It was the worst thing yet. When he had come through it from without it had been in blind escape from imminent seizure; and, although bruised and breathless, his fund of nervous energy had been sufficient to honour the draft. Now he was stiff all over; danger lay on either side of the cleft; and danger lay, too, in it. Surely, surely, it was now narrower by far! He squeezed and strained himself to a dead stop, crushed in a brutal vice of stone, with nothing but his sense of touch to help him, with even that sense hopelessly crippled as his arms, his wrists, his very fingers seemed no longer to have an inch’s play. Terror rose and lipped the threshold of his strained possession of himself. Panic here and he was done for. All that rescuers would find here – pinned in the rock – would be the wreck of a small boy, irretrievably insane. Or so it seemed to Humphrey, who was prone, as we know, to dramatic views. He gave a last shove – it would certainly mean one thing or the other – and found himself outside. He found himself, too, seeing something: the ghost of a glint of water. And this meant that he must be reeling crazily on the narrow ledge’s verge, the sea flowing between its fatally smooth walls below. He took a step backwards and sat down.
At least the bearded man and his associates had not simply been lurking there, ready to pounce. And, if they were still lurking at all, would it not be here rather than in the open air beyond the cavern – a place which, however lonely, was yet within possible observation from the cliff, and from the sea, and by possible wanderers on the shore? Humphrey, taking fresh heart from this, got to his feet again and groped his way painfully forward.
It was incredible that along this ledge, that through this utter darkness, he had actually run headlong less, as it must be, than a couple of hours ago. Now, he could achieve nothing that could be called a walk, a crawl; he edged his way forward, fumbling and shuffling, as his very grandmother, similarly placed, might have done. And his heart was in his mouth throughout every instant of his progress. It was almost as if he were enjoying the luxury of manageable, of assessable fear.
And then he saw the light. Incredibly, alarmingly almost, like the first appearing sliver of the sun’s orb after the long arctic night, it filtered in from distance and reached him; another moment only, and it distinguishably lit the remaining path before him. At this he paused, irresolution taking him like a strong hand. Would it not be best to wait at this spot – here, with the nursery nightlight comfortably glimmering in its corner? Then, should his enemies appear, he could retreat to the fastness from which he had just issued. But he had no sooner made this proposition to himself than he knew it to be nonsense; knew, that was to say, that he would never enter that little cave again. It had been the scene of his greatest triumph, of his most vulgar exultation. And it had been the scene of his life’s most staggering scare. That, decidedly, was enough. Humphrey walked rapidly forward and out of the cavern.
The sea had been silver and now it was blue, a deep, deep blue; it had stirred into life, moreover, and there were little ridges of dazzling foam, whiter than any white thing had ever been before. The sky, too, was blue and brilliant; it was dressed with incredible clouds; gulls in enormous freedom cut it with their passionate geometry. Humphrey ran forward, let himself be received again into the abundant world, tumbled himself out upon its bosom with the tears streaming down his cheeks. Straight before him was the gleaming, empty beach. Across it – the only sign of change he could discern – a double row of footprints led to and from the cavern, traversing the lovely sand that poor Ivor had deemed so treacherous. And where they had gone Humphrey could go. He took them as a line and ran – a limping run with a stab of pain in every stride. He would have shouted – why ever should he not? – had he not preferred to keep all his breath for joyous speed. The footprints – they were as small, almost, as a child’s – ended in a little eddy or sortie of others in a familiar spot. It was the place where he had himself made that brief dash across the sand before Ivor had called out to him to halt. And now before him there was only the path that slanted up the cliff. When he had climbed that the strange, the blessed populousness of rural Ireland would lie before him: tiny fields dotted with the bright homespuns of the labouring folk; dykes and hedgerows along which were strewn the same bright colours of the drying wool; white cottages with their open eyes and pricked ears; donkeys, sheep, goats; the absurd and suspect poultry of Killyboffin Hall.
He climbed, and that really hurt his knee badly. He braced himself against the pain by thinking, not very laudably, of the deep weal that must now lie across the bearded man’s face. Perhaps that would help the police to nobble him. And perhaps the man whom he had kicked – Humphrey, wallowing in atrocious satisfactions, reached the top of the cliff. Everything was as he had imagined it, with one addition. At the end of the commanding headland to which the cliff here rose there stood the solitary figure of his friend, Miss Margaret Liberty. He took to his heels and ran to her as if she offered all the security of the Brigade of Guards. Then, becoming aware that this was a childish performance, he slowed down to an exaggerated saunter. ‘Hullo,’ he said – and his tone was extravagantly casual. ‘It’s a lovely morning, isn’t it?’ He paused, reading in her faint amusement an indication that this had been a little overdone. He gave a sudden incongruous sob. ‘They’ve killed my cousin.’
But behind her moment’s relaxation Miss Liberty had been grave. And at this, indeed, her gravity scarcely increased; it merely became shot with surprise, with the rapid recasting of some picture with which she was preoccupied. ‘In the cave?’ she asked.
Humphrey looked at her with answering surprise. ‘You know about the cave?’
‘I have been watching you come across the sands from it. Why didn’t you answer me, Humphrey? Where were you hiding?’
The boy was now open-mouthed. ‘You!’
Miss Liberty smiled. But at the same time her eye was attentively studying the boy’s battered condition. ‘I took a walk quite early and noticed your cousin and yourself. Later I noticed your footprints where you had stepped for a moment on the sands. I followed the shore and came to the cave. And when I had gone a little way in I heard something that persuaded me it might be wise to do a little clearing of the air.’
‘Clearing of the air?’
By way of answer, Miss Liberty took a small object from her bag and raised it to her mouth. And faintly, as for their private edification only, Humphrey heard the note of a police-whistle. ‘It is’, Miss Liberty said modestly, ‘one of the prescriptive devices. We have often come across it, my dear Humphrey, in our common reading. And it certainly had an effect. But when the air had cleared, and I went further in to look for you, I got no reply. What had happened?’
‘I’m afraid I had – well, gone to sleep. In a little cave in which they were besieging me.’ Humphrey paused. ‘Please, may I ask a question now?’
‘Certainly, my dear boy. This is scarcely a cosy spot for a little chat. But it has advantages. We are in full view of a good many of the people working in those nearer fields. And if I stand so, and you face me – yes, just so – then you will be keeping an eye open this way, and I that. I think you scarcely need to be told by now that keeping an eye open in this part of the country is an excellent thing.’
‘Indeed I don’t!’ Humphrey’s tone was grim. ‘But listen, please. I think it must have been you who rescued me on the Heysham train. And it was you who talked – well, so as to put guts in me. And it was certainly you – I see it now – who fixed it so that poor Mr Thewless found himself in the place meant for me in that ambulance. And then you turn up in a most frightful crisis, blowing a police-whistle like mad. And a police-whistle, after all, isn’t a thing that old’ – Humphrey blushed and stammered – ‘that ladies commonly carry about with them. So – well, what I mean is, you’re not, are you, just an accident?’
‘No, Humphrey; I must admit to being distinctly intentional. You see, my brother, Sir Charles, has the duty of keeping an eye on certain most important matters; and he had grown a little uneas
y. So when he found difficulty in the way of taking official action, he just asked me to come along – to keep half an eye, you know, on your little holiday.’
‘Gosh!’ Humphrey, round-eyed and awed, stared at his friend. ‘It must be pretty hot when you get both eyes on the job.’
‘Well, that precisely describes the position now.’ Miss Liberty glanced at her watch. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much chance of your tutor’s turning up.’
Humphrey could only stare again. ‘Mr Thewless was to turn up here?’
‘I endeavoured to convey to him a hint that he should do so – at ten o’clock. It seemed time that he and I had a quiet little talk. But he must have failed to take my implication. And now I think you had better tell me just what has happened this morning.’
Humphrey did his best. Miss Liberty listened with the steady and unstrained attention of a judge. ‘And so’, she said when she had heard him out, ‘for a time you almost suspected your cousin himself?’
‘I’m afraid I did.’
‘But there can be no doubt of the fact? He was attacked – genuinely attacked, and overpowered, and thrown – dead, you think – into the sea?’
‘There’s no doubt of it. And the same chaps – at least the bearded man again and somebody else – raided us last night in Killyboffin Hall itself.’ And Humphrey recounted the history of this too.
Miss Liberty listened and nodded, frowning slightly. ‘The basis of success in this trade’, she said, ‘is to keep on suspecting everybody all the time. But, of course, there has to be a limit to it.’
‘This trade? Is what you tell me about your brother Sir Charles not quite all the story?’ Humphrey’s wonder still grew. ‘Have you been at it – often?’
‘Ah, my dear Humphrey – we all have secrets in our past. I expect you have some that are quite dark to me still. Had you better tell me some of them – in so far, that is, as they may relate to this exciting affair?’
And Humphrey told – or told much. Miss Liberty, as she listened to these further disclosures, had moments of undisguised perplexity. ‘And another requisite of success’, she said when he had finished, ‘is that one should recognize when the waters become too deep for one. But I think our next step is clear.’
‘The police?’
‘Decidedly the police. As a romantic adventure designed to exercise the faculties of Humphrey Paxton the affair definitely ended when your cousin went into the waters of that cave. And my brother’s apprehensiveness has certainly been amply vindicated. We shall walk together as far as the Hall, still with our eyes extremely wide open. You must go straight inside. But you need not tell your uncle about his son’s probable death if you feel unequal to it, my dear boy. For as soon as I have walked on to the village and made one or two telephone calls I shall come straight back, bringing the local police with me. And then we can have it all out while waiting for more substantial help to arrive.’
Humphrey nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That seems all right. And I don’t think I shall too much mind telling. It has to be faced, after all.’ He spoke with the sober confidence of one who had himself faced a good deal. They walked on for a time in silence, their senses alert to what was happening round about them. It was only when they had taken a cut through the ragged park, and were within hail of the front door of the house, that he spoke again. ‘I suppose I had better go in?’
And for an instant Miss Liberty hesitated, caught by something in the boy’s tone of which he was himself, perhaps, unconscious. Then she nodded. ‘Yes; I think you had better go. The sooner the facts are spread beyond just our two selves the better. I shall follow you in less than a quarter of an hour.’
Humphrey watched her go – a slight, quick, upright figure glancing alertly from side to side as she walked. He noticed how she kept her right hand in one roomy pocket, much as Ivor had done on their walk to the cave. But at the thought of Ivor Humphrey’s eyes misted with tears.
He turned and once more entered Killyboffin Hall.
25
Cyril Bolderwood had at first viewed his prostrate son with considerably more surprise than alarm. He was immensely struck, that is to say, with the abundant quality of the verisimilar in Ivor’s presentation of one who has, in the handy American phrase, been ‘beaten up’. Ivor, indeed, looked, to the point of extravagance, a man who had been down beaten; he was now crawling across the room to prop himself, with a low groan, against the back of a chair. ‘The boy!’ he gasped. ‘He’s been kidnapped.’
The scene was taking place hours before it was due; and, thanks to the efficiency of the London police, it was taking place in a context the wider reaches of which were vastly other than had been planned. Apart from this, Cyril Bolderwood had no fault to find with it. ‘Kidnapped?’ he exclaimed. ‘Good heavens – it is just what we feared!’
The tone of this – much that of Lady Macbeth’s ‘What, in our house?’ – produced in Ivor a sort of weak gasp of strangled fury. ‘By the people’, he said hoarsely, ‘who broke in last night. They got us in the cave before – before we had finished looking at it.’
And light dawned on Cyril Bolderwood. ‘You mean’, he shouted – a shade strangely to Mr Thewless’ ear – ‘that Humphrey has been… kidnapped?’
‘Of course I do. And snatched from us, it now seems, with the plan – the vital plan – actually in his pocket… Get a bandage out of the cupboard there, will you? It’s only a hack on the scalp, but it makes me bleed like a pig.’
Ivor’s father did as he was bidden, but with the air of a man not at all knowing how to proceed. ‘Thewless,’ he said suddenly, ‘would you, like a good fellow, go up to the bathroom beside your room, and fetch some lint and sticking-plaster from the cupboard? We must do what we can until the doctor comes.’
Mr Thewless, although his concern was much more for the vanished Humphrey than for the injured Ivor, hurried away. When he returned it was to find Ivor sitting up in a chair. The young man, however, looked by no means better; he had turned yet paler and was breathing fast; it was clear that such intelligence as father and son had exchanged in the interval was far from having any composing effect. And one might, moreover, have formed the impression that something like a brief altercation had been in the air.
‘Well,’ Ivor was saying, ‘these people have taken the boy, haven’t they – after more shots at it than one? And the police must go after them for all they’re worth?’
‘Certainly – certainly.’ Cyril Bolderwood, glancing rapidly at Mr Thewless now ministrant with the sticking-plaster, appeared to find difficulty in the easy expression of his feelings. ‘The police must go after them, of course. And I’ll telephone the moment we’ve fixed you up. The police, my dear boy, must investigate the whole affair from the start, you know; they must follow up whatever seems remotely connected with it. And they will do that. We can trust them, absolutely.’
Ivor received this for a moment in silence, and Mr Thewless took the opportunity to speak. ‘I must get in touch with Sir Bernard at once. I feel about this quite terribly, since I was given his confidence in the matter. I wish to heaven the other man had been able to come. He would probably have been far more competent than I in such a disaster.’
Cyril Bolderwood pounced upon this. ‘Another man?’
‘Another tutor, who was Sir Bernard’s choice in the first place. But he was prevented at short notice from taking up the post–’
‘Now, that’s just the sort of thing I mean.’ Cyril Bolderwood, who had finished bandaging his son’s head, drew back, fixed him with an urgent gaze, and proceeded in a sort of rapid gabble. ‘Just before these plots begin – as a prelude to them, you may say – this other tutor suddenly drops out. Well, the police must go after that even, for what it’s worth. Find him, you know, alive or dead – and find out all about him. They must do it. Exploring every avenue. Leaving no stone–’
‘Yes, of course.’ Ivor held up an impatient hand, and at the same time uttered what, since it could scarcely have be
en an imprecation, Mr Thewless took to be a muted exclamation of pain. ‘The police are bound to go right through the whole thing. And – well, you’d better get on to them now.’
‘Exactly.’ And Cyril Bolderwood – obscurely, it seemed to Mr Thewless, as if he had carried some urgent point – turned to the telephone. Then he stopped. ‘But, Thewless – I wonder if you’d make the call? I don’t like Ivor’s look; I don’t like it a bit. I think I had better get out the car and drive him straight to the doctor’s. Ivor, wouldn’t that be best?’
And at this Ivor did unequivocally produce a murmur of weakness and agony. ‘Yes, I think it would. I have lost a shocking amount of blood.’
‘Good. I’ll get it out straight away.’ Cyril Bolderwood made for the door, checked himself, seized from beneath his desk a bulging leather bag. ‘Brandy,’ he said. ‘And that sort of thing. Kept for an emergency. Get the police, Thewless, and insist on being put straight through to the county office. I’ll have the car round for Ivor in a couple of minutes.’
Again he made for the door. But it opened before he reached it.
‘Ivor!’
Humphrey Paxton, his face alive with amazement and joy, ran across the room and threw himself into his cousin’s arms.
To Mr Thewless the sheer relief of this apparition was so great that it was a moment before he could identify in himself the further pleasurable sensation arising from the affecting nature of the scene; arising, basically, from all that was generous in his pupil’s character. Twenty-four hours before Humphrey would not have known Ivor Bolderwood from Adam; but in the interim his cousin had fought for him against superior odds; and now Humphrey felt for the bandaged figure before him as Hamlet might have felt for a wounded Horatio. And at the sight Mr Thewless turned to Cyril Bolderwood, as if from an impulse to share with him something so decidedly worth sharing. What this movement brought into his field of vision was a state of affairs so entirely unexpected that an appreciable interval elapsed before it made, so to speak, any intelligible statement. His host was still standing by the door through which he had proposed to depart to fetch out the car. He had, however, laid down his bag – and what first dawned on Mr Thewless, oddly enough, was the extremely unlikely appearance that this receptacle presented as the repository of a bottle of brandy. And in place of the bag Cyril Bolderwood was now handling something else. It was some small contrivance of gleaming metal. Mr Thewless placed it provisionally as being – what seemed in itself unlikely enough – a species of surgical instrument. But now Cyril Bolderwood was advancing it, pointing it, in the oddest way – in what was surely the most threatening way… Thus laboriously did Mr Thewless analyse out the wholly unfamiliar experience of finding himself covered with a revolver.
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