Part 20

“For six years,” he said. “I found it on the twenty-first anniversary of my dear mother’s death. I think I ought to say ‘murder,’ for there is no doubt that my father, who had all the worst qualities of Dick, killed her--hanged her.”

Her face contorted with horror.

“In that room?” she said, in a strained voice. “Behind the door?”

He nodded.

“The thing was hushed up. My clever father was too great a man to be put on trial for his life and the story was circulated that she had died by her own hand.”

Every word he said was a lie, as she knew, but he believed it. He explained quite rationally how the light was worked; showed her the little wash place with the stream of water running from the raw rock through a cavity into some invisible deeps; even gave her a short résumé of the history of the place. It had been built by the Black Abbot himself for his own especial purpose.

“My first idea was that there was another exit here, or rather an entrance for those peculiar friends of his, but that I have failed to discover.”

He took up one of the rifles, shot back the bolt with the air of an expert, and, going up the steps, unfastened the heavy oaken bar that kept the stone in place.

The slab pivoted round, and she had a wild idea that when it was closed she would fasten it; but he was evidently prepared for this, for she heard him drag a paving-stone to the edge of the hole and place it so that the trap could not close.

“Good-night, Leslie,” he said, peering down at her through his spectacles. “You will not mind my light? I want to read a chapter before I sleep.”

For a quarter of an hour no sound broke the silence. She sat on the bed, her hands clasped on her knees. And then she heard him move and her breath came faster, but he had only a question to ask.

“Tell me, Leslie, did Thomas leave any relations? I should like to provide for them. The man annoyed me, but I really do not regret killing him. But I should not like to feel that his relatives were suffering through my act of justice.”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she said, and it did not seem to be her voice.

LV

It seemed an interminable time before his light went out. Was he sleeping? Should she attempt to escape past him? From where she sat she could see his hand, which lay over the edge of the pit, and she remembered Dick telling her how light a sleeper he was. Systematically and without moving, she searched the place with her eyes, foot by foot. In one corner of the room square tins of every shape were piled. She supposed they were preserved provisions and she wondered how he got rid of the débris. She examined the wash place, cupped her hands and drank of the cool, refreshing water, afterward bathing her face. The touch of the cold spring water refreshed and invigorated her.

How long she sat there motionless, she could not tell. She was in a kind of coma, paralyzed by a sense of helplessness. It must have been hours before she heard him move and, his blanket over his arm, and rifle in hand, he crept down the steps and fastened the slab.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Don’t speak--it is he!” he whispered, and sat down by her side, his hand on her shoulder.

She heard the sound of footsteps above.

Dick!

She had to bite her lips to prevent the cry that came to her lips. Harry was watching her--a scream and she would be dead. Dick could never break open that trap in time, even if he could locate the sound. Presently the footsteps went away and she felt the hand on her shoulder relax.

“Sorry to disturb you.”

He picked up blanket and rifle and ascended the steps--she watched him pull the paving-stone forward and after a while there was quietness.

There must be some exit, if the legend of the disreputable Black Abbot were true. She took off her shoes and walked noiselessly over the even floor, examining it stone by stone. The walls were obviously impenetrable; the vaulted ceiling was decorated with the lines of a St. Andrew’s Cross that met in a great stone rosette in the centre.

He had left a box of matches and a candle on the table. This she lit and carried it into the tiny cavern where the water ran. She could see no roof; she guessed it stretched up the full height of the tower, and that somewhere above was the edge of the circular staircase that had brought her down to the first cavern.

Holding the light above her head, she strained her eyes upward and presently she saw great iron D-shaped projections fixed at intervals of a foot; they reached to the top, and, most blessed sight of all, she saw above her head a star.

And yet she was puzzled. The Abbot had a reputation for gallantry, and it was hardly likely that the visitors who shared his solitude would make their entrance by so precarious a means. She reached up, but her hand was three feet from the nearest rung, and there was nothing in the room on which she could stand. She went back to her bed noiselessly and pulled out one of the sheets; she took the remaining rifle and, by dint of great exertion, managed to push one end of the sheet through the nearest rung. After ten minutes’ work the end came down and she had a rope. She knotted together the sheets at the end, and tested her weight. The staple held, and, springing up, she climbed hand over hand to the lowest rung. Her arms were almost pulled from their sockets; she was breathless, but she held on, and, reaching up, caught the third rung and pulled herself up until her feet rested on the first. She waited a little while to gain breath and began to climb. Higher and higher, and then her heart sank. Above her, she saw a steel grille, fixed immovably across the exit. It was impossible even to put her arm through, the meshes were so small, and with a bitter sense of disappointment, she descended again and slid down the sheet to the floor.

There was no escape this way. She unknotted the sheet and replaced it in her bed, stained with rust and torn at the edges. She brought the rifle back with her. She was an enthusiastic miniature target shot and knew the mechanism of the weapon. Pulling out the magazine, she found it loaded to its full capacity. Here, then, was something; her confidence grew, though she prayed she might never have to use this weapon upon the madman who slept so quietly above. The weapon might be used to terrify him in an emergency.

She went back to the wash place and looked up. Day was breaking, and she took a sudden resolve. The man had been almost his normal self, as she had known, and she guessed that this was but an interlude and that there were periods when she must shoot to save her life. Stealthily she crept up the stairs, rifle in hand, and she heard him stir, and presently his shrill voice asked:

“Where are you going? Stay where you are, you vixen----”

She brought the butt of the rifle and smashed past the paving-stone that prevented the trap from closing. The stone thudded down, and instantly she swung round the heavy bar that kept it in place. She heard him stamping and screaming above; heard, with a shivering horror, the threats that, as she thought, no human tongue could frame; staggering down the steps, she fell.

LVI

A high official from Scotland Yard had arrived and was interviewing Dick in the library.

“I am wholly responsible. I have always known my brother was queer, and about a year ago I was certain that the horrible taint of madness which his poor mother transmitted to him was developing in a way which could only have one end. I begged of him to see a medical man, but he hated doctors. I brought down the best alienists from London in various guises, sometimes as bailiffs, and occasionally as prospective buyers of our property, but in their presence he behaved so rationally that it was impossible that I could get a certificate.

“My own position was a very delicate one. I am, as you know, the heir to the property. Any step I took meant that the estate came into my hands, and that eventually, when poor Harry died, as one doctor told he must die in a few years, I should be branded with the stigma of having put him away, and I was anxious to save the family name. My chief anxiety was that he should never marry.”

“Wasn’t it easy enough to take the girl into your confidence?”

Dick was silent for a while.

“Not in this case. There were reasons why----”

And the official, dimly understanding, changed the subject.

“Then you were the Black Abbot?”

“Mostly,” confessed Dick. “My brother was terrified of the Abbot and would never go out if there was a rumour that the Black Abbot was about. I was especially anxious to keep him in the house, where, under my eye, there was no chance for him to indulge in these extraordinary paroxysms that have really alarmed the countryside. The man whom the villagers feared and whom they call the Black Abbot, is really Harry. I was a very silent Black Abbot,” he smiled faintly, “and I had no other purpose than to keep Harry indoors. I’m going to say I did not always succeed.”

“I’m afraid the truth will have to come out now,” said the official, shaking his head.

“I wish it had come out last week,” replied Dick bitterly.

“Do you think your brother is responsible for the disappearance of Miss Gwyn?”

“Undoubtedly. He must have attracted her to the window and persuaded her to come down into the grounds. He was very plausible; no man would dream that he was not sane, only I, who have seen”--he drew a long breath--“what I have seen. I’ll tell you this, Colonel,” he said, with sudden vehemence, “not all the lordship of Chelford, not all the estates, not even the Chelford treasure, would make me live again my life of the past five years! There are times,” he said, his voice trembling with passion, “when I feel I would like to dig up the Abbey and scatter its stones in the dust, raze this house to the ground, and turn the place into a public park.” He laughed at his own excess. “I am talking like an idiot. This place belongs to a family that knows not Harry. He is just a terrible accident. My dear mother often told me how worried my father was about Harry, his queer, secretive ways. And yet in a way he is a sportsman, one of the best shots in England as a boy, a great runner, and a wonderful fellow over a country, until about eight years ago, when this treasure bug got into his brain and he shut himself away from us all and gave his mind and his soul to this wild chase.”

“The gold?”

Dick shook his head.

“No,” he said. “If it were only the gold, that would have been an intelligent interest in life.”

He described Harry’s search for the elixir, the famous Life Water of which the ancient Chelford had written in his diary.

“It is probably no more than a flask of a native wine--Arac or the like,” said Dick. “Poor Harry!”

Miss Wenner had intended to leave by the early morning train but had changed her mind. Possibly the arrival of Fabrian Gilder had been a factor. She had one solution for Leslie’s disappearance.

“Have you searched the Abbey?” she asked, not once but a dozen times.

Dick was weary; the Abbey had been his first thought. He had suspected this was Harry’s hiding place, and with his own hands had taken a basket of provisions for him, but this, he saw, was untouched.

There was one possibility about the underground cavern, and that was the second door, and he had ordered the blacksmith and his assistant to be at the stone tower at two o’clock that afternoon, with instruments, one of which had to be procured from London.

The presence of Miss Wenner was not as distasteful to Gilder as he thought it would have been. To use a phrase of childhood, she was “on his side.” In very truth, Miss Wenner was on anybody’s side if that person happened to be agreeable to her.

They were walking through the rosary before lunch, and certainly the trend of Mary Wenner’s remarks was very comforting to a man who had been so badly rebuffed.

“If I had my way, Fabrian, dear”--she assumed all the rights and privileges of an engagement which was somewhat illusory and he made only a feeble resistance--“if I had my way I’d put you in charge of this case. After all, you are the very man to solve this mystery and I must say you could have knocked me down with a feather when you told me you were fifty--you don’t look a day more than thirty--and you’ve got experience, you’re a lawyer, you’re up to all kinds of artfulness----”

“Not to all kinds,” said Gilder with a grim recollection of a certain blank check.

“Well, to most kinds,” conceded Miss Wenner. “And what are they all doing? This Dick Alford and this so-called detective? They’re just standing around, scratching their heads, whilst you could go, as it were, to the real heart of the mystery. Don’t deny it--I’m sure you would, Fabe.”

“Don’t call me Fabe, Mary,” he asked gently. “If you want to call me by my Christian name, let us have all the three syllables.”

“You’re a man of the world, Fabrian”--she accentuated the word as she would have done “Mary Ann”--“you understand the ins and outs of everything. Why don’t they come to you like men and say, ‘Mr. Gilder, what is your opinion of this mystery?’ Instead of which, they don’t so much as ask you if you’ve got a mouth!”

“Perhaps they know that,” said Gilder in good humour.

He lifted his head suddenly, a frown on his face. He had heard a shot; more than a shot, the whirr and whine of a bullet.

“What----”

Something fell at his feet with a “plop!” He saw a little hole, and, stooping, dug out a bullet with his fingers.

“Where on earth did that come from?”

He looked up at the sky, but the aëroplane which was later to make an appearance, and which had nothing to do with this mysterious shooting, was not yet in sight.

Dick had heard the shot and was running across the lawn.

“Did you----” he began.

_Plop!_

They heard it again, and presently Dick saw leaves fall from a laurel bush and heard the thud of an impact. One of the police who were still patrolling the grounds shouted to him, but he could not hear what he was saying, and raced across to him. Nearer at hand, he saw that the man was pointing to the ruins.

“It came from there,” shouted the constable, and Dick changed direction.

He was flying up the slope when the third shot sounded, and this time he located it with fair accuracy. Somebody was shooting from the tower.

Happily, he had made preparations for the blacksmith’s visit, and there was an assortment of lanterns near the entrance. He stopped long enough to light one, and, slipping back the catch with his knife, he pushed aside the stone corner piece and ran down the stairs. The room was empty. He tried the mystery door; that, too, was closed. Somebody shouted his name from the landing above and he answered:

“Come down, Gilder. There’s nobody here.”

Gilder descended the steps gingerly and looked round with his keen, shrewd eyes. And then he remembered and pointed to the slab.

“Have you tried that? I meant to tell you before.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know, but I rather think that the stone turns on a pivot. If that is the case, there are pretty stout supports underneath that will want cutting through.”

Gilder sprawled flat on the floor, his ear to the crack.

“There’s nothing there that is audible,” he said. “Can’t you smell anything?”

He put his nose to the crack.

“There’s a petrol light burning down there, or else it has been burning recently.”

Flat on his face, Dick sniffed.

“Yes,” he said, and called: “Leslie!”

There was no answer. He called again, with a like result.

Gilder went up the stairs and searched amongst the tools that had been brought in readiness for the afternoon’s investigation. He selected two saws and a second lantern, and, lighting this, he descended to Dick’s side.

“It is pretty sure to be an oaken support; these old builders seldom used iron,” he said.

Throwing off his coat, he rolled up his sleeves. The thin blade of the saw worked down between the stones and after a while he began sawing gingerly.

“It’s wood,” he said. “You’ll find yours is the same.”

They both worked at one end, for, as he pointed out, there would only be one bar, the other end of the stone being bevelled to meet the edge of the floor. The wood was like rock, and both men were hot before they had half-sawn through the support. Presently Dick drew out his saw. He had gone through the oak and had heard the loose end fall below. A few seconds later, Gilder’s saw passed through the last obstruction. Gingerly he put his foot on the edge and pressed down, and the stone trap swung open.

They looked down into a dark vault; and now the smell of the burning lamp was very pungent. Dick lowered the lantern and peered down. He could see no sign of human life. He caught a view of the end of a bed, a table, and, on the floor, a rifle. He reached the bottom and, swinging his lantern round, called:

“Leslie!”

A mocking echo came back to him from the little cavern at the far end of the apartment. The place was empty; the man and woman who, five minutes before, had fought in a death struggle, had disappeared.

LVII

“Leslie!”

He called again, his voice hoarse with anxiety. He had seen two little shoes by the side of the bed. Her hat was on the floor, crushed into a shapeless mass. Picking up the rifle, he felt the barrel; it was still warm, and under the tower there were four empty cartridge cases. And then, holding his lantern high, he saw the rungs in the rough face of the wall, and jumped to the conclusion that she had escaped that way. Within a minute he leapt up, caught the lower rung and ran up the ladder to the top, oblivious of one or two ominous cracks as his man weight came upon the old ironwork. The grille at the top stopped him. He had seen it, but thought it might be movable.

“They couldn’t have gone that way,” he said breathlessly as he came down to the ground.

Gilder rubbed his gray hair.

“Then where on earth have they gone?” he asked irritably.

They searched every inch of the long room, pulled the bed from the wall, but beneath was solid stone pavement. The table seemed fastened to the floor; they could not move it.

“Do you notice anything about this floor?” Gilder asked suddenly. “It is not level.”

And when Dick looked, he saw this was true. The floor sloped gradually down from the wash cavern to the wall behind the steps. Gilder went in search of a hammer, and the two, now reinforced by Puttler and the Scotland Yard man, went over every inch of the wall and flooring, tapping and sounding. They struck no hollow place. The four men took hold of the side of the table and tried to drag it from its foundations, but they might as well have tried to move the wall itself. It had a thick oaken base, from which ran three pillars supporting the enormously heavy top.

It was very clear to Dick what had happened. The girl had been attacked, and, having discovered this opening to the sky, had procured a rifle by some means and had fired up the shaft to attract attention. Then she had been overcome and--what?

The water ran down through a crevice in the solid rock about six or eight inches wide. It was impossible that any human being could have gone down that narrow slit, but, to make sure, he had the edges of the water-worn rock broken away. The blacksmith by this time was waiting above. Dick had him brought down with his tools; the second door might yield some sort of solution.

For half an hour they worked with jacks and levers, and presently, with a deafening crack, the lock parted and the door was pushed open. There was revealed a room similar in shape and size to that which Mary Wenner had discovered; with this exception, that there were no stone benches, and in the centre of the apartment was a circular hole. Dick knelt by the side and held down his lantern; he heard the faint “clug” of water, and saw the light reflected at a considerable depth.

“A well,” he said. “All these old places have an interior well. There’s one in the Tower of London, in the centre of the dungeon.”

This room had been used as a prison at a distant period. At intervals along the walls hung rusted chains, with leg-irons attached. In one corner he saw a heap of rags, glimpsed a milk-white bone, and shuddered. What was the history of this poor wretch who had been shut away from the light of God’s sunshine, to die miserably in this dark and dreadful place?

“Well, there’s nothing there,” said Gilder, peering over.

Dick tied his lantern to the end of a cord and let it slowly down to the depths. Thirty feet below, as near as he could judge, the bottom of the lantern touched water. The old builders had builded splendidly. The green, weed-grown sides of the well seemed intact. And then his heart almost stood still. A hand was thrust out, seemingly from the solid brickwork of the well; a white hand on which flashed and sparkled a single diamond that he knew well. And from below he heard a muffled voice and in his agitation the cord which held out the lantern slipped from his hand into the water.

He cursed aloud in his rage at his own criminal carelessness.

“Give me the other lantern!” he called and pulling the other hand over hand, he untied it and flung it aside, fastening in its place the lighted storm lamp that Puttler handed to him. “And get a rope--quickly!”

But there was no rope nearer than Fossaway Manor, and he fumed in his impatience and would have made an attempt to slip down the treacherous sides of the well if Puttler had not restrained him.