he had seen something looking over the wall of Chatterham prison. And he had a horrible impression that the something was wet.
Chapter 3
Sitting now in Dr. Fell's study, on the afternoon of his first day at Yew Cottage, he was inclined to question everything in the nature of the fanciful. This solid little house, with its oil-lamps and its primitive plumbing, made him feel as though he were on a vacation in some hunting-lodge in the Adirondacks, say; that presently they would all go back to New York, and that a car door would slam, to be opened only by the doorman of his own apartment house.
But here it was — the bees astir in a sunlit garden, the sun-dial and bird-houses, the smell of old wood and fresh curtains; not like anything except England. Bacon and eggs had a savour here that he had never fully appreciated before. So had pipe tobacco. The countryside here didn't look artificial, as country has a habit of looking when you live in it only during the summer; nor did it at all resemble the shrubs on the roof of a penthouse.
And here was Dr. Fell, pottering about his domain in a broad-brimmed white hat, looking sleepily amiable and doing nothing with an engrossed thoroughness. Here was Mrs. Fell, a very small and bustling and cheerful woman who was always knocking things over. Twenty times in a morning you would hear a small crash, whereupon she would cry, 'Bother!' and go whisking on with her cleaning until the ensuing mishap. She had, moreover, a habit of sticking her head out of windows all over the house, one after the other, to address some question to her husband. You would just place her at the front of the house when out she would pop at a rear window, like a cuckoo out of a clock, to wave cheerfully at Rampole and ask her husband where something was. He always looked mildly surprised, and never knew. So back she would go, previous to her reappearance at a side window with a pillow or a dustcloth in her hand. To Rampole, lounging in a deck-chair under a lime tree and smoking his pipe, it suggested one of those Swiss barometers where the revolving figures are for ever going in and coming out of a chalet to indicate the weather.
The mornings and a part of the afternoons Dr. Fell usually devoted to the composition of his great work, The Drinking Customs of England from the Earliest Days, a monumental labour into which he had put six years of scholarly research. He loved to trace out the origin of such quaint terms as drinking supernaugulum; carouse the hunter's hoop; quaff upse freez crosse; and with health, gloves, mumpes, frolickes, and other curious terms of the tankard. Even in speaking of it to Rampole, he took violent issue with the treatises of such authors as Tom Nash (Pierce Pennilesse, 1595) and George Gascoigne (A delicate Diet for daintie mouthed Dronkardes, wherein the fowle Abuse of common carowsing and quaffing with hartie Draughtes is honestlie admonished, 1576).
The morning passed, with the blackbirds piping from the meadow and drowsy sunlight drawing all suggestion of evil from Chatterham prison. But the mellowness of afternoon brought him to the doctor's study, where his host was tapping tobacco into a pipe. Dr. Fell wore an old shooting-jacket, and his white hat was hung on a corner of the stone mantelpiece. On the table before him were papers, at which he kept stealing furtive glances.
'There will be guests to tea,' said the doctor. 'The rector is coming, and young Martin Starberth and his sister — they live at the Hall, you know; the postman tells me they got in this morning. Perhaps Starberth's cousin, too, though he's a sullen sort of dog for your money. I suppose you'll want to know more about the prison?'
'Well, if it's not?'
'Violating any confidence? Oh no. Everybody knows about it. I'm rather curious to see young Martin, myself. He's been in America for two years, and his sister has run the Hall since their father died. A great girl, that. Old Timothy died in rather a curious way.'
'A broken neck?' Rampole inquired, as the other hesitated.
Dr. Fell grunted. 'If he didn't break his neck, he broke most of the rest of him. The man was fearfully smashed up. He was out riding just after sunset, and his horse threw him — apparently while he was coming down Chatterham prison hill near the Hag's Nook. They found him late that night, lying in the underbrush. The horse was near by, whinnying in a kind of terror. Old Jenkins — that's one of his tenants — found him, and Jenkins said the noises his horse was making were one of the worst things he'd ever heard. He died the next day. He was fully conscious, too, up to the end.'
Several times during his stay Rampole had the suspicion that his host might have been making game of him as an American. But he knew differently now. Dr. Fell was plodding through these gruesome anecdotes because something worried him. He talked to relieve himself. Behind the shiftings of his eyes, and his uneasy rollings in the chair, there was a doubt-a suspicion-even a dread. His asthmatic breaths were loud in the quiet room, turning dusky against the afternoon sun.
Rampole said, 'I suppose it revived the old superstition.'
'It did. But then we've always had superstitions hereabouts. No, this business suggested something worse than that.'
'You mean”
'Murder,' said Dr. Fell.
He was bending forward. His eyes had grown large behind the glasses, and his ruddy face looked hard. He began to speak rapidly:
'Mind! I say nothing. It may be fancy, and it's no concern of mine. H'mf. But Dr. Markley, the coroner, said he'd got a blow across the base- of the skull which might have been caused by the fall, and then again might not. He looked, it seemed to me, less as though he'd had a fall than that somebody had trampled on him. I don't mean by a horse, either. Another thing: it was a damp evening in October, and he was lying in marshy ground, but that didn't seem to account wholly for the fact that the body was wet.'
Rampole looked steadily at his host. He found that his fingers had closed on the arms of his chair.
'But you say he was conscious, sir. Didn't he speak?'
'I wasn't there, of course. I got the story from the rector, and from Payne, too; you remember Payne? Yes, he spoke. He not only spoke, but he seemed to be in a sort of ghoulish high spirits. Just at daybreak they knew he was dying. He had been writing, Dr. Markley said, on a board propped across him; they tried to prevent it, but he just showed his teeth. `Instructions for my son,' he said-Martin was in America, as I told you-'there's the ordeal to be gone through, isn't there?' '
Dr. Fell stopped to light his pipe. He pulled the flame down fiercely into the bowl, as though it might give him clearer sight.
'They hesitated in calling Mr. Saunders, the rector, because Timothy was an old sinner and a furious hater of the Church. But he always said Saunders was an honest man, even if he didn't agree with him, so they brought him out at dawn to see whether the old man would agree to prayers for the dying. He went in to see old Timothy alone, and after a while he came out wiping the sweat off his forehead. `My God!' says the rector, as though he were praying, `the man's not in his right mind. Somebody go in there with me.' `Will he hear the commitment?' says Timothy's nephew, who was looking queer. `Yes, yes,' says the rector, `but it isn't that. It's the way he's talking.' `What did he say?' asks the nephew. `I'm not allowed to tell you that,' says the rector, `but I wish I could.'
'In the bedroom they could hear Timothy croaking gleefully, though he couldn't move for the splints. He called out to see Dorothy next, alone, and after that Payne, his lawyer. It was Payne who called out that he was going fast. So just as daylight was growing outside the windows, they all went into the big oak room with the canopied bedstead. Timothy was nearly speechless now, but he said one clear word, which was, `Handkerchief,' and he seemed to be grinning. The rest of them knelt down while the rector said the prayers, and just as Saunders was making the sign of the cross, some froth came out of Timothy's mouth, and he jerked once and died.'
During a long silence, Rampole could hear the blackbirds piping outside. The sun was growing long and wan in the branches of the yew.
'It's, odd enough,' the American assented at length. 'But if he said nothing, you've hardly any grounds to suspect murder.'
'Haven't I?' said Dr. Fell, musingly. 'Well, maybe not. The same night — of the day he died, I mean-the same night there was a light in the window of the Governor's Room.'
'Did anybody investigate?'
'No. You couldn't get any of the villagers near there after dark for a hundred pounds.' Oh, well! A
