“Still,” said Varney, “you aid and abet him. I suppose you help him to dig them up.”
Philip laughed scornfully. “Why, you are as bad as Dan, Varney. You are thinking in terms of bait. Do you imagine Dr. Thorndyke and the professor go a-worming with a bully-beef tin and a garden fork as you do when you are getting ready for a fishing jaunt?”
“Well, how was I to know?” retorted Varney. “I am not a naturalist. What do they do? Set traps for ’em with bits of cheese inside?”
“Of course they don’t,” laughed Margaret. “How absurd you are, Mr. Varney! They go out with a boat and a dredge, and very interesting it must be to bring up all those curious creatures from the bottom of the sea.”
She spoke rather absently, for her thoughts had gone back to Mr. Penfield’s letter. There was certainly something a little cryptic in its tone, which she had taken for mere professional pedantry, but which she now recalled with vague uneasiness. Could the old lawyer have stumbled on something discreditable and written this ambiguously worded letter as a warning? Her husband was not a communicative man, and she could not pretend to herself that she had an exalted opinion of his moral character. It was all very disquieting.
The housekeeper, who had been retained with the furnished house, brought in the coffee, and as Margaret poured it out she continued her reflections, watching Varney with unconscious curiosity as he rolled a cigarette. The ring-finger of his left hand had a stiff joint, the result of an old injury, and was permanently bent at a sharp angle. It gave his hand an appearance of awkwardness, but she noted that he rolled his cigarette as quickly and neatly as if all his fingers were sound. The stiff finger had become normal to him. And she also noted that Dr. Thorndyke appeared quite interested in the contrast between the appearance of awkwardness and the actual efficiency of the maimed finger.
From Varney her attention—or inattention—wandered to her guest. Absently she dwelt on his powerful, intellectual face, his bold, clean-cut features, his shapely mouth, firm almost to severity; and all the time she was thinking of Mr. Penfield’s letter.
“Have we all finished?” she asked at length; “and if so, where are we going to smoke our pipes and cigars?”
“I propose that we go into the garden,” said Philip. “It is a lovely evening, and we can look at the moonlight on the sea while we smoke.”
“Yes,” Margaret agreed, “it will be more pleasant out there. Don’t wait for me. I will join you in a few minutes, but I want first to have a few words with Mr. Rodney.”
Philip, who, like the others, understood that this was a consultation on the subject of Mr. Penfield’s letter, rose and playfully shepherded Varney out of the door which his brother held invitingly open. “Now then, Varney, out you go. No lagging behind and eavesdropping. The pronouncements of the oracle are not for the likes of you and me.”
Varney took his dismissal with a smile and followed Dr. Thorndyke out, though, as he looked at the barrister’s commanding figure and handsome face, he could not repress a twinge of jealousy. Why could not Maggie have consulted him? He was an old friend, and he knew more about old Penfield’s letter than Rodney did. But, of course, she had no idea of that.
As soon as they were alone, Margaret and Rodney resumed their seats, and the former opened the subject without preamble.
“What do you really think of Mr. Penfield’s letter?” she asked.
“Could you give me, in general terms, the substance of what he says?” Rodney answered cautiously.
“I had better show you the letter itself,” said Margaret.
She rose and left the room, returning almost immediately with an official-looking envelope, which she handed to Rodney. The letter, which he extracted from it and spread out on the table, was not remarkably legible; an elderly solicitor’s autograph letters seldom are. But barristers, like old-fashioned druggists, are usually expert decipherers, and Rodney read the letter without difficulty. It ran thus:
“George Yard,
“Lombard Street, E.C.
“2 June, 1911.
“Dear Mrs. Purcell,
“I have just received from your husband a letter with certain enclosures, which have caused me some surprise. The envelope is addressed to me in his handwriting, and the letter, which is unsigned, is also in his hand; but neither the letter nor the other contents could possibly have been intended for me, and it is manifest that they have been placed in the wrong envelope.
“The postmark shows that the letter was posted at Penzance at 8.30 P.M. on the 23rd instant. It was opened by me, and the contents, which have been seen by no one but me, have been deposited in my private safe, of which I alone have the key.
“Will you very kindly acquaint your husband with these facts and request him to call on me at his early convenience?
“I am,
“Dear Mrs. Purcell,
“Yours sincerely,
“Joseph Penfield.
“Mrs. Daniel Purcell,
Sennen,
“Cornwall.”
Rodney read the solicitor’s letter through twice, refolded it, replaced it in its envelope, and returned it to Margaret.
“Well, what do you think of it?” the latter asked.
Rodney reflected for some moments.
“It’s a very careful letter,” he replied at length.
“Yes, I know; and that is a very careful answer, but not very helpful. Now do drop the lawyer and tell me just what you think like a good friend.”
Rodney looked at her quickly with a faint smile and yet very earnestly. He found it strangely pleasant to be called a good friend by Margaret Purcell.
“I gather,” he said slowly, “from the tone of Mr. Penfield’s letter, that he found something in that envelope that your husband would not have wished him to see—something that he had reasons for wishing no one to see but the person for whom it was meant.”
“Do you mean something discreditable or compromising?”
“We mustn’t jump at conclusions. Mr. Penfield is very reticent, so, presumably, he has some reasons for reticence, otherwise he would have said plainly what the envelope contained. But why does he write to you? Doesn’t he know your husband’s address?”
“No, but he could have got it from Dan’s office. I have been wondering myself why he wrote to me.”
“Has your husband arrived at Oulton yet?”
“Heavens! Yes. It doesn’t take two days and a half to get to Norfolk.”
“Oh, then he wasn’t staying at Falmouth?”
Margaret stared at him. “Falmouth!” she exclaimed. “What do you mean?”
“I understood Varney to say that he was going to call at Falmouth.”
“No, certainly not. He was going straight to London and so on to Oulton the same night. I wonder what Mr. Varney can have meant.”
“We must find out presently. Have you heard from your husband since he left?”
“No. Oddly enough, he hasn’t written, which is unlike him. He generally sends me a line as soon as he arrives anywhere.”
“You had better send him a telegram in the morning to make sure of his whereabouts, and then let him have a copy of Mr. Penfield’s letter at once. And I think I wouldn’t refer to the subject before any of our friends if I were you.”
“No. I oughtn’t to have said what I did. But, of course, I didn’t dream that Mr. Penfield really meant anything. Shall we go out into the garden?”
Rodney opened the door for her, and they passed out to where their three companions sat in deck-chairs facing the sea. Two chairs had been placed for them, and, as they seated themselves, Varney remarked:
“I take it that the oracle has spoken, and I hope he was more explicit than oracles are usually.”
“He was explicit and discreet—especially discreet,” Margaret replied.
“Oh, they are always that,” said Varney; “discretion is the oracular speciality. The explicitness is exceptional.”
“I believe it is,” replied Margaret,
“and I am glad you set so much value on it because I am coming to you now for information. Mr. Rodney tells me that Dan said something to you about Falmouth. What was it?”
“He said he was going to call in there—at least, so I understood.”
“But he wasn’t, you know. He was going direct to London and straight on to Oulton the same night. You must have misunderstood him.”
“I may have done, but I don’t think I did. Still, he only mentioned the matter casually, and I wasn’t paying particular attention.”
Margaret made no rejoinder, and the party became somewhat silent. Philip, realizing Margaret’s uneasy preoccupation, engaged Dr. Thorndyke in an animated conversation respecting the natural history of the Cornish coast and the pleasures of dredging.
The other three became profoundly thoughtful. To each the solicitor’s letter had its special message, though to one only was that message clearly intelligible. Rodney was puzzled and deeply suspicious. To him the letter had read like that of a man washing his hands of a disagreeable responsibility. The curious reticence as to the nature of the enclosures and the reference to the private safe sounded ominous. He knew little of Purcell—he had been a friend of the Haygarths’—and had no great opinion of him. Purcell was a financier, and financiers sometimes did queer things. At any rate, Penfield’s excessive caution suggested something fishy—possibly something illicit. In fact, to speak colloquially, Rodney smelt a rat.
Margaret also was puzzled and suspicious, but, womanlike, she allowed her suspicions to take a more special form. She, too, smelt a rat, but it was a feminine rat. The lawyer’s silence as to the contents of that mysterious envelope seemed to admit of no other interpretation. It was so pointed. Of course he could not tell her, though he was an old friend and her trustee, so he had said nothing.
She reflected on the matter with lukewarm displeasure. Her relations with her husband were not such as to admit of jealousy in the ordinary sense; but still, she was married to him, and any affair on his part with another woman would be very disagreeable and humiliating to her. It might lead to a scandal, too, and from that her ingrained delicacy revolted.
Varney, meanwhile, sat with his head thrown back wrapped in thought of a more dreamy quality. He knew all about the letter, and his mind was occupying itself with speculation as to its effects. Rodney’s view of it he gauged pretty accurately, but what did she think of it? Was she anxious—worried at the prospect of some unpleasant disclosure? He hoped not. At any rate, it could not be helped. And she was free, if she only knew it.
He had smoked out his cigarette, and now, as he abstractedly filled his pipe, his eye insensibly sought the spot where the diamond and ruby flashed out alternately from the bosom of the night. A cloud had crept over the moon, and the transitory golden and crimson gleam shone out bright and clear amidst the encompassing darkness, white—red, white—red, diamond—ruby, a message in a secret code from the tall, unseen sentinel on that solitary, wave-washed rock, bidding him be of good cheer, reminding him again and again of the freedom that was his—and hers, made everlastingly secure by a friendly iron sinker.
The cloud turned silvery at the edge and the moon sailed out into the open. Margaret looked up at it thoughtfully.
“I wonder where Dan is tonight,” she said; and in the pause that followed a crimson spark from the dim horizon seemed to Varney to signal, “Here,” and instantly fade into discreet darkness.
“Perhaps,” suggested Philip, “he is having a moonlight sail on the Broad, or, more probably, taking a whisky-and-soda with Bradford in the inn parlour where the stuffed pike is. You remember that stuffed pike, Jack?”
His brother nodded. “Can I ever forget it, or the landlord’s interminable story of its capture? I wonder why people become so intolerably boresome about their fishing exploits. The angler is nearly as bad as the golfer.”
“Still,” said Varney, “he has more excuse. It is more of an achievement to catch a pike or a salmon than merely to whack a ball with a stick.”
“Isn’t that rather a crude description of the game?” asked Margaret. “It is to be hoped that Dr. Thorndyke is not an enthusiast.”
“I am not,” he assured her—“in fact, I was admiring Mr. Varney’s simplification. His definition of the game is worthy of Dr. Johnson. But I must tear myself away. My host is an early bird, and I expect you are, too. Good-night, Mrs. Purcell. It has been very delightful to meet you again. I am only sorry that I should have missed your husband.”
“So am I,” said Margaret, shaking his hand warmly, “but I think it most kind of you to have remembered me after all these years.”
As Dr. Thorndyke rose, the other three men stood up. “It is time for us to go, too,” said Rodney, “so we will see you to the end of the road, Thorndyke. Good-night, Mrs. Purcell.”
“Good-night, gentlemen all,” she replied. “Eight o’clock breakfast, remember.”
The four men went into the house to fetch their hats and took their departure, walking together as far as the cross-roads, where Thorndyke wished the other three “good-night” and left them to pursue their way to the village.
The lodging accommodation in this neighbourhood was not sumptuous, but our three friends were not soft or fastidious. Besides, they only slept at their “diggings,” taking their meals and making their home at the house which Purcell had hired, furnished, for the holiday. It was a somewhat unconventional arrangement, now that Purcell had gone, and spoke eloquently of his confidence in the discretion of his attractive wife.
The three men were not in the same lodgings. Varney was “putting up” at the “First and Last” inn in the adjoining village—or “church-town,” to give it its local title—of Sennen, while the Rodneys shared a room at the “Ship” down in Sennen Cove, more than a mile away. They proceeded together as far as Varney’s hostel, when, having wished him “good-night,” the two brothers strode away along, the moonlit road towards the Cove.
For a while neither spoke, though the thoughts of both were occupied by the same subject, the solicitor’s letter. Philip had fully taken in the situation, although he had made no remark on it, and the fact that his brother had been consulted quasi-professionally on the subject made him hesitate to refer to it. For in spite of his gay, almost frivolous, manner, Philip Rodney was a responsible medical practitioner, and really a man of sound judgment and discretion.
Presently his scruples yielded to the consideration that his brother was not likely to divulge any confidence, and he remarked:
“I hope Purcell hasn’t been doing anything shady. It sounded to me as if there was a touch of Pontius Pilate in the tone of Penfield’ s letter.”
“Yes, a very guarded tone, with a certain note of preparation for unpleasant possibilities. So it struck me. I do sincerely hope there isn’t anything in it.”
“So do I, by Jove! but I shouldn’t be so very astonished. Of course we don’t know anything against Purcell—at least, I don’t—but somehow he doesn’t strike me as a very scrupulous man. His outlook on life jars a bit; don’t you feel that some times?”
“The commercial standard isn’t quite the same as the professional, you know,” Jack Rodney answered evasively, “and financial circles are not exactly of the higher morality. But I know of nothing to Purcell’s discredit.”
“No, of course not. But he isn’t the same class as his wife; she’s a lot too good for a coarse, bucolic fellow like that. I wonder why the deuce she married him. I used to think she rather liked you.”
“A woman can’t marry every man she rather likes, you know, Phil, unless she happens to live in Ladak; and even there I believe there are limits. But to come back to Purcell, we may be worrying ourselves about nothing. Tomorrow we shall get into touch with him by telegraph, and then we may hear something from him.”
Here the consideration of Purcell and his affairs dropped so far as conversation went; but in the elder man’s mind certain memories had been revived by his brother’s remark and occupied i
t during the remainder of the walk. For he, too, had once thought that Maggie Haygarth rather liked him, and he now recalled the shock of disagreeable surprise with which he had heard of her marriage. But that was over and done with long ago, and the question now was, how was the Sandhopper, at present moored in Whitesand Bay, to be got from the Land’s End to her moorings above Westminster Bridge?—a problem that engaged the attention of the two brothers until they turned into their respective beds and the laggard, according to immemorial custom, blew out the light.
In spite of Mrs. Purcell’s admonition they were some minutes late on the following morning. Their two friends were already seated at the breakfast table, and it needed no extraordinary powers of observation to see that something had happened. Their hostess was pale and looked worried and some what frightened, and Varney was preternaturally grave. A telegram lay open on the table by Margaret’s place, and as Rodney advanced to shake hands, she held it out to him without a word. He took the paper and read the brief but ominous message that confirmed but too plainly his misgivings of the previous night.
“Where is Dan? Expected him here Tuesday night. Hope nothing wrong. —BRADFORD, Angler’s Hotel, Oulton.”
Rodney laid down the telegram and looked at Margaret. “This is a queer business,” said he. “Have you done anything?”
“No,” she replied. “What can we do?” Rodney took a slip of paper and a pencil from his pocket. “If you will write down the name of the partner or clerk who is attending at the office and address, and that of the caretaker of your flat, I will go and send off reply-paid telegrams to them asking for information as to your husband’s whereabouts, and I will also reply to Mr. Bradford. It is just possible that Purcell may have gone home after all.”
“It’s very unlikely,” said Margaret. “The flat is shut up, and he would surely have written. Still, we may as well make sure, if you will be so kind. But won’t you have your breakfast first?”
“We’d better waste no time,” he answered, and, pocketing the paper, strode away on his errand.
The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack Page 77