The House 'Round the Corner Part 35

CHAPTER XV

THE LAYING OF THE GHOST

It has been seen that Dalrymple had a short way with the Percy Whittakers of this world. He strode up the garden path and confronted Whittaker, who was standing on one foot and clinging in pain and terror to Dr. Scaife and the nurse.

"You had better remain here," he said sternly. "Miss Ogilvey has only gone to meet her mother at York. Both ladies will probably arrive this evening. Why are you making yourself a nuisance when everyone is doing all that is possible to serve you?"

Whittaker clutched the doctor even more tightly.

"He says that before witnesses," he quavered, "yet less than an hour ago he tried to strangle me."

"Stuff and nonsense! I don't believe it!" protested Scaife emphatically.

"I frightened him, undoubtedly," said Dalrymple. "It was necessary.

Sometimes a threatened spanking is as effectual as the real thing, and Mr. Whittaker's nervous system has led him to take an exaggerated view of my intentions. The fact is that he himself was responsible for a show of violence on my part. Meanwhile, Marguerite Ogilvey, whom you have always known as Meg Garth, Dr. Scaife, has promised to become my wife, so Mr. Whittaker and I have no further cause for quarrel. Indeed, by the time he is able to walk downstairs una.s.sisted, his own good sense will come to the rescue, and blot out any unpleasant memories as between him and me.... Now, Percy, my boy, let me use my muscles to better purpose than choking the life out of you. I'm going to carry you back to bed again."

His air of quiet domination, no less than the news which sounded the knell of Whittaker's hopes, seemed to mesmerize the neurotic youth into silence and submission. Dalrymple took him in his arms, lifted him off the ground with gentle care, and carried him to the bedroom he had insisted on leaving. The nurse followed, and he left the invalid in her care.

Hastening to the porch, he found Dr. Scaife mopping his forehead; the worthy doctor was more upset by the frenzied statements made by Percy than by the physical effort involved by carrying him downstairs.

"Wait one moment," he said. "I'm bringing in some men whom you know.

Then I shall explain everything."

He pa.s.sed on to the gate.

"I want you, Hutton, and you, Mr. Dobb, to come into the house. Those police officers also had better join us. Who is the other man?"

"Mr. Banks, of the _Nuttonby Gazette_," said the baronet.

"Very well. Let him come, too. Better tell him what he must not say rather than correct his blunders subsequently in a court of law."

Mr. Dobb, being a lawyer, doubted the wisdom of admitting a representative of the press to their conclave, but Dalrymple's air of authority kept him dumb. During the drive from Nuttonby the delegate of the India Office had discoursed on the important position this stranger occupied in India, and it was not for a country solicitor, who hardly guessed what was coming, to question his decision before he knew its scope.

And therein Dalrymple showed his genius. Banks, already in a flutter because of certain indiscretions in his printed references to the inquest, was at once soothed and gratified by the great man's tact. The police superintendent found the ground cut away from beneath his feet by the full and complete version of recent events which Dalrymple supplied. Sir Berkeley and the doctor listened to the recital with ill-suppressed amazement, but, at the end, they agreed, each and all, with Dalrymple's suggestion that judgment should be suspended until Mrs.

Ogilvey was in Elmdale.

He did not attempt to argue that the law should not take its course.

"During the past ten years," he said, "I have held the lives and liberties of two millions of people in my keeping, so I need hardly say that I am a most unlikely person to fly in the face of authority. But there are circ.u.mstances connected with this inquiry which call for careful treatment. Some man died here, and was buried, and the law must be satisfied that Mr. Stephen Ogilvey was either ignorant of the occurrence, or had no guilty knowledge of it--which is not quite the same thing--before he can be exonerated from the grave suspicion at present attached to his actions of two years ago. Now, I have not the honor of knowing either Mr. Ogilvey or his wife, but I do hold that they could not have won the respect of their neighbors during twenty years of residence in this house and yet be capable of planning and committing an atrocious murder. I would point out that Mrs. Ogilvey shares some of the blame, or the guilt, of her husband. If he is a criminal, she knows it.

The law looks with lenient eyes on a woman who shields a man in such conditions, but that element in human affairs only goes to strengthen my contention that Mrs. Ogilvey can, if she chooses, throw a flood of light on this strange problem. She is now on her way North. Her daughter has gone to York to meet her. In all likelihood, one or both ladies will be in Elmdale to-night. Is it not reasonable to ask that investigation by the police into a singular occurrence now two years old should be postponed till to-morrow? Gentlemen, I promise you this. Come here to-morrow, say, about two o'clock, and you will be placed in possession of every fact then known to me. It is obvious, in my opinion, that the police can hardly adopt any other course, but I am bound to point out to Mr. Banks that the man who writes, and the newspaper which publishes, theories or speculations with regard to this matter before it is fully cleared up through the proper channel, will incur a most serious responsibility."

Sir Berkeley Hutton, of course, had a word to say.

"Mr. Garth, or Mr. Ogilvey as you now call him, is an old and valued friend of mine," he declared, "and it is my fixed and definite belief that if he was stung by a wasp he would find some excuse for a poor insect which was only trying to protect itself from imaginary danger.

Stephen Garth kill anybody! Stuff and nonsense!"

Mr. Dobb, too, was incredulous in so far as his friend's criminality was concerned.

"Mr. Garth certainly wrote the letter to the coroner," he said. "I saw it, and recognized his handwriting. Therefore, he knew that a death had taken place, and used a remarkably ingenious method of hoodwinking the authorities. That, in itself, is a legal offense--the magnitude of which alone can be estimated when we know the truth. I agree with Sir Robert Dalrymple. We must await Mrs. Garth's, or, I suppose I must learn to say, Mrs. Ogilvey's, arrival before any other steps are taken.

Meanwhile, it is of the utmost importance that no word of this discussion shall travel beyond these four walls."

"Will Sir Robert Dalrymple undertake to notify me of Mrs. Ogilvey's presence?" was the very pertinent inquiry made by the police superintendent.

Dalrymple undertook readily to send a messenger into Nuttonby early next morning, and his diplomacy was rewarded by seeing the conclave break up on that understanding. Nevertheless, he pa.s.sed a miserable and restless day. He had not stemmed the torrent, but diverted it. If his faith was not justified, if Marguerite's mother either refused to give any explanation of her husband's extraordinary ruse, or denied all knowledge of it, there was no getting away from the fact that the elderly recluse might soon be lodged in a felon's cell.

Marguerite herself would strain every nerve to save her father, if only by flight, but her lover realized how futile that would prove. He had secured a respite--and no more. If Mrs. Ogilvey's admissions led her daughter to journey on through the night to Warleggan, the girl might contrive to hurry her father out of England before the bolt fell. But to what avail? They would be traced with ease. Their flight, the pursuit, the arrest, would only add fuel to the flame lighted by inquisitive newspapers. Better, far better, that the man should face an inquiry at once rather than be put on trial after a vain attempt to escape.

It was almost a relief to visit Percy Whittaker during the afternoon, and endeavor to convert him from active enmity into a sulky acquiescence in things as they were, and not as he hoped they would be. Luckily, Dalrymple had estimated a curious temperament with singular accuracy.

After a long conversation, in which the older man cajoled and flattered Percy by turns, the latter declared that he never meant to put his threat into force.

"I'm not such an a.s.s as to want to marry a girl who loathed the sight of me," he said ruefully. "I tried to frighten Meg. I guessed she'd run off to Warleggan. My motive was to separate the pair of you. Then I'd follow, as soon as this confounded ankle of mine would permit, and tell her candidly that I was frantically jealous of you. Dash it all, and not without good cause! All's fair in love an' war, Mr. Armathwaite. I've a notion now that my splutter simply drove her into your arms."

"My name is not Armathwaite----" began Dalrymple, whereupon Whittaker glared at him in a new frenzy.

"I never thought it was!" he vociferated. "Let me tell you you're the biggest puzzle of the lot. I shan't be a bit surprised if you say you are the fellow who hanged somebody here, and persuaded old Garth to stand the racket."

So, to pa.s.s the time while the nurse was eating a meal, Dalrymple told him the story of Barapur, and Percy heard, and was subdued, since he knew now that, come what might, Marguerite Ogilvey was lost to him forever.

Then, while Dalrymple was surveying the day's work of Smith and his men, and declaring it was good, there came a messenger from Bellerby on a borrowed bicycle, bearing a telegram. It was from Marguerite, and Dalrymple's heart danced with joy when he read:

"All is well. Father leaves for York to-night. He will join mother and me early to-morrow. Expect us about ten o'clock. Am detaining car. Love, MEG."

All is well! What was well? It was a woman's message, which a.s.sumed everything and told nothing, except the one amazing fact that Stephen Ogilvey's wife had evidently decided that the period of concealment was ended, and that her husband should now vindicate himself in the eyes of his world.

At any rate, a youth returned to Bellerby with two bicycles and the richer by two sovereigns, so it is tolerably certain that Dalrymple's few words of congratulation were not delayed on the way.

The new tenant smoked and mused in the garden for another hour, until Betty came to summon him to dinner. He was entering the house when he saw the ghost again, a phantom divested now of eeriness, because a round blob of sunshine shone on the wall instead of the white sockets of eyes which lent such a ghoulish aspect to the shadowy face. Then he did a queer thing. Lifting the grandfather's clock, and disregarding the protest of weights and pendulum thumping against its wooden ribs, he placed it exactly where the reflection of the window fell. Instantly, the ghost vanished. The dark mahogany case absorbed the outlines of the figure. The old Spanish wood glowed richly here and there where the lights were strongest, and a disk of gold illumined the dull bra.s.s of the clock's face. And that was the end of the Elmdale ghost! Never again would it be seen until someone moved the clock, and Sir Robert Dalrymple vowed that such alteration should not occur in his time.

Luckily, Dr. Scaife came just as Dalrymple was sitting down to a solitary meal, and he was promptly bidden to the feast. Dalrymple showed him Marguerite's telegram, and they discussed it for an hour, or longer, though with no result, for they could only theorize, and, since truth is stranger than fiction, even two such acute minds failed to arrive at the actual solution of the mystery.

Dalrymple went late to bed, and awoke early, to find that the much-maligned British climate had produced another fine day. It was joyous to see the sun shining into his bedroom; it was still more joyous to descend the stairs, and glimpse the blue sky through the Black Prince's visor. A current of pure, sweet-scented air came through the orifice, and seemed to presage a new span of life to the old house; Dalrymple decided, then and there, that when the turmoil had subsided, he would commission the best obtainable artist in stained gla.s.s to restore the Black Prince's features in guise befitting his character as a warrior, statesman, and true lover.

A few minutes before ten Tom Bland came with a cartload of plants from a nursery. Smith and the laborers carried the boxes of flowers into the garden, and set them on both sides of the path, so that happy chance contrived that Marguerite should lead her parents to their old home through a blaze of color when the automobile brought them to the gate at ten o'clock.

It is not often that any collection of mortals is privileged to see a ghost in broad daylight, and in the rays of a powerful sun at that, but such was the lot of carrier Bland, gardener Smith, and four gaping yokels of Elmdale, not to mention a quite respectable number of other inhabitants, when Stephen Garth alighted from the car and walked jauntily up the garden to the porch of his own house. To save Mrs.

Jackson and Betty from spasms, Dalrymple had warned them previously of Mr. Garth's coming, but the men, and Elmdale generally, were not thus enlightened, and some of them would certainly have bolted had they not seen "the new guv'nor" shaking hands with "the old guv'nor," and had not the latter stopped to greet Begonia Smith with the exceedingly trite remark:

"Well, Smith, I'm not so dead as you thought me!"

"No, sir," said Smith, who did not find his tongue again until the newcomers had gone into the Grange.

Then he turned to one of the men.

"All I can say, Henery, is this," he murmured huskily. "I've heerd of people lookin' as though they'd bin dead an' dug up, but I'll take my oath no one has dug Mr. Garth out o' Bellerby Churchyard."

"It must be all right, though," was the philosophic answer. "Miss Meg wouldn't look so happy if there was goin' to be trouble."

"Ay! But hurry up with those begonias. In with 'em!"