The Ashiel mystery

M >> Mrs. Charles Bryce >> The Ashiel mystery

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"The Green Way," Gimblet repeated mechanically. For a moment his brain
revolved with wild imaginings.

"Yes," repeated Lady Ruth. "Sometimes they call it 'The Way,' for short.
It is a favourite place for picnics from Crianan. My cousin used to allow
them to come here, and the place is generally made hideous with
egg-shells and paper and old bottles. One of the gardeners comes and
tidies things up once a week in the summer. People are so absolutely
without consciences."

"Is there a bull here?" cried Gimblet. He was quivering with excitement.

"Goodness gracious, I hope not!" said Lady Ruth. "Do you see any cattle?
I can't bear those long-horned Highlanders!"

"No," said Gimblet. "I thought perhaps--But what is the statue? The
design, surely, is rather a strange one for the place."

"Most extraordinary," assented Lady Ruth. "He got it in Italy and had it
sent the whole way by sea. It took all the king's horses and all the
king's men to get it up here, I can tell you. And, as I say, nothing
less apropos can one possibly imagine. That poor thin female with such
very scanty clothing is hardly a cheerful object on a Scotch winter's
day, and as for those little naked imps they would make anyone shiver,
even in August."

They had drawn near the sculptured group. It consisted of the slightly
draped figure of a girl, bending over an open box, or casket, from which
a crowd of small creatures, apparently, as Lady Ruth had said, imps or
fairies, were scrambling and leaping forth.

Gimblet gazed at it intently, as if he had never seen a statue
before. In a moment his face cleared and he turned to Lady Ruth with
burning eyes.

"It is Pandora," he cried. "Curiosity! Pandora and her box. Is it
not Pandora?"

Lady Ruth stared at him amazed.

"I believe it is," she said, "that or something of the sort. I'm not very
well up in mythology."

"Of course it is," cried Gimblet. "Face curiosity! And here's the bull,
or I'll eat my microscope," he added, advancing to the side of the group
and laying a hand upon the pedestal.

Lady Ruth followed his gaze with some concern. She was beginning to doubt
his sanity. But there, sure enough, beneath his pointing finger, she
perceived a row of carved heads: the heads of bulls, garlanded in the
Roman manner, and forming a kind of cornice round the top of the great
rectangular stone stand.

Gimblet glanced to right and left, up the glen and down it. There was no
one to be seen. The sun had fallen by this time beneath the rim of the
hills; a greyness of twilight was spread over the whole scene, and under
the trees the dusk of night was already silently ousting the day. He
turned once more to Lady Ruth.

"Lady Ruth," he said, "can you keep a secret?"

"My husband trusted me," she replied. "He was judicious as well as
judicial."

"I am sure I may follow his example," Gimblet said, after looking at her
fixedly for a moment. "So I will tell you that I believe I am on the
point of discovering Lord Ashiel's missing will--and not that alone.
Somewhere, concealed probably within a few feet of where we are standing,
we may hope to find other and far more important documents, involving,
perhaps, not only the welfare of one or two individuals but that of
kings and nations. Apart from that, and to speak of what most immediately
concerns us at present, I am convinced that within this stone will be
found the true clue to the author of the murder."

"You don't say so," gasped Lady Ruth, her round eyes rounder than ever.

"I found some directions in the handwriting of the murdered man," went on
Gimblet, "which I could not understand at first. But their meaning is
plain enough now. 'Take the bull by the horn,' he says. Well, here are
the bulls, and I shall soon know which is the horn."

He walked round to the front of the statue, so that he faced the stooping
figure of Pandora, and laid his hand upon one of the curved and
projecting horns of the left-hand bull. Nothing happened, and he tried
the next There were seven heads in all along the face of the great block,
and he tested six of them without perceiving anything unusual. Was it
possible that he was mistaken, and that, after all, the words of the
message did not refer to the statue?

When he grasped the first horn of the last head, the hand that did so was
shaking with excitement and suspense. It seemed, like the rest, to
possess no attribute other than mere decoration. And yet, and yet--surely
he had missed some vital point. He would go over them again. There
remained, however, the last horn, and as he took hold of it with a
premonitory dread of disappointment, he felt that it was loose in its
socket, and that he could by an effort turn it completely over. With a
triumphant cry he twisted it round, and at the same moment Lady Ruth
started back with an exclamation of alarm.

She was standing where he had left her, and was nearly knocked down by
the great slab of stone which, as Gimblet turned the horn of the bull,
swung sharply out from the end of the pediment, till it hung like a door
invitingly open and disclosing a hollow chamber within the stone.

Within the opening, on the floor at the far end, stood a large tin
despatch-box.

The door was a good eighteen inches wide; plenty of room for Gimblet to
climb in, swollen with exultation though he might be. In less than three
seconds he had scrambled through the aperture and was stooping over the
box. It seemed to be locked, but a key lay on the top of the lid. He lost
no time in inserting it, and in a moment threw open the case and saw that
it was full of papers.

Suddenly there was another cry from Lady Ruth as, for no apparent cause
and without the slightest warning, the stone door slammed itself back
into position, and he was left a prisoner in the total darkness of the
vault. He groped his way to the doorway and pushed against it with all
his strength. He might as well have tried to move the side of a mountain.
But, after an interval long enough for him to have time to become
seriously uneasy, the door flew open again, and the agitated countenance
of Lady Ruth welcomed him to the outside world.

"Do get out quick," she cried. "If it does it again while you're half in
and half out, you'll be cracked in two as neatly as a walnut."

Gimblet hurried out, clutching the precious box. No sooner was he safely
standing on the turf than the door shut again with a violence that gave
Pandora the appearance of shaking with convulsions of silent merriment.

"I wasn't sure how it opened," said Lady Ruth, "but I tried all the horns
and got it right at last. How lucky I was with you!"

"Yes, indeed," said Gimblet. "I am very thankful you were."

They twisted the horn again, and stood together to watch the recurring
phenomenon of the closing door.

"It must be worked by clockwork," the detective said, and taking out his
watch he timed the interval that elapsed between the opening and
shutting. "It stays open for thirty seconds," he remarked after two or
three experiments. "No doubt the mechanism is concealed in the thickness
of the stone. At all events it seems to be in good working order."

Squatting on the grass, he opened the tin box, and examined the papers
with which it was filled. A glance showed him that they were what he
expected, and he replaced the box where he had found it, while Lady Ruth
manipulated the horn of the bull.

"I have no right to the papers," he explained to her, as they walked
homeward in the gathering dusk. "It would be more satisfactory if a
magistrate were present at the official opening of the statue, and I will
see what can be done about that to-morrow. In the meantime, and
considering that we have been interfering with other people's property, I
shall be much obliged if you will keep our discovery secret."

And talking in low, earnest tones, he explained to her more fully all
that was likely to be implied by the papers they had unearthed.

CHAPTER XVI

With her white paint and her scarlet smokestack, the _Inverashiel_--one
of the two small steamers that during the summer months plied up and
down the loch, and incidentally carried on communication between
Inverashiel and Crianan--was a picturesque addition to the landscape,
as she approached the wooden landing-stage that stood half a mile below
the promontory on which the castle was built. It was the morning of
Friday, the day following the funeral, and clouds were settling slowly
down on to the tops and shoulders of the hills in spite of the
brilliant sunset of the previous evening. The loch lay dark and still,
its surface wore an oily, treacherous look; every detail of the
_Inverashiel's_ tub-like shape was reflected and beautifully distorted
in the water, which broke in long low waves from her bows as she
swerved round to come alongside the pier.

As the few passengers who were waiting for her crossed the short gangway,
a shower burst over the loch and in a few minutes had driven every one
into the little cabin, except the two or three men who constituted the
officers and crew of the steamer. One of these was in the act of
slackening the rope by which the boat had been warped alongside, when a
running, gesticulating figure appeared in the distance, shouting to them
to wait for him.

Waited for accordingly he was; and in a few minutes Gimblet, rather out
of breath after his run, hurried on board, and with a word of apology and
thanks to the obliging skipper turned, like the other passengers, towards
the shelter of the cabin.

With his hand on the knob of the door he hesitated. Through the glass top
he had just caught sight of a figure that seemed familiar. He had seen
that tweed before; the short girl with her back to him was wearing the
dress in which he had seen her on the Wednesday night, searching among
Lord Ashiel's papers in the library at the castle. It was Julia Romaninov
beyond a doubt, and Gimblet drew back quickly and took up his position
behind the funnels on the after-deck. In spite of the rain he remained
there until the boat reached Crianan, leaning against the rail with his
collar turned up and his soft felt hat pulled down over his ears, so that
little of him was visible except the tip of his nose.

His mind, always active, was busier than usual as he watched the
ripples roll away in endless succession from the sides of the
_Inverashiel_--which looked so strangely less white on closer
inspection--or followed the smooth soaring movements of the gulls that
swooped and circled around her, as she puffed and panted on her way
across the black, taciturn waters.

As they drew near to Crianan he concealed himself still more carefully
behind a pile of crates, and not till Miss Romaninov had left the steamer
did he emerge from his hiding-place and step warily off the boat.

The young lady was still in sight, making her way up the steep pitch of
the main street, and the detective followed her discreetly, loitering
before shop windows, as if fascinated by the display of Scottish
homespuns, or samples of Royal Stewart tartan, and taking an
extraordinary interest in fishing-tackle and trout-flies.

But, though the girl looked back more than once, the little man in the
ulster who was so intent on picking his way between the puddles did
not apparently provide her with any food for suspicion; and she made
no attempt to see who was so carefully sheltered beneath the umbrella
he carried.

At last they left: the cobble-stones of the little town and emerged upon
the high road, which here ran across the open moorland.

It was difficult now to continue the pursuit unobserved: and Gimblet
became absorbed in the contemplation of an enormous cairngorm, which was
masquerading as an article of personal adornment in the window of the
last outlying shop.

From this position--not without its embarrassments, since a couple of
barefooted children came instantly to the door, where they stood and
stared at him unblinkingly--he saw the Russian advancing at a rapid pace
across the moor; and, look where he would, could perceive no means of
keeping up with her unobserved upon the bare side of the hill.

Just as he decided that the distance separating them had increased to an
extent which warranted his continuing the chase, he joyfully saw her
slacken her pace, and at the same moment a man, who must have been
sitting behind a boulder beside the road, rose to his feet out of the
heather, and came forward to meet her. For ten long minutes they stood
talking, driving poor Gimblet to the desperate expedient of entering the
shop and demanding a closer acquaintance with the cairngorm. It is
humiliating to relate that he recoiled before it when it was placed in
his hand, and nearly fled again into the road. However, he pulled himself
together and held the proud proprietress, a gaunt, grey-haired woman with
knitting-needles ever clicking in her dexterous hands, in conversation
upon the theme of its unique beauties until the subject was exhausted to
the point of collapse.

Every other minute he must stroll to the door and take a look up and down
the road. A friend, he explained, had promised to meet him in that place;
and though the shopwoman plainly doubted his veracity, and kept a sharp
eye that he did not take to his heels with the cairngorm, she did not go
so far as to suggest his removing himself from the zone of temptation.

At last, when for the twentieth time he put his nose round the doorpost,
he saw that the pair had separated, and were walking in opposite
directions, the girl continuing on her way, while the man returned to the
town. He was, indeed, not a hundred yards off.

Gimblet plunged once more into the shop, and fastened upon some pencils
with a zeal not very convincing after his disappointing vacillation over
the brooch. The gaunt woman cheered up, however, when he bought the first
seventeen she offered him, and, the stock being exhausted, finished by
purchasing a piece of india-rubber, a stylographic pen, and a penny paper
of pins, which she pressed upon him as particularly suited to his needs
and charged him fourpence for.

By the time he issued forth into the open air, his pockets full of
packages, the stranger had passed the shop and was turning the corner of
the next house. To him, now, Gimblet devoted his powers of shadowing.

There was no great difficulty about it. The man walked straight before
him, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and as he strode along
the wet roads Gimblet noted with satisfaction the long, narrow, pointed
footprints that were deeply impressed in the muddy places. He had no
doubt they were the same as those he had noticed on the beach on the day
of his arrival at Inverashiel.

The stranger turned into the Crianan Hotel, which stands on the lake
front, fifty yards from the landing-place of the loch steamers. Gimblet
passed the door without pausing and went down to the loch, where he
mingled with the boatmen and loafers who congregated by the waterside.

He kept, however, a strict eye on the door of the hotel, and after a
quarter of an hour saw the object of his attentions emerge with
fishing-rod and basket, and cross the road directly towards him. Gimblet
had not been able to see his face before, but now he had a good look as
he passed close beside him.

He was a tall, fair man, evidently a foreigner, but with nothing very
striking about his appearance. A pointed yellow beard hid the lower part
of his face, and, for the rest, his nose was short, his eyes blue and
close together, and his forehead high and narrow. He looked closely at
Gimblet as he went by, and for a moment the eyes of the two men met, both
equally inscrutable and unflinching; then the stranger glanced aside and
strode on to where a small boat lay moored. The detective turned his back
while the fair man got in and pushed off into the loch.

"Gentleman going fishing?" he remarked to a man who lounged hard by upon
the causeway.

"He's axtra fond o' the feeshin'," was the reply, "for a' that he's a
foreign shentleman."

Waiting till the boat had become a distant speck on the face of the
waters, Gimblet made his way into the inn and entered into conversation
with the landlord, on the pretext of engaging rooms for a friend. The
landlord was sorry, but the house was full.

"If ye wanted them in a fortnicht's time," he said, "ye could hae the
hale hotel; but tae the end o' the holidays we're foll up. Folks tak'
their rooms a month in advance; they come here for the fishin' on the
loch, and because my hoose is the maist comfortable in the Hielands."

"Indeed, I can well believe that," Gimblet assured him. "I suppose you
get a lot of tourists passing through, though, Americans, for instance?"

"We hardly ever hae a room tae tak' them in. No, I seldom hae an American
bidin' here; they maistly gang doon the loch," said the innkeeper.

"I thought," said Gimblet, "that was a foreign-looking man whom I saw a
little while ago, coming out of the hotel."

"We hae ae gintleman bidin' here wha belongs tae foreign pairts," the
landlord admitted. "A Polish gintleman, he is, Count Pretovsky, a vary
nice gintleman. I couldna just cae him a tourist. He's vary keen on the
fishin' and was up here for it last year as well. He has his ain boat and
is aye on the water trailin' aefter the salmon."

"A great many sporting foreigners come to our island nowadays," Gimblet
remarked. "Does he get many fish?"

"Oh, it's a grand place for salmon," said the inn-keeper with obvious
pride. "And there's troots tac. And pike, mair's the peety," he added.

"Dear me," said Gimblet, "just what my friend wants. I'm sorry you
can't take him in. I must tell him to write in good time next year if
he wants a room."

As he parted from the landlord upon the doorstep of the Crianan Hotel,
the _Rob Roy_--the second of the two loch steamers--was edging away from
the pier, under a cloud of black smoke from her funnel The rain had
stopped; the passengers were scattered on the deck, and in the bows of
the vessel the detective caught sight of Julia Romaninov's tweed-clad
form. She was leaning against the rail, and gazing at a distant part of
the loch where a black speck, which might represent a rowing boat, could
faintly be discerned. She had come back, then, from her moorland walk. It
was as Gimblet had expected; and, though he chafed at the delay, he
regretted less than he would have otherwise that he could not catch the
_Rob Roy_.

The _Inverashiel_ would be due on her homeward trip in a couple of hours'
time, and meanwhile he had other business that must be attended to.

He went first to the post office, where he registered and posted to
Scotland Yard a packet he had brought with him. Then, after asking
his way of the sociable landlord of the hotel, he proceeded to the
police station, a single-storied stone building standing at the end
of a side street.

Here he made himself known to the inspector, and imparted information
which made that personage open his eyes considerably wider than was
his custom.

"If you will bring one of your men, and come with me yourself," said
Gimblet, at the conclusion of the interview, "I think I shall be able to
convince you that a mistake has been made. In the meantime there will be
no harm done by a watch being kept on the foreign gentleman who is at
this moment trolling for salmon on the loch."

The inspector agreed; and when the _Inverashiel_ started, an hour later,
on her voyage down the loch, she carried the two policemen on her deck,
as well as the most notorious detective she was ever likely to have the
privilege of conveying.

It was nearly three o'clock when they landed on the Inverashiel pier.

The weather, which for the last few hours had looked like clearing, had
now turned definitely to rain; clouds had descended on the hills, and the
trees in the valleys stooped and dripped in the saturated, mist-laden
air. Gimblet conducted the men to the cottage, where Lady Ruth anxiously
awaited them.

"If you don't mind their staying here," he suggested to her, "while I go
up to the castle and consult Lord Ashiel about a magistrate, it will be
most convenient, on account of the distance."

"By all means," said Lady Ruth. "I feel safer with them. I expect you
will find Miss Byrne up there. She has not come in to lunch, and I think
she probably met Mark and went to lunch at the castle. She ought to know
better than to go to lunch alone with a young man, and I am just
wondering if she has changed her mind and accepted him after all. Girls
are kittle cattle, but I've got quite fond of that one, and I hope she's
not forgotten poor David so soon. I really am feeling anxious about her."

"I daresay she has only walked farther than she intended," said Gimblet,
"or perhaps she came to a burn or some place she couldn't get over, and
has had to go round a mile or two. Depend on it, that's what's happened.
But I promise you that if she is at the castle I will bring her back when
I return."

CHAPTER XVII

Behind the shrubberies, which lay at the back of the holly hedge that
surrounded the little enclosed garden outside the library, beyond the.
end of the battlements, and reached by a disused footpath, a great tree
stood upon the edge of the steep hillside and thrust its sweeping
branches over the void.

Its trunk was grey and moss-grown; moss carpeted the ground between its
protruding roots, but the bracken and heather held back, and left a
half-circle beneath it, untenanted by their kind. It would seem that all
vegetation fears to venture beneath the shade of the beech; and for the
most part it stands solitary, shunned by other growing things except
moss, which creeps undaunted where its more vigorous brothers lack the
courage to establish themselves.

Here came Juliet that morning.

A week ago, David Southern had shown her the path to the tree. It had
been a favourite haunt of his when he was a boy, he told her. It was a
private chamber to which he resorted on the rare occasions when he was
disposed to solitude; when something had gone wrong with his world he had
been used to retire there with his dog, or, more seldom, a book. There he
had been accustomed to lie, his back supported by the tree, and hold
forth to the dog upon the troubles and difficulties of life and the
general crookedness of things; or, if a book were his companion, he
would gaze out, between the pages, at distant Crianan clinging faintly to
the knees of Ben Ghusy, and watch the swift change of passing cloud and
hanging curtain of mist upon the faces of the hills and loch.

It had been a place all his own; secret from every one, even from Mark,
his companion during all those holidays that he had spent at Inverashiel.
Somehow, David told Juliet--and it was a confidence he had seldom before
imparted to anyone--he had never quite managed to hit it off with Mark.
He couldn't say why, exactly. No doubt it was his own fault; but there
was no accounting for one's likes and dislikes.

And with quick regret at having betrayed his carefully suppressed
feelings in regard to his cousin, David had laughed apologetically, and
spoken of other things.

Here, then, just as the steamer _Rob Roy_ was drawing close to the wooden
landing-stage at the edge of the loch, with Julia Romaninov still
standing in the bows; here, because she had once been to this place with
him, because without her he had so often sat upon these mossy roots, came
Juliet to dream of her love.

Like him, she seated herself against the tree trunk at the giddy brink of
the precipitous rock; like him, her eyes rested on the smooth waters
below her, or on the far-away misty distance where Crianan slumbered;
but, unlike him, her eyes, as they looked, were filled with tears. Where
was he now? Oh, David, poor unjustly treated David! In what narrow cell,
lighted only by a high, iron-barred window--for so the scene shaped
itself in her mind--with uncovered floor of stone, bare walls and a bench
to lie on, was the man she loved wearing away his days under the burden
of so frightful an accusation?

For the thousandth time Juliet's blood boiled within her at the
thought, and she grew hot with anger and indignant scorn. That anyone
should have dared to suspect him! Why were such fools, such wicked,
evil-working imbeciles as the police allowed to exist for one moment
upon the face of the globe? But no doubt they had some hidden motive in
arresting him, for it was quite incredible that they really imagined he
had committed this appalling crime. She could not understand their
motive, to be sure, but without doubt there must have been some reason
which was not clear to her.

Oh, David, David! Was he thinking of her, as she was thinking of him? Did
he know, by instinct, that she would be doing all that could be done to
bring about his release? But was she? Again her mind was filled with the
disquieting question, was there nothing that might be done, that she was
leaving undone? Had she forgotten something, neglected something? She was
sure Gimblet did not believe David to be guilty, but was he certain of
being able to prove his innocence? He did not seem to have discovered
much at present.

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