The Grey Room Part 15

"Indeed you must. He is playing with death," said Mannering.

They sought Tom's father, to find him, as Mary had said, walking up and down, with fierce joy of battle on his thin, stern face and in his shining eyes.

"Now shall the powers of Light triumph and the will of G.o.d be done!" he said to them.

He made no demur, however, when they drew him away.

"The future is mine," he declared, and grew calm. "You cannot stand between me and my duty again, Sir Walter. You have gravely erred, and this is the result of your error. But you will not err a second time."

His excitation ceased, and it was he who proposed that they should return to their forgotten meal. In the matter of the man just dead, he revealed an indifference almost callous.

"His G.o.d will justly judge him according to his deserving," he declared.

"If he sinned through ignorance and false teaching, his punishment will not be heavy; if he hardened his heart against truth and rejected the faith from pride--but even then the Father of Mercy may pardon him. He has failed, even as I knew he must, and paid a terrible penalty for failure."

Sir Walter, sorely stricken, hardly heard the other. He ate a little at Mary's entreaty, then, driven by some impulse to leave his fellow-creatures and court solitude, excused himself, begged Lennox and Mannering to bring him news when the telegram dispatched to Scotland Yard was answered, and prepared to leave them.

As he rose, he marked his old spaniel standing whimpering by his side.

"What is the matter with Prince?" he asked.

"He has not had his dinner," said Mary.

"Let him be fed at once," answered her father, and went out alone.

She rose to follow him immediately, but Mannering, who had stopped and was with them, begged her not to do so.

"Leave him to himself," he said. "This has shaken your father, as well it may. He's all right. Make him take his bromide to-night, and let n.o.body do anything to worry him."

The master of Chadlands meantime went afield, walked half a mile to a favorite spot, and sat down upon a seat that he had there erected. A storm was blowing up from the south-west, and the weather of his mind welcomed it. He alternated between bewilderment and indignation. His own life-long philosophy and trust in the ordered foundations of human existence threatened to fail him entirely before this second stroke. It seemed that the punctual universe was suddenly turned upside down, and had emptied a vial of horror upon his innocent head.

Reality was a thing of the past. A nightmare had taken its place, a nightmare from which there was no waking. He considered the stability of his days--a lifetime followed upon high principles and founded on religious convictions that had comforted his sorrows and countenanced his joys. It seemed a trial undeserved, that in his old age he should be thrust upon a pinnacle of publicity, forced into the public eye, robbed of dignity, denied the privacy he esteemed as the most precious privilege that wealth could command. Stability was destroyed; to count upon the morrow seemed impossible. His thought, strung to a new morbidity, unknown till now, ran on and pictured, with painful, vivid stroke upon stroke, the insufferable series of events that lay before him.

Life was become a bizarre and brutal business for a man of fine feeling.

He would be thrust into the pitiless mouth of sensation-mongers, called to appear before tribunals, subjected to an inquisition of his fellow-men, made to endure a notoriety infinitely odious even in antic.i.p.ation. Indeed, Sir Walter's simple intellect wallowed in antic.i.p.ation, and so suffered much that, given exercise of restraint, he might have escaped altogether. He was brave enough, but personal bravery would not be called for. He sat now staring dumbly at an imaginary series of events abominable and unseemly in every particular to his order of mind. He was so concerned with what the future must hold in store for him that for a time the present quite escaped his thoughts.

He returned to it, however, and it was almost with the shock of a new surprise he remembered that Peter Hardcastle, a man of European repute, had just died in his house. But he could not in the least realize the new tragedy. He had as yet barely grasped the truth of his son-in-law's end, and still often found himself expecting Tom's footfall and his jolly voice. That such an abundant vitality was stilled, that such an infectious laugh would never sound again on mortal ear he yet sometimes found it hard to believe.

But now it seemed that the impact of this second blow rammed home the first. He brooded upon his dead son-in-law, and it was long before he returned to the event of that day. A thought struck him, and though elementary enough, it seemed to Sir Walter an important conclusion.

There could be no shadow of doubt that Tom May and Peter Hardcastle had died by the same secret force. He felt that he must remember this.

Again he puzzled, and then decided with himself that, if he meant to keep sane, he must practice faith and trust in G.o.d. Septimus May had said that such unparalleled things sometimes happened in the world to try man's faith. Doubtless he was right.

Henceforth the old man determined to stand firmly on the side of the supernatural with the priest. He went further, and blamed his scepticism. It had cost the world a valuable life. He could not, indeed, be censured for that in any court of inquiry. Sceptical men would doubtless say that he had done rightly in refusing Mr. May his experiment. But Sir Walter now convinced himself that he had done wrongly. At such a time, with landmarks vanishing and all accepted laws of matter resolved into chaos, there remained only G.o.d to trust. Such a burden as this was not to be borne by any mortal, and Sir Walter determined that he would not bear it.

Were we not told to cast our tribulations before the Almighty? Here, if ever, was a situation beyond the power of human mind to approach, unless a man walked humbly with his hand in his Maker's. Septimus May had been emphatically right. Sir Walter repeated this conviction to himself again and again, like a child.

He descended to details presently. The hidden being, that it had been implicitly agreed could only operate by night in the Grey Room, proved equally potent under noonday sun. But why should it be otherwise? To limit its activities was to limit its powers, and the Almighty alone knew what powers had been granted to it. He shrank from further inquiries or investigations on any but a religious basis. He was now convinced that no natural explanation would exist for what had happened in the Grey Room, and he believed that only through the paths of Christian faith would peace return to him or his house.

Then the present dropped out of his thoughts. They wandered into the past, and he concerned himself with his wife. She it was who had taught him to care for foreign travel. Until his marriage he had hardly left England, save when yachting with friends, and an occasional glimpse of a Mediterranean port was all that Sir Walter knew of the earth outside his own country. But he remembered with grat.i.tude the opportunities won from her. He had taken her round the world, and found himself much the richer in great memories for that experience.

He was still thinking when Mary found him, with his old dog asleep at his feet. She brought him a coat and umbrella, for the threatened storm advanced swiftly under clouds laden with rain. Reluctantly enough he returned to the present. A telegram had been received from London, directing Dr. Mannering to reach the nearest telephone and communicate direct. The doctor was gone to Newton Abbot, and nothing could be done until he came back. Not knowing what had occupied Sir Walter's mind, Mary urged him to leave Chadlands without delay.

"Put the place into the hands of the police and take me with you," she said. "Nothing can be gained by our stopping, and, after this, it is certain the authorities will not rest until they have made a far more searching examination than has ever yet been carried out. They will feel this disaster a challenge."

"Thankfully I would go," he answered. "Most thankfully I would avoid what is hanging over my head. It was terrible enough when your dear husband died; but now we shall be the centre of interest to half England. Every instinct cries to me to get out of it, but obviously that is impossible, even were I permitted to do so. It is the duty of the police to suspect every man and woman under my roof--myself with the rest. These appalling things have occurred in my home, and I must bear the brunt of them and stand up to all that they mean. No Lennox ever ran from his duty, however painful it might be. The death of this man--so eminent in his calling--will attract tremendous attention and be, as you say, a sort of direct challenge to the authorities for whom he worked.

They will resent this second tragedy, and with good reason. The poor man, though I cannot pretend that I admired him, was a force for good in the world, and his peculiar genius was devoted to the detection of crime and punishment of criminals--a very worthy occupation, however painful to our ideas."

They sat in the library now, and Henry Lennox spoke to his uncle, with his eye on the window, waiting for the sight of the doctor's car.

"They'll want to tear the place down, very likely. They'll certainly have no mercy on the stones and mortar, any more than they will on us."

"They can spare themselves that trouble, and you your fears," declared Septimus May, who had joined them. "It is impossible that they will be here until to-morrow. Meantime--"

"It is easy to see what they will do," proceeded young Lennox, "and what they will think also. Nor can we prevent them, even if we wanted to. I image their theory will be this. They will suppose that Mr. Hardcastle, left in that room alone, was actually on the track of those responsible for Tom's death. They will guess that, in some way, or by some accident, he surprised the author of the tragedy, and the a.s.sa.s.sin, seeing his danger, resorted to the same unknown means of murder as before. They may imagine some hidden lunatic concealed here, whose presence is only known to some of us. They may suspect a homicidal maniac in me, or my uncle, or Masters, or anybody. Certainly they will seek a natural explanation and flout the idea of any other."

The clergyman protested, but Henry was not prepared to traverse the old ground again.

"I have as much right to my opinions as you to yours," he said. "And I am positive this is man's work."

Then Mary announced that Mannering's car was in sight. The library windows opened on the western side of the house and afforded a view of the main drive, along which the doctor's little hooded car came flying, like a dead leaf in a storm. But it was not alone. A hospital motor ambulance followed behind it.

They soon learned of curious things, and the house was first thrown into a great bustle and then restored to peace.

Mannering had spoken for half an hour with London, and received directions that puzzled him not a little by their implication. For a moment he seemed unwilling to speak before Mary. Then he begged her bluntly to leave them for a while.

"It's this way," he said when she was gone. "They're harboring a mad idea in London, though, of course, the facts will presently convince them to the contrary. Surely I must know death when I see it? But a divisional surgeon, or some other medical official, directs me to bring this poor fellow's body to London to-night. Every care must be taken, warmth and air applied, and so on. They've evidently got a notion that, since life appears to go so easily in the Grey Room, and leave no scratch or wound, either life has not gone at all, or that it may be within the power of science to bring it back again. In a sense this is a reflection upon me--as though it were possible that I could make any mistake between death and suspended animation; but I must do as I'm ordered. I travel to town with the dead man to-night, and if they find he is anything but dead as a doornail, I'll--"

The doctor was writing his reminiscences, "The Recollections of a Country Physician," and he could not fail to welcome these events, for they were destined to lend extraordinary attraction to a volume otherwise not destined to be much out of the common.

He spoke again.

"I should be very glad if you would accompany me, Lennox. I shall have a police inspector from Plymouth; but it would be a satisfaction if you could come. Moreover, you would help me in London."

"I'll come up, certainly. You don't mind, Uncle Walter?"

"Not if Mannering wishes it. We owe him more than we can ever repay.

Anything that we can do to lessen his labors ought to be done."

"I should certainly welcome your company. A small saloon carriage is to be put on to the Plymouth train that leaves Newton for London before midnight. We shall be met at Paddington by some of their doctors. And as to Chadlands, four men arrive to-morrow morning by the same train that Peter Hardcastle came down in last night. We shall pa.s.s them on the way.

They will take charge both of the Grey Room and the house as soon as they arrive."

"And they will be welcome. I would myself willingly pull down Chadlands to the foundations if by so doing I could discover the truth."

"It demands no such sacrifice," declared May, who had listened to these facts. "Bricks and mortar, stone and timber are innocent things. One might as soon dissect a thunder-cloud to find the lightning as destroy material substances to discover what is hidden in this house. The unknown being, about his Master's business here, will no more yield its secret to four detectives, or an army of them, than it did to one. 'What I do thou knowest not now.' It is all summed up in that."

He turned to Mannering and asked a sudden question.

"Why did you object to Mary hearing these facts? In what way should they distress her particularly?"