“I did promise,” she said, for she was one of those rare people who believe that promises should hold.
Possibly it was this remark that influenced Bobby. Or it may have been mere curiosity, a marked trait in his character, so that he could never hear of anything unusual without wanting to get to the bottom of it. Or it may have been even a kind of uneasy premonition that lonely girls in possession of a trade secret of possible cash value might just conceivably come to be in need of police protection. Anyhow, he said:
“We’ll go and have a look round if you like. To-morrow’s Sunday and I’m not on duty for a wonder.” He paused to regard this fact with faint surprise, for it was his deep conviction that he was on duty practically every Sunday. “It’s a goodish way, but there’s a drop of petrol to spare and if the weather keeps up we could take some lunch and make a sort of picnic of it.”
Olive thought this a very good idea. What with war work and threatening air raids and ordinary police routine, it was long since Bobby had had anything even remotely resembling a holiday. Do him good, she decided. Do them both good, for that matter.
“Even if she wants to keep the recipe to herself,” Olive went on, “I expect she would be willing to make some for the bazaar. Mrs Weston would love to have them for her stall and she could charge as much as she liked, because you can at a bazaar.”
“So you can and so you do,” agreed Bobby; and Olive looked at him severely, for she did not altogether approve of the tone in which this last remark had been uttered.
CHAPTER II
WOODLAND RAMBLE
NEXT MORNING ACCORDINGLY Bobby and Olive started off in their small car, with a basket of provisions as well stocked as the times permitted. As far as the village of Barsley Forest—in peace time a favourite place wherefrom to start for forest picnics—the road was familiar. At the village, for being an inspector of police has its advantages, Bobby parked his car at the village police station—which was the cottage occupied by the sergeant in charge, a man named Turner—and after spending a few moments admiring the garden and expressing his determination to make his own an equal success as soon as he could really get down to it, he explained that he and Olive meant to spend a quiet day in a woodland ramble and what did Sergeant Turner, as a local man, think the best and most picturesque route to follow? One route the sergeant recommended was by Barsley Abbey. The park was open to the public—it was crossed by an ancient right of way—and though picnicking was frowned upon, there were many pleasant spots farther on, beyond the park boundaries. There was also the ‘Rawdon Arms’ half way on the road to Tombes, and at the ‘Rawdon Arms,’ the beer, as Sergeant Turner could testify, was of superior quality. Barsley Abbey itself, as Bobby and most other people knew, was renowned for the fine collection of pictures housed there and occasionally thrown open to the public on payment of a small fee for the benefit of Wychshire hospitals. The total value of the pictures was said to be in the order of a vague number of hundreds of thousands of pounds. As, however, they all came under the entail settlement as heirlooms, they could not be disposed of, though it was generally understood that the present owner, Sir Alfred Rawdon, was trying to get the entail broken and permission to sell some or all. This was likely to be a long business, especially as the interests of minors had to be considered, but once the legal formalities were accomplished, the subsequent sale of the pictures and other objects of art was likely to be the sensation of the season. Already it was understood dealers were hinting they would be prepared to make better offers privately than any likely to be secured at public auction.
“Because,” it had been explained to Bobby, “if a dealer gives a thousand or so for a picture at public auction, he has to be fairly reasonable in the figure he quotes to a likely purchaser. Whereas if he gives even a few hundred more in private, he can quote any figure he likes and still swear black and blue he is selling at next door to a loss. Then again, many collectors prefer that the amount they have given for their possessions should remain a mystery. That allows them to hint at astronomical sums without the risk of the actual figures being discovered in a reference book.”
“There’s been a gent from London,” Turner was saying now, “asking a lot of questions about those Abbey pictures. He was talking about them in the ‘Rawdon Arms’ bar. What he said was there was two of ’em stolen fifty years back. Wanted to know if I knew anything about it when he heard me being called ‘sergeant’, but I told him that was before my time.”
“What was it he thought you might know?” Bobby asked.
“Seemed to think some of the folk about here might have them, innocent like. I told him he didn’t know the folk about here, if he thought that, but he stuck it out they might think the pictures had just been mislaid like or forgotten. Didn’t sound likely to me, not if they were worth all the money he said. I told him so. He had photos of two of them. Lord love a duck,” said the sergeant, amused at the memory, “you never saw the like. Nightmares. Fair nightmares. The only thing you saw was an arm as long as a leg and the rest like a jigsaw puzzle, only worse. He said a Greek gentleman did them,” and this was evidently regarded by Sergeant Turner as to some extent an explanation or even an excuse.
“El Greco, perhaps,” Bobby remarked, interested. “If they are genuine El Grecos they would be worth a bit of money all right, if they did turn up somewhere.”
“Not my money,” said Turner firmly. “Mr Baker—he’s the ‘Rawdon Arms’ landlord—he said he wouldn’t mind having ’em just to show at closing time. Said they would clear the bar in quick sticks. Said anyone seeing them would think it was most like a fit of the D.T.s coming on, and be only too glad to clear off home before it got worse.”
“Do you know,” interposed Olive quickly, “I remember reading something like that. It was in an article on Spanish art in one of the magazines, about two unidentified paintings, believed to be by El Greco, that were said to have vanished from the Barsley Abbey collection, only it wasn’t very certain they had ever been there. Why, they might be worth a small fortune.”
“Them things?” asked the sergeant incredulously, and Bobby tried to explain that appreciation of art varied. A painting like, for example, Millet’s ‘The Angelus’, might bring the artist only a comparatively small sum, and yet afterwards be sold for twenty or thirty thousand pounds. Quite possible, Bobby said, that the El Grecos, their worth unrecognized, their strange value not understood, had been hung in some little used room, taken down during some process of cleaning or re-decoration, and then simply forgotten, relegated to a lumber room, and finally lost sight of. Or a dependant of the great house might have taken a fancy to them and they might be hanging peacefully on the wall in some cottage or farmhouse. Or in the course of time they might have got damaged and been disposed of as rubbish.
The sergeant was obviously incredulous and inclined to suspect his superior of the unworthy action of pulling a subordinate’s leg. He admitted, however, that he had always considered art a rummy business, anyhow, and was obviously relieved when Bobby agreed with this dictum. Olive remarked that in the same article there had been a reference to what it called ‘The Diabolic Candelabra’, attributed to Benvenuto Cellini, and supposed to have disappeared about the same time, and when the sergeant understood that candelabra meant many-branched candlesticks and that these would be in solid silver, he was quite relieved.
“Now them things,” he said, “would be worth a pound or two and I’ll take my oath none of them about here have anything of the sort, or would keep ’em if they had ’em. Straight into the melting pot,” declared the sergeant, “silver being always silver, though less so now than when I joined the force.”
Olive went a little pale at the thought of Cellini work going straight into the melting pot, but supposed it was a very probable though most awful suggestion. Then the subject dropped, though Bobby wondered vaguely what had brought all this up again after the lapse of half a century, and Sergeant Turner went on to instruct them on the favourite walks i
n the neighbourhood. Bobby thought the one by Barsley Abbey and the ‘Rawdon Arms,’ however famous this last might be for its beer, was a little round about, and said they would prefer to get more quickly into the heart of the forest. So Turner recommended another path that led far away from pubs and tea gardens, and other such amenities of civilized life, and on to Heron’s Mere, a lovely but also a lonely and unfrequented spot.
“Might walk for miles and never see a soul,” declared Turner. “Get lost, too, if you aren’t careful, sir, the way the paths in the forest twist and turn.”
“No houses anywhere about?” Bobby asked.
“Not a sign of one all the way,” answered Turner, “except for Coop’s Cottage. And old Peter the Hermit’s hut farther on.”
“Who is Peter the Hermit?” Bobby asked.
It appeared that Peter the Hermit was a local celebrity, but a celebrity against his will and apt to be vicious if disturbed. There had even been one or two charges of assault against him, though the provocation received had been such that each time he had escaped with a small fine and a warning to keep his temper under better control. He lived in the depths of the forest in a small one-roomed hut he had built himself, though with intervals of wandering that had tended, however, to grow shorter as he himself grew older. How old he was no one knew. Local gossip put his age at a hundred, but that, in the sergeant’s considered opinion, was probably an exaggerated estimate. Nor did any one seem to know how long he had occupied his hut. He had come to be accepted in his strange and solitary life as a forest institution. Also he was reputed to have a great knowledge of herbs and their effects, so that his advice was often sought in cases of illness, much to the annoyance of the local medical men, of whom he, on his side, was openly contemptuous. Consultation with him was, however, not easy, as it was never possible to be sure of finding him at home. Even if he were at his hut, it seemed entirely a question of his mood whether he would give the advice asked for and proffer a remedy or whether on the visitor’s approach he would vanish into the forest, not appearing again perhaps for many days. How he lived no one knew. Occasionally he would appear in the village to make purchases for which he invariably paid in gold. As this had led to stories that he possessed immense stores of hidden treasure, his cottage, or hut rather, for it was no more, had been ransacked more than once during his prolonged absences, but without result. Nor had he made any complaint, though it was a fact that the residence of one man, supposed to have been responsible for such a search, had been mysteriously burned down. Another man, also held to have been guilty of a similar act, had been found stark naked and generally in sorry plight twenty miles from his home, though how he got there and what had happened he steadfastly refused to say. Other and even more remarkable tales were current and as a consequence no local inhabitant would now ever dream of meddling with the hut or its contents. The hermit’s more prosaic appearances in the police court had been largely due to the misguided efforts of a local paper to give him the publicity apt in these drab days to attend anything supposed to be picturesque or unusual. Articles had appeared on the ‘Hermit of Wychwood Forest’, ill-advised trippers and picnickers had come to stare, and had been driven away with a vigour and an emphasis and a flourished hatchet that had on occasion gone farther than the law approved. Now, however, all that had died down and the hermit was allowed to pursue his own course of life undisturbed save when efforts were made to obtain his advice or some of his herbal remedies.
“If he wanted,” said the sergeant, “he could have a crowd there every day. But as like as not if you go you won’t find him and if he does give you a bottle of stuff, it’s a toss-up if you get another. But they do say it’s not often two bottles are needed. One of ’em generally does the trick, not like doctor’s stuff you can go on taking for ever and never notice the difference except when the bill comes in.”
“Poor old man,” Olive said. “Hasn’t he anyone belonging to him?”
The sergeant had never heard of any relations, and Bobby, more practical, wondered what the hermit’s title was to the land on which, apparently, he had built his habitation. Wasn’t most of the forest Crown property, except that portion the town of Midwych had purchased at the end of the last century and a few other parts that were still in private hands?
“Not that there is any need to bother,” he added, fearing the question might be misunderstood. “Not our business. I was only wondering.”
It seemed, however, that this point had come up during the police court proceedings already mentioned. His was not merely squatter’s right. The hut stood at the extreme tip of a narrow, triangular piece of land, belonging to the Rawdon estate, where a strip of Sir Alfred’s land ran down into the forest in a kind of peninsula of private property. The hermit claimed to have written permission, dated from long before the first world war, to occupy his hut on payment of a nominal rent that was, as a matter of fact, never demanded. So far, therefore, as occupation went his legal position was secure and he had a perfect title to his habitation. Sir Alfred was also the landlord of Mr Coop, the ill-reputed step-father of the Miss Floyd who turned out such wonderful homemade chocolates. But the rent for the Coop cottage was always duly collected. Indeed the leniency of the Rawdon estate towards the old hermit was the cause of some surprise in the district. Leniency towards tenants had never been a marked characteristic of the Rawdons, who had the reputation, a reputation that went back to early Georgian days, of being harsh and grasping landlords.
Fortified with all this information and with full instructions of the path to follow, passing between the Coop cottage on the left and Boggart’s Hole on the right—and of Boggart’s Hole they were warned to beware, since it had been the scene of more than one accident—Bobby and Olive set out on the way to Heron’s Mere, supposed to be one of the loveliest spots in the forest. It could, however, be reached only on foot and by a somewhat long and tiring uphill walk, so it was not as popular with excursionists and picnickers as were other of the neighbouring beauty spots.
CHAPTER III
UNSEEN FOLLOWER
THE PATH TO Heron’s Mere passed close by the edge of Boggart’s Hole, the old, long deserted quarry, whence had been cut the stone used in early mediaeval days in building the abbey and, subsequently, many other places in the neighbourhood. From the path above, one looked down on what had become an almost impenetrable jungle of tree and undergrowth, and as the quarry edge was abrupt, unprotected and concealed by bushes, it is little wonder that more than one accident had occurred here, or that the place had acquired an evil reputation. No need to fall back on the evil spirit in the form of a lovely maiden, who, according to local tradition, was supposed to float before belated travellers, enticing them to follow her till, their attention on her and unaware of their danger, they walked over the quarry edge to fall to their death below. The drop down the almost sheer face of the cliff, left by the cutting away of the stone, was at least fifty feet, broken only once by a stunted tree and straggling bushes that somehow or another had managed to cling to, and find sustenance on, a narrow, projecting ledge.
“Don’t go too near,” Olive said nervously, as Bobby craned forward to look over the edge.
“Nasty dangerous spot,” Bobby agreed. “No wonder there have been a few broken necks here. Looks as if something of the sort had been happening recently.”
“Why?” asked Olive.
Bobby showed the bark of a tree growing near, slightly bruised.
“Been a rope round there not so long ago,” he said. “You can see where it went over the edge.” He pointed to where a tiny furrow on the turf at the quarry edge was visible. “Couldn’t be bird-nesting at this time of year. Might be something else, I suppose,” he remarked.
He peered over cautiously. For twenty feet or so the cliff descent was perpendicular. Then a rough ledge jutted out, widening from a few inches to a couple of feet or so. At the wider end grew a tree, a cluster of tangled bushes. Below, the fall was sheer again and Olive said:
“Midwych town property, this part,” Bobby said. “You won’t catch the corporation doing that. Make them responsible.”
“But they are responsible if it belongs to them,” Olive declared.
Bobby shook his head.
“Actually,” he said, “the quarry remains private property—part of the Rawdon estate. Strictly speaking, you are trespassing if you leave the path. So it’s your own look out if you go tumbling over the edge. Up to you to look after yourself. But if the corporation fenced in the path and then you fell over, you, or your heirs rather, could argue the fence was defective and you trusted it and it deceived you or something like that, and the corporation might have to stand a lawsuit and perhaps damages as well. So you don’t catch ’em taking the risk.”
Olive considered this.
Then she said:
“Is that the law?”
“It is,” said Bobby.
Olive drew a long breath.
“How—how mean,” she said.
“Oh, just the law,” Bobby explained.
They went on their way and when they reached Heron’s Mere it proved as charming a spot as it had been described. They spent a little time, resting, eating their lunch, admiring the view, watching the lovely voracious dance of dragon flies like living flashes of light above the surface of the mere, and then turned homewards. Leaving Boggart’s Hole, of evil reputation, on their left, they found the path they had been warned to look out for and followed it through what seemed a lonelier and certainly a lovelier part of the forest than that they had traversed before.
Diabolic Candelabra Page 2
