cruikshank print-the white, staring eyeballs, the outflung arms, the shadowy murderer.
A cry against the wind and rain; then the noise, however it had sounded; and a lamp blown out. It was all as dead as one of those books in the shelves. Ainsworth might have imagined it, just as it took place, in the eighteen- twenties….
Distantly he heard Dr. Fell say: 'There, Miss Starberth. There's your damned curse. There's what's been worrying you all this time. Not very impressive, is it?'
She rose without speaking, and began to walk about the room, her hands thrust into her pockets, just as Rampole remembered her that first night at the train. Pausing in front of Dr. Fell, she took a folded paper from her pocket and held it out. The verses.
'Then,' she asked, 'this? What about this?'
'A cryptogram, undoubtedly. It will tell us the exact place…. But don't you see that a clever thief wouldn't have needed that paper, he wouldn't even need to have known of its existence, to know that there was something hidden in the well? He could have used just the evidence I used. It's all available.'
The candle was getting low, and a broad sheet of flame curled about it, throwing momentary brightness. Dorothy went to where the rain was making splattered pools below the window, and stared blankly at the vines.
'I think I see,' she said, 'about my father. He was — wet, wet all over, when they found him.'
'You mean,' said Rampole, 'that he caught the thief at work?'
'Well, is there any other explanation?' Dr. Fell growled. He had been making ineffectual efforts to light his pipe, and now he laid it down on the table. 'He was out riding, you know. He saw the rope going down into the well. We can assume that the murderer didn't see him, because Timothy went down into the well. So-?' He glared ferociously.
'There's some sort of room, or hollowed-out place,' Rampole nodded. 'And the murderer didn't know he was there until he came down.'
'Humph. Well. There's another deduction, but let it go. Excuse me, Miss Starberth: your father didn't fall. He was beaten, coldly and viciously, and then thrown into the bushes for dead.'
The girl turned. 'Herbert?' she demanded.
