Rampole let the stick slide through his hand until its ferrule clanged on the floor; then he leaned on it. He said, "Dr. — " and found that his voice had gone into a crazy key,
The girl was laughing, pressing her hand to her mouth.
"We thought―" Rampole said, swallowing.
"Yes," nodded the doctor, "you thought I was the murderer, or a ghost. I was afraid you might see my candle from Yew Cottage and come over to investigate, but there was no way to block the window. Look here, my dear girl, you'd better sit down. I admire your nerve in coming up here. As for me―"
From his pocket he took an old-style derringer revolver and weighed the heavy weapon in his palm reflectively. He wheezed, nodding again.
"Because, children, I rather think we're up against a very dangerous man. Here, sit down."
"But what are you doing here, sir?" Rampole asked.
Dr. Fell laid the pistol on the table beside the candle. He pointed to what looked like a stack of manuscript ledgers, rotten and mildewed, and to a bundle of brown dry letters; with a large handkerchief he tried to mop the dust from his hands.
"Since you're here," he rumbled, "we might as well go into it. I was ransacking…. No, my lad, don't sit on the edge of that bed; it's full of unpleasant things. Here, on the edge of the table. You, my dear," to Dorothy, "may have the straight chair; the others are full of spiders.
"Anthony kept accounts, of course," he continued. "I fancied I should find 'em if I poked about…. The question is, what was Anthony hiding from his family. I must tell you, I think we're in for mother old, old story about buried treasure."
Dorothy, sitting very quiet in her wet raincoat, turned slowly to look at Rampole. She only observed:
"I knew it. I said so. And after I found those verses―"
"Ah, the verses!" grunted Dr. Fell. "Yes. I shall want to look at those. My young friend mentioned 'em. But all you have to do is read Anthony's diary to get a hint about what he did. He hated his family; he said they'd suffer for ridiculing his verse. So he turned his verse into a means to taunt them. I'm no very good accountant, but I can see from these," he tapped the ledgers, "that he left 'em precious little cash out of a large fortune. He couldn't beggar them, of course, because the lands — the biggest source of revenue-were entailed. But I rather think he put a gigantic sum beyond their reach. Bullion? Plate? Jewels? I don't know. You'll remember, he keeps referring in the diary to `the things one can buy to defeat them,' meaning his relatives; and again he says, `I have the beauties safe.' Have you forgotten his signet, `All that I have I carry with me?' — 'Omnia mea mecum porto."'
"And left the clue in the verses?" asked Rampole. "Telling where the hiding-place is?"
Dr. Fell threw back his ancient box-pleated cape and drew out pipe and tobacco-pouch. Reeling out the black ribbon, he adjusted his glasses more firmly.
"There are other clues," he said, meditatively.
"In the diary?"
"Partly. 'For instance, why was Anthony so strong in the arms? He was rather puny when he became governor; nothing about him developed except his arms and shoulders. We know that…. Eh?"
"Yes, of course."
The doctor nodded his big head. "Then again, you saw that deeply worn groove in the stone railing of the balcony over there. Eh? It was about of a size to contain a man's thumb," added the doctor, examining his own thumb reflectively.
"You mean a secret mechanism?" asked Rampole.
"Again," said the doctor, "again — and this is important — why did he leave, behind him a key to the balcony door? Why the balcony door? If he left those instructions in the vault, all that his heirs would need to get at them would be three keys: one to the corridor door of this room, one to the vault, and one to the iron box inside the vault. Why, then, include that fourth key?"
"Well, clearly because his instructions entailed going out on the balcony," said Rampole. "That was what Sir Benjamin said when he was talking about a death-trap out there…. Look here, sir! By that groove the size of a man's thumb, do you mean a spring, a mechanism, to be pressed so that―"
"Oh, nonsense!" said the doctor. "I didn't say a man's thumb went there. A man's thumb, even in the course of thirty years, wouldn't have worn that groove. But I'll tell you what would have done it. A rope."
Rampole slid off the edge of the table. He glanced over at the balcony door, closed and sinister in the faint light of the candle.
"Why," he repeated aloud — "why was Anthony so strong in the arms?"
"Or, if you want more questions," boomed the doctor, sitting up straight, "why is the destiny of everybody so intimately concerned with that well? Everything leads straight to the well. - There's Anthony's son, of course, the second Starberth who was a governor of this prison. He's the one who threw us all off the track. He died of a broken neck, like his father, and started the tradition. If he'd died in bed, there wouldn't have been any tradition, and we could examine the death of Anthony, his father, without any hocus-pocus. We could see it as the isolated problem it is. But it didn't happen that way. Anthony's son had to be governor of this prison when the cholera wiped out most of its inmates, and those poor devils went mad down in their airless cells. Well, the governor of the prison went mad from the same fever. He had it, too, and his delusions were too strong for him. You know what an effect that diary of his father's had on all of us? Then what sort of effect do you imagine it had on a nervous, bogey-ridden man who had been stricken with cholera in the bogey-ridden nineteenth century? What do you suppose is the effect on the brain of living just above the exhalations of a swamp where hanged men have been thrown to rot? — Anthony could hardly have hated his own son enough to want him to get up from his bed in delirium and throw himself from that balcony. But that's what the second governor did."
Rumbling, Dr. Fell exhaled his breath so hard that it almost blew out the candle, and Rampole jumped. For a moment the big room was quiet: dead men's books, dead men's chairs, and now the ancient sickness of their brains had become as terrible here as the face of the Iron Maiden. A rat scurried across the floor. Dorothy Starberth had put her hand on Rampole's sleeve; you would have said that she saw ghosts.
"And Anthony-?" Rampole put in, with an effort.
For a time Dr. Fell sat with his big shock of hair bowed.
"It must have taken him a long time," he remarked, vacantly, "to have worn so deep a groove in the stone. He had to do it all alone, and in the dead of night-time, when nobody could see him. Of course, there were no guards on that side of the prison, so he could escape unnoticed… Still, I'm inclined to think he had a confederate for the first few years, until he could develop his own strength. His own terrific strength would come with patience, but until then he had to have a confederate up raise and lower him. Probably, afterwards, he did away with the man…."
"Wait, please!" said Rampole, hitting the table. "You say that the groove was worn by a rope because Anthony spent years…"
"Hauling himself up and down it."
"Into the well," the other observed, slowly. He. had a sudden vision of a weird spiderish figure in black, swinging on a rope under the night sky. A lamp or two would be burning in the prison. The stars would be out. And Anthony would dangle by night where dead men dangled in daytime, working his way down to the well..
Yes. Somewhere down in that broad well, God knew where, he had spent year's in hollowing out a cache. Or possibly every night he had swung down to examine his treasures there. The reek from the well would dissolve his own sanity as it later dissolved his son's; but more subtly, for he was a harder man. He would see dead men climbing up from the well to knock at his balcony door. He would hear them whispering together at night, because he had decked their flesh with his wealth, and planted gold among their bones. Many nights he must have seen the rats eating in the well. It was only when he saw the rats in his own bed that he believed the dead men were coming to carry him down with them, soon.
Rampole's damp coat felt repulsive against him. The room was full of Anthony's presence.
Dorothy spoke in a clear voice. She did not look afraid now.
"And that," she said, "went on until-?"
"Until he grew careless," answered Dr. Fell.
The rain, which had almost died away, crept up on the prison once more; it rustled in the ivy at the window, splattering the floor; it danced through the prison, as though it were washing things away.
"Or perhaps," resumed the doctor, looking suddenly at the balcony door, "perhaps he didn't grow careless. Perhaps somebody knew of his visits, without knowing what they were about, and cut that rope. Anyway, the knot of his rope slipped, or was cut. It was a wild night, full of wind and rain. The rope, freed, went down with him. Since its edge was on the inside lip of the well, it slid over into the well; nobody would have cared to examine anything down there, so they didn't suspect a rope. But Anthony didn't fall into the well."
And Rampole thought: Yes, a rope that was cut. Much more probable than a noose that slipped. Perhaps there was a lamp burning in the Governor's Room, and the man with the knife was looking over the balcony rail, and saw Anthony's face momentarily as he went whirling down towards the spikes on the edge of the well. In Rampole's mind it was as horribly vivid as a Cruikshank print-the white, staring eyeballs, the outflung arms, the shadowy murderer.
A cry against the wind and rain; then the noise, however it had sounded; and a lamp blown out. It was all as dead as one of those books in the shelves. Ainsworth might have imagined it, just as it took place, in the eighteen-twenties….
Distantly he heard Dr. Fell say: "There, Miss Starberth. There's your damned curse. There's what's been worrying you all this time. Not very impressive, is it?"
She rose without speaking, and began to walk about the room, her hands thrust into her pockets, just as Rampole remembered her that first night at the train. Pausing in front of Dr. Fell, she took a folded paper from her pocket and held it out. The verses.
"Then," she asked, "this? What about this?"
"A cryptogram, undoubtedly. It will tell us the exact place…. But don't you see that a clever thief wouldn't have needed that paper, he wouldn't even need to have known of its existence, to know that there was something hidden in the well? He could have used just the evidence I used. It's all available."
The candle was getting low, and a broad sheet of flame curled about it, throwing momentary brightness. Dorothy went to where the rain was making splattered pools below the window, and stared blankly at the vines.
"I think I see," she said, "about my father. He was — wet, wet all over, when they found him."
"You mean," said Rampole, "that he caught the thief at work?"
"Well, is there any other explanation?" Dr. Fell growled. He had been making ineffectual efforts to light his pipe, and now he laid it down on the table. "He was out riding, you know. He saw the rope going down into the well. We can assume that the murderer didn't see him, because Timothy went down into the well. So-?" He glared ferociously.
"There's some sort of room, or hollowed-out place," Rampole nodded. "And the murderer didn't know he was there until he came down."
"Humph. Well. There's another deduction, but let it go. Excuse me, Miss Starberth: your father didn't fall. He was beaten, coldly and viciously, and then thrown into the bushes for dead."
The girl turned. "Herbert?" she demanded.
With his forefinger Dr. Fell was making a pattern in the dust of the table, like a child drawing, with the utmost absorption. He muttered:
"It can't be an amateur. The thing's too perfect. It can't be. But it's got to be, unless they tell me differently. And if he isn't, it must be a high stake."
Rampole somewhat irritably asked what he was talking about.
"I was talking," the doctor replied, "about a visit to London."
With an effort he hoisted himself to his feet on the two canes; he stood fiery and lowering, blinking about the room behind his glasses. Then he shook one stick at the walls like a schoolmaster.
"Your secret's out," he rumbled. "You can't scare anybody now."
"There's still a murderer," Rampole said.
"Yes. And, Miss Starberth, it's your father who has kept him here. Your father left that note in the vault, as I explained to you the other day. The murderer thinks he's safe. He has waited nearly three years to get that condemning paper back. Well, he isn't safe."
"You know who it is?"
"Come along," said the doctor, brusquely. "We've got to get home. I need a cup of tea or a bottle of beer, preferably the latter. And my wife will be returning from Mrs. Payne's before long… "
"Look here, sir," Rampole persisted; "do you know who the murderer is?"
Dr. Fell pondered.
"It's still raining hard," he responded, at length, with the air of one meditating a move at chess. "Do you see how much water has accumulated under that window?"
"Yes, of course, but―"
"And do you see," he indicated the closed door to the balcony, "that none has got in through there?" "Naturally."
"But if that door were open there would be much more water there than under the window, wouldn't there?"
If the doctor were doing all this merely for the purpose of mystification, Rampole could not tell it. The lexicographer was looking through his glasses in a rather cross-eyed fashion, and pinching at his moustache. Rampole grimly resolved to hang on to the coat-tails of the comet.
"Undoubtedly, sir," he agreed.
"Then," said the other, triumphantly, "why didn't we see his light?"
"O God!" said Rampole, with a faint groan.
"It's like a conjuring trick. Do you know," enquired Dr. Fell, pointing with one cane, "what Tennyson said of Browning's 'Sordello'?"
"No, sir."
"He said that the only things you could understand in the poem were the first line and the last-and that both of 'em were lies. Well, that's the key to this business. Come along, children, and have some tea."
There might still have been terror in the house of whips and hangings. But Rampole did not feel it when he led the way down again with his light.
Back in the lamplit warmth of. Dr. Fell's house, they found Sir Benjamin Arnold waiting for them in the study.