CHAPTER XXIV

Bannerlee’s Secret

2.45 P.M.

Salt shared my perturbation. Indeed, he adopted the idea of a searching expedition with such alacrity and energy that one might suppose Miss Lebetwood to be fleeing from justice!

There were some bitter things said of her, though, by those, even, who volunteered readiest for the search. Repressed criticisms of her seemingly callous behaviour since Cosgrove’s death outcropped now. I stood by, a coward, for hot answers rose to my lips and I suppressed them. I remembered that from these hostile thoughts, thoughts more sinister might spring.

Just as they were going, I observed that Maryvale was not present. (Aire, too, was not among us.) Tenney volunteered the information, gained from Harmony, that Maryvale has again locked himself in his room. Seeking admittance in her morning round of the bedrooms, she found the door fastened and received a gruff intimation that she need not trouble to knock again until further notice.

I am almost as unwilling to leave Maryvale to his own devices as to leave Paula Lebetwood unsought for on the hills. But we _must_ find her!

7.45 P.M.

The last stragglers have not even yet returned from the uplands.

Hours of starved hope they were, while I stumbled along the half-blind paths, often bewildered, once quite lost myself. It was dogged work. I never should have struggled through without an inexorable motive and the faintest glimmer of a clue, a clue offered me by Salt many days ago. Had he not told how in his boyhood he had found “something like” the oratory of St. Tarw? I had kept the directions he had given, and now in a forlorn hazard I followed them, since they alone might lead me to some definite place that she, too, might have sought.

In observing Salt’s tuition, I was obliged to keep for the most part below the crown of the hills. The flanks were cut by gorges where water had eaten its way. In these places I made but indifferent progress. In a dusky dingle I did no better, and although I gasped in relief at finding what seemed a path, it proved unfriendly, for it led me into a covert of dogwood whose small green berries were turning purple-black, and deserted me there. I got out somehow, although spines clutched me. Before me, stretching into the upper fog, extended a curtain of rock and gravel. I attacked it with feet and hands.

It seemed to go up and up forever. In that frantic climb, out of a bottom soon invisible, up to a summit veiled in fog, I tore a finger-nail and broke into the flesh of my left palm. I paused on a splintery ledge to bind my handkerchief over the wound, and rested there awhile. It was then that I thought of looking, not up or down, but sidewise.

A brief cry escaped me. I could see further on the left, and what I saw quickened my heart.

A few yards away the rock curtain ended somewhat abruptly, and beyond appeared a brief slope full of stunted trees. Even further in the same direction, the trees gave place to shorter, tangled growth intermixed with grassy patches. Here and there a monolith thrust up from the surface, which on the whole was fairly level, though a vague darkness in the background showed that this clearing was not the summit of any hill, but a platform more or less below the highest elevation.

Along the outer edge of the cleared space stood a regiment of trees, whose ranks were quite dense enough to conceal what lay behind from eyes in the hollow of the Vale. Having gained the grassy platform with its curious black stones sprouting and littered about, I found that while I continued in the same direction over the tumbled grass full of small scarlet toadstools, the ground grew higher and the dark mass of the hilltop closer, while the platform narrowed.

My hope caught fire and blazed. I kept peering ahead and slightly upward, for the gentle slope persisted. Suddenly I saw Miss Lebetwood, very dim in the mist.

She was seated close under the shadowy brow of the hill, with her face away from me, and her head thrown back, leaning against something.

A lovely picture she had been that first night by the gate-house tower; now again I paused, rapt by the grace of her languid, lissome body, by the pale abstraction of her face—against the ancient gloom of the oratory of St. Tarw!

There was not the slightest doubt that this had been the devotional cell of the saint. Here stood the rude arch, still discernible though one or two of its stones had been displaced and the rest were mantled in moss and grass grown downward from above. The projection beside the door, where her head leaned, had surely once upon a time been the support of a holy shrine. These scattered rocky benches: on them had sat the small, dark, half-savage hill-folk, the strange congregations of the venerable man.

No, I would not rouse her from that mood of thought or vacancy; I would be still until she turned and looked at me. So minutes passed, while her image impressed itself in my mind, in my very heart of hearts. While I stood there in the grass, awaiting the first movement of her weary head, even breathing softly that she might not be disturbed, for the first time I dared to say to myself, bold and unafraid, “I love her.”

She did quicken from her inanimate pose, she did turn her head and see me. She rose swiftly; already I had come very near to her.

When she attempted to speak, her voice faltered. “So—so you found me?”

“Yes, Paula,” I said.

“I was waiting. I heard—”

My own queer voice filled the pause. “You don’t mean that—you were waiting—for me?”

“Yes.”

“You heard the others calling, and you waited for me?”

“Yes.”

Then—I cannot describe what was, only what must have been, for the white-heat of those moments has annihilated the memory of them—she was close within my arms, and my lips reached hers. Yes, for that ineffable once, I must have kissed her, since I remember too well that when I would have drawn her to me again, she put me away with a gentle pressure of her hand against my arm.

She shook her head slowly, her gaze searching mine. “You—misunderstood, I think. I—I let you because of what I saw in your eyes. They were soft and wistful for a moment.”

“But—Paula—”

“Now I think that you must never do that again.”

My mind went cold and grey as the world about us. “I’m sorry, then. Indeed, I must have misunderstood.”

I saw that some change had rushed over her. Her face became dull and sad, as if the clammy gloaming that darkened about us had penetrated to her heart. “Don’t misunderstand me all over again; please don’t. Your kisses might be very sweet, and their meaning might be dear to dream about. But you know that I have to set all the woman in me aside. . . . I must forget dreams,” she said bitterly, and to my astonishment she put both hands across her eyes and commenced to sob, sinking down on the stone seat again. I stood by and felt the iron grind into my soul.

But half a minute later she looked up with a rueful smile through her tears. “How perfectly ridiculous of me. What must you think! Don’t imagine for a minute that I was crying for any such preposterous reason as I said. It’s just that I’m awfully, awfully tired, and I _felt_ tired that moment. I was up nearly all last night over your diary. Please, have you a handkerchief I can use? I’ve nothing but one of these silly little women’s affairs.”

I handed over a fairly clean one. “Up all last night and in the hills all day! You’re a Trojan. But at least you found what you were looking for?”

She ceased dabbing for a moment to give me a half-moist look. “Here, do you mean?”

“Why, of course.”

“I found what I wanted, but it wasn’t here. This was afterward. I somehow had a feeling that you would come here and discover me sooner or later. These _inane_ tears.”

I brooded on this for a while, while she removed the last traces of them. “I suppose it’s no good asking where you found what you really wanted?”

“Why, yes—up there on Mynydd Tarw.”

“But at least you aren’t bringing it back with you as you declared you would, are you?”

She gave a strange laugh. “It was too big, a million times too big. So I have to be satisfied with carrying it here.” She placed a finger against her forehead. “Now I am ready, sir, if you’ll take me back down with you. Please let’s go now. There is so much to be done to-night.”

“You shall rest to-night, nothing else.”

“On the contrary—don’t think I’m rude—there’s everything else. Yes, yes, really. Come, let’s go.”

She picked up the little campstool, but I took it from her. Slowly we turned and went away from that place, and while we passed through a huddling hazel wood where sheep had made a track before us, the sun at last thridded the mist with hazy golden beams. While we descended the glen, I looked at her face with the light playing upon its firm, rounded surfaces and gleaming in her eyes. She was weary, indeed, with what seemed more than physical exhaustion; I slipped my arm about her when she appeared almost unable to pick her footing on the precarious slope. But, “Oh, no, no,” she said, resisting so softly that I pitied her, and took my arm away.

When we had discovered the path that led down to Aidenn Water and were well on our slanting way to the valley bottom, she found more strength in the smoother footing. Suddenly I felt that she was scrutinizing me, and I turned my head to hear her ask:

“What did it remind you of—that place up there?”

“A graveyard,” I answered almost without thought.

“Just so. Tell me honestly; have you never been there before?”

“Before?—there?” I repeated, quite truly surprised.

“Don’t temporize, please. Confess that you were there before but didn’t set it down when you wrote your journal. That was the place where you fell when you escaped from the bull, and it was where you took shelter from the storm the day you saw the rainbow. Wasn’t it?” I did not answer but she insisted. “I suppose you had some foolish fear that if you wrote about it and someone—like poor me—read of the discovery before you had published it to the world, you might lose the credit for it. Yes? For it _was_ your discovery, and I only followed the hints you gave.”

“Yes,” I said promptly, since my secret was guessed. “It was my discovery, and I wanted to preserve it for myself. I thought I had written enough, without being explicit to the point of revelation, to sustain any claim I might need to make afterward. I suppose you think I was a very large and egregious idiot?”

For a little while she did not answer. When I turned to look at her, her eyes seemed to dwell not on the present but on the past, and there was the intention of a smile in her face. “No; I think you were an—antiquarian. Ah, you scholars!”

“Well, in archæological circles you know—” I broke off.

“Archæological circles seem about as important as ant-hills to me, just now. One thing, though, I really learned last night and today—a platitude I never quite believed in.”

“A platitude—and not yet discredited?”

She gave a little laugh. “I mean the one about boxing up truth. You can hammer down board after board, but the truth is like smoke: it always finds a new chink in the cover to escape from. Don’t you see”—she gave a smothered laugh—“the moment you began keeping your archæological cat in the bag, you had to use all kinds of devices of wire and rope to keep it there, and more often than not it was you and not the cat who was tangled!”

I looked at her in comic dismay. “Well! If you’ve found that out from the diary you must be a perfect demon of ratiocination!”

“Hardly; it was obvious. For instance, when Mr. Salt offered you his suggestions for finding the oratory, you felt obliged to skid all around the truth that you already knew where it was. You even said that finding it seemed ‘superfluous.’ That was rather neat, I thought.”

I grinned. “So do I. As a fact, I followed his route to the oratory to-day. And now I have a gleam in my prophetic soul that you found discrepancies in the rainbow section of the diary.”

She weighed her answer. “Well, I don’t know. I saw the discrepancies readily enough. You never were on Whimble all that afternoon, were you, in spite of the suggestions you scattered to that effect? I always thought archæologists were profound people, but I had no idea they were so sly.”

I mused. “Hm. You are perfectly right. ‘I headed straight for Whimble. . . .’”

“Yes, and afterward, ‘It would take me some time to get from where I was to the edge of Mynydd Tarw.’ That was so, no doubt, but I’d bet a—a lot that you were on Mynydd Tarw all the while.”

“Naturally, but I wasn’t going to say so, when the oratory was under the edge of that particular hill. Yes, you’re right: my secret entailed quite a number of peccadilloes.”

I saw her smiling at me. “They became quite inveterate, didn’t they? But the whole thing goes back to the platitude. Squeeze the truth in one place and it sticks out in another. Because you _would_ have the secret of the oratory all to yourself, you had to conceal the innocent fact that you accidentally left a book there.”

I stared at her as at a miracle, which indeed she was. “Come, come; this is on the thick side. You must have been shadowing me.”

“Only in brain-waves. It was your copy of the Book of Sylvan Armitage, wasn’t it? How did you happen to leave it there? I can guess you had it out of your knapsack and studied it for comparison with the place you had fallen to. Then, perhaps, you laid it down—”

“I did, and leaned back to rest, just as I found you doing this afternoon. The Book slipped off the stone and fell inside the shelter of the oratory. I didn’t notice it when I started up and left the place. But how on earth did you know?”

“You mustn’t think it was so wonderful for me to see a plain nose on a plain face. To begin with, I was surprised to death when I learned that you hadn’t brought your own copy of the Armitage with you, but had to send for it from Balzing. Was it likely that you would leave behind the one work which referred to the oratory of St. Tarw? Then that evening in the library after the rainbow, some of Lib’s remarks—‘Having the hump,’ and so forth—sounded as if you might be concealing something that you had brought with you under your coat. And finally—well this alone would have been enough to tell me—the day you were supposed to receive it through the mail, you didn’t call at the Post Office for it; when you came home from Old Aidenn, you gave New Aidenn a wide berth and crossed the Smatcher.”

“Out of my own inkwell I stand condemned,” I laughed. “It’s uncanny, that’s what it is, the way you get inside my cranium and read my secret thoughts. Still, you haven’t told me what the fundamental deduction was. It couldn’t have been a mere guess. How did you _know_ that I wasn’t on Whimble when I drew the map?”

“I think you are playing Doctor Watson on purpose. Why, that was the essence of simplicity. Why, a _primitive_ mind could have told that. What do you suppose I brought the campstool for? It was as simple as—as rule of three. You’ll have to discover that for yourself.”

After silence:

“What was that you said—about the rapture you felt the first time you wandered on the uplands? You never could feel the same freedom? You never could be so happy again?”

“I think I never shall.”

“Nor I. I hate this place. It has robbed me of something—something more than love or any little thing like that.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, appalled—and when she did not answer, I asked again, with my hand clenched about her wrist and my eyes burning into her face, “What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure . . . but I suppose I mean . . . innocence. Since I came here, something has happened that I never can forget. I think it will make all my life worse.”

We went on. The sunlight was dying. The trees became spectral. In me, who walked beside this wonderful, clear-spirited girl, a monstrous horror welled.

I had a sense of vast, dark, insufferable wings hovering down. Was it fated that I should need to protect her against herself? Long before we reached the House, that I had sworn to do, at all costs, whatever should betide.