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park to the pond in the center, there was no trace of
Lord Bulmer, dead or alive. Horne Fisher realized
that a chilling premonition had already prevented him
from expecting to find the man alive. But his bald
brow was wrinkled over an entirely new and
unnatural problem, in not finding the man at all.
He considered the possibility of Bulmer having
gone off of his own accord, for some reason; but
after fully weighing it he finally dismissed it. It was
inconsistent with the unmistakable voice heard at
daybreak, and with many other practical obstacles.
There was only one gateway in the ancient and lofty
wall round the small park; the lodge keeper kept it
locked till late in the morning, and the lodge keeper
had seen no one pass. Fisher was fairly sure that he had before
him a mathematical problem in an inclosed space. His
instinct had been from the first so attuned to the
tragedy that it would have been almost a relief to him
to find the corpse. He would have been grieved, but
not horrified, to come on the nobleman's body
dangling from one of his own trees as from a gibbet,
or floating in his own pool like a pallid weed. What
horrified him was to find nothing.
He soon become conscious that he was not alone
even in his most individual and isolated experiments.
He often found a figure following him like his
shadow, in silent and almost secret clearings in the
plantation or outlying nooks and corners of the old
wall. The dark-mustached mouth was as mute as the
deep eyes were mobile, darting incessantly hither and
thither, but it was clear that Brain of the Indian police
had taken up the trail like an old hunter after a tiger.
Seeing that he was the only personal friend of the
vanished man, this seemed natural enough, and Fisher
resolved to deal frankly with him.
"This silence is rather a social strain," he said.
"May I break the ice by talking about the weather?--which, by the
way, has already broken the ice. I know that breaking the ice
might be a rather melancholy metaphor in this case."
"I don't think so," replied Brain, shortly. "I don't
fancy the ice had much to do with it. I don't see how it could."
"What would you propose doing?" asked Fisher.
"Well, we've sent for the authorities, of course, but
I hope to find something out before they come,"
replied the Anglo-Indian. "I can't say I have much
hope from police methods in this country. Too much
red tape, habeas corpus and that sort of thing. What
we want is to see that nobody bolts; the nearest we
could get to it would be to collect the company and
count them, so to speak. Nobody's left lately, except
that lawyer who was poking about for antiquities."
"Oh, he's out of it; he left last night," answered the
other. "Eight hours after Bulmer's chauffeur saw his
lawyer off by the train I heard Bulmer's own voice
as plain as I hear yours now."
"I suppose you don't believe in spirits?" said the
man from India. After a pause he added: "There's
somebody else I should like to find, before we go
after a fellow with an alibi in the Inner Temple.
What's become of that fellow in green--the architect
dressed up as a forester? I haven't seem him about."
Mr. Brain managed to secure his assembly of all
the distracted company before the arrival of the
police. But when he first began to coment once more
on the young architect's delay in putting in an
appearance, he found himself in
the presence of a minor mystery, and a psychological
development of an entirely unexpected kind.
Juliet Bray had confronted the catastrophe of her
brother's disappearance with a somber stoicism in
which there was, perhaps, more paralysis than pain;
but when the other question came to the surface she
was both agitated and angry.
"We don't want to jump to any conclusions about
anybody," Brain was saying in his staccato style. "But
we should like to know a little more about Mr. Crane.
Nobody seems to know much about him, or where he
comes from. And it seems a sort of coincidence that
yesterday he actually crossed swords with poor
Bulmer, and could have stuck him, too, since he
showed himself the better swordsman. Of course,
that may be an accident and couldn't possibly be
called a case against anybody; but then we haven't
the means to make a real case against anybody. Till
the police come we are only a pack of very amateur
sleuthhounds."
"And I think you're a pack of snobs," said Juliet. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]