The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont Part 28

'It _is_ midnight,' answered the woman; 'I came here because I heard my husband call me three times distinctly, "Sophia, Sophia, Sophia!"

just like that.'

'Nonsense, madam,' I said, with an asperity I seldom use where the fair s.e.x is concerned; but I began to see that this hysterical creature was going to be in the way during a research that called for coolness and calmness. I was sorry I had invited her to come.

'Nonsense, madam, you have been dreaming.'

'Indeed, Monsieur Valmont, I have not. I have not even been asleep, and I heard the words quite plainly. You must not think I am either mad or superst.i.tious.'

I thought she was both, and next moment she gave further evidence of it, running suddenly forward, and clutching me by the arm.

'Listen! listen!' she whispered. 'You hear nothing?'

'Nonsense!' I cried again, almost roughly for my patience was at an end, and I wished to go on with my inquiry undisturbed.

'Hist, hist!' she whispered; 'listen!' holding up her finger. We both stood like statues, and suddenly I felt that curious creeping of the scalp which shows that even the most civilised among us have not yet eliminated superst.i.tious fear. In the tense silence I heard someone slowly coming up the stair; I heard the halting step of a lame man. In the tension of the moment I had allowed the light to go out; now recovering myself, I pressed the spring, and waved its rays backward and forward down the stairway. The s.p.a.ce was entirely empty, yet the hesitating footsteps approached us, up and up. I could almost have sworn on which step they last struck. At this interesting moment Sophia Brooks uttered a piercing shriek and collapsed into my arms, sending the electric torch rattling down the steps, and leaving us in impenetrable darkness. Really, I profess myself to be a gallant man, but there are situations which have a tendency to cause annoyance. I carried the limp creature cautiously down the stairs, fearing the fate of the butler, and at last got her into the dining-room, where I lit a candle, which gave a light less brilliant, perhaps, but more steady than my torch. I dashed some water in her face, and brought her to her senses, then uncorking another bottle of wine, I bade her drink a gla.s.sful, which she did.

'What was it?' she whispered.

'Madam, I do not know. Very possibly the club-footed ghost of Rantremly.'

'Do you believe in ghosts, Monsieur Valmont?'

'Last night I did not, but at this hour I believe in only one thing, which is that it is time everyone was asleep.'

She rose to her feet at this, and with a tremulous little laugh apologised for her terror, but I a.s.sured her that for the moment there were two panic-stricken persons at the stair head. Taking the candle, and recovering my electric torch, which luckily was uninjured by its roll down the incline the butler had taken, I escorted the lady to the door of her room, and bade her good-night, or rather, good-morning.

The rising sun dissipated a slight veil of mist which hung over the park, and also dissolved, so far as I was concerned, the phantoms which my imagination had conjured up at midnight. It was about half-past ten when the chief constable arrived. I flatter myself I put some life into that unimaginative man before I was done with him.

'What made you think that the butler was mounting the stair when he fell?'

'He was going up with my lord's breakfast,' replied the chief.

'Then did it not occur to you that if such were the case, the silver pitcher would not have been empty, and, besides the broken dishes, there would have been the rolls, b.u.t.ter, toast, or what not, strewn about the floor?'

The chief constable opened his eyes.

'There was no one else for him to bring breakfast to,' he objected.

'That is where you are very much mistaken. Bring me the boots the butler wore.'

'He did not wear boots, sir. He wore a pair of cloth slippers.'

'Do you know where they are?'

'Yes; they are in the boot closet.'

'Very well, bring them out, examine their soles, and sticking in one of them you will find a short sliver of pointed oak.'

The constable, looking slightly more stupefied than ever, brought the slippers, and I heard him e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e: 'Well, I'm blowed!' as he approached me. He handed me the slippers soles upward, and there, as I have stated, was the fragment of oak, which I pulled out.

'Now, if you take this piece of oak to the top of the stair, you will see that it fits exactly a slight interstice at the edge of one of the planks. It is as well to keep one's eyes open, constable, when investigating a case like this.'

'Well, I'm blowed!' he said again, as we walked up the stair together.

I showed him that the sliver taken from the slipper fitted exactly the interstice I had indicated.

'Now,' said I to him, 'the butler was not going up the stairs, but was coming down. When he fell headlong he must have made a fearful clatter. Shuffling along with his burden, his slipper was impaled by this sliver, and the butler's hands being full, he could not save himself, but went head foremost down the stair. The startling point, however, is the fact that he was _not_ carrying my lord's breakfast to him, or taking it away from him, but that there is someone else in the castle for whom he was caterer. Who is that person?'

'I'm blessed if I know,' said the constable, 'but I think you are wrong there. He may not have been carrying up the breakfast, but he certainly was taking away the tray, as is shown by the empty dishes, which you have just a moment ago pointed out.'

'No, constable; when his lords.h.i.+p heard the crash, and sprang impulsively from his bed, he upset the little table on which had been placed his own tray; it shot over the oaken chest at the head of the bed, and if you look between it and the wall you will find tray, dishes, and the remnants of a breakfast.'

'Well, I'm blessed!' exclaimed the chief constable once again.

'The main point of all this,' I went on calmly, 'is not the disaster to the butler, nor even the shock to his lords.h.i.+p, but the fact that the tray the serving man carried brought food to a prisoner, who probably for six weeks has been without anything to eat.'

'Then,' said the constable, 'he is a dead man.'

'I find it easier,' said I, 'to believe in a living man than in a dead man's ghost. I think I heard his footsteps at midnight, and they seemed to me the footsteps of a person very nearly exhausted.

Therefore, constable, I have awaited your arrival with some impatience. The words his late lords.h.i.+p endeavoured to write on the paper were "The Secret". I am sure that the hieroglyphics with which he ended his effort stood for the letter "R", and if he finished his sentence, it would have stood: "The secret room". Now, constable, it is a matter of legend that a secret room exists in this castle. Do you know where it is?'

'No one knows where the secret room is, or the way to enter it, except the Lords of Rantremly.'

'Well, I can a.s.sure you that the Lord of Rantremly who lives in London knows nothing about it. I have been up and about since daylight, taking some rough measurements by stepping off distances. I surmise that the secret room is to the left of this stairway. Probably a whole suite of rooms exists, for there is certainly a stair coinciding with this one, and up that stair at midnight I heard a club-footed man ascend. Either that, or the ghost that has frightened you all, and, as I have said, I believe in the man.'

Here the official made the first sensible remark I had yet heard him utter:--

'If the walls are so thick that a prisoner's cry has not been heard, how could you hear his footsteps, which make much less noise?'

'That is very well put, constable, and when the same thing occurred to me earlier this morning, I began to study the architecture of this castle. In the first place, the entrance hall is double as wide at the big doors as it is near the stairway. If you stand with your back to the front door you will at once wonder why the builders made this curious and unnecessary right angle, narrowing the farther part of the hall to half its width. Then, as you gaze at the stair, and see that marvellous carved oak newel post standing like a monumental column, you guess, if you have any imagination, that the stairway, like the hall, was once double as wide as it is now. We are seeing only half of it, and doubtless we shall find a similar newel post within the hidden room. You must remember, constable, that these secret apartments are no small added chambers. Twice they have sheltered a king.'

The constable's head bent low at the mention of royalty. I saw that his insular prejudice against me and my methods was vanis.h.i.+ng, and that he had come to look upon me with greater respect than was shown at first.

'The walls need not be thick to be impenetrable to sound. Two courses of brick, and a s.p.a.ce between filled with deafening would do it. The secret apartment has been cut off from the rest of the house since the castle was built, and was not designed by the original architect. The part.i.tion was probably built in a hurry to fulfil a pressing need, and it was constructed straight up the middle of the stair, leaving the stout planks intact, each step pa.s.sing thus, as it were, through the wall. Now, when a man walks up the secret stairway, his footsteps reverberate until one would swear that some unseen person was treading the visible boards on the outside.'

'By Jove!' said the constable, in an awed tone of voice.

'Now, officer, I have here a pickaxe and a crowbar. I propose that we settle the question at once.'

But to this proposal the constable demurred.

'You surely would not break the wall without permission from his lords.h.i.+p in London?'

'Constable, I suspect there is no Lord Rantremly in London, and that we will find a very emaciated but genuine Lord Rantremly within ten feet of us. I need not tell you that if you are instrumental in his immediate rescue without the exercise of too much red tape, your interests will not suffer because you the more speedily brought food and drink to the lord paramount of your district.'

'Right you are,' cried the constable, with an enthusiasm for which I was not prepared. 'Where shall we begin?'

'Oh, anywhere; this wall is all false from the entrance hall to some point up here. Still, as the butler was carrying the meal upstairs I think we shall save time if we begin on the landing.'

I found the constable's brawn much superior to his brain. He worked like a sansculotte on a barricade. When we had torn down part of the old oak panelling, which it seemed such a pity to mutilate with axe and crowbar, we came upon a brick wall, that quickly gave way before the strength of the constable. Then we pulled out some substance like matting, and found a second brick wall, beyond which was a further sh.e.l.l of panelling. The hole we made revealed nothing but darkness inside, and although we shouted, there was no answer. At last, when we had hewn it large enough for a man to enter, I took with me an electric torch, and stepped inside, the constable following, with crowbar still in hand. I learned, as I had surmised, that we were in the upper hall of a staircase nearly as wide as the one on the outside. A flash of the light showed a door corresponding with the fireplace of the upper landing, and this door not being locked, we entered a large room, rather dimly lighted by strongly barred windows that gave into a blind courtyard, of which there had been no indication heretofore, either outside or inside the castle. Broken gla.s.s crunched under our feet, and I saw that the floor was strewn with wine bottles whose necks had been snapped off to save the pulling of the cork. On a mattress at the farther end of the room lay a man with gray hair, and s.h.a.ggy, unkempt iron-gray beard. He seemed either asleep or dead, but when I turned my electric light full on his face he proved to be still alive, for he rubbed his eyes languidly, and groaned, rather than spoke:--