CHAPTER I

At the Rose and Crown

The quiet of a fine summer evening was falling on the little village of Salting; the fields were slowly emptying as the dusk settled down, and the bar of the Rose and Crown was steadily filling with the heavy-footed, silent-minded labourers. Salting lies a mile or two away from a branch-line which ends with apparent inconsequence at a sleepy town some ten miles further; and the pursuits of its inhabitants, and in consequence their conversation, range eternally round the topics of the season and the crops and the simple, but not necessarily good-natured, personalities concerning one another. Nor is it a social district in the sense in which so many English neighbourhoods are, galvanized sporadically into an appearance of life by the moneyed activities of the upper classes. There are no small gentry, only farmers of varying prosperity; there is only one large estate, and though the great house which is hidden in the woods of it had been built for twenty-five years or more, it had never become in any sense part of the life of the place.

Salting Towers was the residence of Sir Roger Penterton, a man who cared nothing for the village which had happened to lie in the hollow below the hill selected as a suitable site for his house. He was not interested in agricultural affairs; he had chosen the locality solely because it was sufficiently convenient for the visits he continued to pay two and three times a week to the town in which he had pursued a highly successful career at the head of a big business; hence an appearance in a birthday honour list and that accretion of dignity and pride which proclaims itself in the carriage of a Knight. He liked, however, to fancy himself as a landed proprietor even while holding that class in the greatest contempt as a set of idle and unthrifty folk; the type of man of whom he was a shining example was, as he often used to proclaim as he stood astride of the fire in hall or smoking-room, the real backbone of the country. By years of hard work he had built up a fine business, amassed a large fortune, and incidentally married above himself. He had succeeded and not by any stroke of luck, but, as he would declare, by sheer industry, and so could any one else; he had no pity for failures. “Show me a failure and I’ll show you an idler,” was a favourite remark of his to those who tried to enlist his purse in aid of some charitable scheme.

As Inspector Humblethorne sat finishing his supper in the dingy coffee-room of the Rose and Crown, he could see the grandiloquent sweep of the drive as it crossed the park and disappeared into the wood which shut off the Towers from the village, and idly wondered where it led to. He had never heard of Sir Roger Penterton. The warmth of the evening and the freshness of the air had their usual subtle effect upon him, which the draining of a big glass of ale did nothing to dispel. He felt mellowed, sociable and well-pleased with himself, and heaved a big sigh to say so to all whom it might concern. It concerned nobody; that was the one objection to an otherwise entirely satisfactory state of things.

As he gazed out with dreamy eyes across the lane, watching the cattle which showed dimly in the meadow beyond and listening to the slow, ceaseless chatter of voices in the bar and the occasional sounds of the village, he had a vague feeling in his mind that he was ripe for conversation. He was not yet sufficiently accustomed to solitude to feel bored; ease and inactivity were still delightful companions, but nevertheless his mind did take hold for the first time of a certain indefinite feeling that he didn’t know quite what he was going to do with himself in this self-contained and seemingly lifeless spot. In town, whilst still shackled with work, nothing had seemed to him more deliciously original than to bury himself for his holiday in a picturesque and unexciting village, but it must be confessed that on this first evening a vague doubt as to the wisdom of this originality began to present itself to him. There wasn’t a soul to talk to, and he felt talkative, not to say, witty.

In this last it is possible he may have been deceived, for no one had yet associated wit with Emmanuel Humblethorne. His colleagues in the Force would have described him as a good little fellow, painstaking and accurate rather than intuitive in his work, and kind and helpful in his social relations. He was universally popular, even with those against whom his work was necessarily directed, but not exactly celebrated for his wit; he was of too sterling and quiet a strain to seem to incur that dangerous reputation. Nevertheless the fact remains on record that on this first free evening of his holiday he felt almost witty, and had no one upon whom to exercise the unusual faculty.

He was about to feel in his pocket for his pipe and rise from the table with the idea of strolling out and seeking amusement for himself, as it seemed obvious that none was coming to him of its own accord, when sounds outside indicated the arrival of another visitor to the Rose and Crown. But much to Humblethorne’s disappointment the newcomer, when at length he entered the coffee-room, showed himself openly, almost aggressively, indisposed to be sociable; he glanced at Humblethorne in a swift and rather nervous way which was certainly not suggestive of geniality, sat down at the furthest end of the table without a word and, after glancing at his watch, drew out a crumpled newspaper, put his elbows on the table and, resting his head upon his hands, began to read.

Humblethorne, checked in the casual greeting which he was about to give, filled his pipe with the studious regard of the completely idle man and let his eyes rest vacantly upon the stranger. Now that he was cheated of a companion the little curiosity he would have had was without reason, but the mind is often above reason and after its bent has been given it by years of training and application will proceed quite happily on its own account. Humblethorne did not know he was taking in the stranger detail by detail, but his mind in fact received a clear and reproducible impression of a tall, thin man of about thirty-three or thirty-four years of age, with hands which bore indistinct indications of refinement and clothes that bore none. A few minutes later when the stranger’s supper was brought in and he was compelled to give over his steady reading of the paper, Humblethorne also noted in the same uninterested way that he had a mouth of delicate sensibility unusual for a man of his apparent status, and above it a pair of restless and perhaps anxious eyes.

These met his as the stranger, after another glance at his watch, began his supper; and he gave a curt nod in forced recognition of the other’s presence, of which Humblethorne took immediate advantage.

“Mind my lighting up?” he inquired affably as he struck a match.

“Not at all,” replied the stranger, but without the least sociability.

“A fine evening,” resumed Humblethorne, “and looks like keeping fine for a bit.”

The stranger took no notice whatever of this original conversationalism, but Humblethorne, undaunted, tried again: “Know this part of the country at all?”

The other mumbled an unwilling, “Not very well.”

“Stopping here long, then,” persisted Humblethorne.

“What the devil’s that to you?” answered the stranger, suddenly looking up with surprising surliness.

“Nothing, nothing at all,” replied Humblethorne, rising in high indignation, “except that if you are, I’m not,” after which he slammed the door violently behind him and felt slightly better.

“Jolly sort of philanthropist to run up against on a holiday,” grumbled the little man to himself as he left the inn and struck out down the lane. “What boors we English are! Now if that had been a Frenchman we’d have been bowing and parlevooing away like anything by this time. Damn the fellow, he’s quite put me out of temper.”

He wandered on in an absent manner and his anger quickly cooled as he drew in the fresh, sweet air of the July night and exchanged a pleasant “Good evening” with a couple of labourers plodding by in the gloom. By the time that he had found a convenient stile, which seemed to invite a man to lean on it and look along the misty darkness of the valley, his good humour was quite restored and he had even begun to blame himself. “What an infernal thing it is,” he mused, “to get into the habit of always asking questions; it’s bad enough when you’re interested in the answers, but hopeless when you aren’t in the least. I suppose it’s too late, though, for me to alter that, and it has certainly proved useful once or twice; I doubt if I should ever have got onto the track in the Scrawley case if it hadn’t been for that chance conversation in the ’bus!” He was thinking, as he often did, of the one great case in his career when, favoured by a singular piece of luck, he had succeeded where a much more brilliant man had been totally at sea; it had won him promotion and gained for him a temporary reputation, subsequently to sink to a more solidly based but less elevated level, and it was a harmless belief of his that he might have succeeded without it. “I suppose I resented his seeming to think I had a reason for my remarks just because I might have had,” he thought, and drifted away into a reverie on the inconsequent perversity of human nature.

When at last he returned to the inn after a long silent communing with the stars, which on this still, clear night powdered the heavens with peculiar brilliance, he found the landlord standing at the door and entered immediately into the easy conversation he had been so long denied.

“A glorious night,” he said, “do you often have weather like this?”

“Well, it’s middlin’ good here as a rule about this time o’ year,” replied the man with something of that rather sententious condescension with which inhabitants of a place so often speak of fine weather to a stranger, as if suggesting that they have had some hand in it and should be regarded with gratitude accordingly. “You don’t get much of this sort in Lunnon, likely,” he added, “and I s’pose it’s natural you should notice it. Powerful lot of rain we had last night, though. The other gennelman, ’e’s out somewhere too, enjoying hisself; I shall be locking ’im out if ’e don’t come in soon.”

“Who is he, d’you know?” asked Humblethorne incuriously.

“No, sir. Traveller, I should say; leastways ’e ain’t stayin’ here, except just for the night, as you might say.”

“Well, I’m not sorry to hear it; he’s an unsociable sort of devil. Now I like a fellow who can talk a bit. Pretty place you have here.”

“Ay, it is that, so I’m told.”

“What’s the best walk about here?” continued Humblethorne. “Not too far; I’m not much of a walker, but I should like to see a bit of the country whilst I’m here.”

“I couldn’t rightly say,” answered the landlord slowly; “I don’t hold for walkin’ myself, and besides I ain’t been here long.”

“No! I thought you’d have been born here.”

“Lord, no; what made you think that, sir? I’ve been here six months come Michaelmas; ’ad a place down Melbury way before that, that’s where I was bred.”

Conversation flourished on similarly simple lines for some time and presently from the clock in the village church midnight boomed out slowly.

“Twelve o’clock!” exclaimed the landlord. “Time I was abed. Wunnerful how time goes when you get talkin’. If you ain’t a-comin’ in just yet, sir, will you have the kindness to lock this door and put out the lamp?”

“With pleasure,” replied Humblethorne. “I shall just finish this pipe and then I shall be turning in, too.”

The continued absence of the stranger had passed out of mind, and Humblethorne had just knocked out the pipe he always declared was the best of the whole day and turned to obey the injunction of the landlord, when he heard hurried steps in the lane, and in another minute the surly stranger came into the little ring of light cast by the lamp. He shot a keen glance of apparent resentment at the sight of Humblethorne standing with one hand on the door, brushed past him without a word, passed through and closed the door quickly and with unnecessary force behind him.

“Quite the gentleman,” murmured Humblethorne as he reopened it; “my gratitude for not being locked out is amazing. Now I should say,” he added thoughtfully as he lit his candle and put the light out, “that that young fellow was following a true instinct in taking a dislike to me—but it’s no concern of mine.”

With which piece of philosophy he went to bed.