Loo came a yard or two farther forward. She looked a little troubled. She was plainly now on the defensive.
“Well, you wouldn’t turn back,” she said.
“No,” agreed Bobby, “we wouldn’t. The forest is free to all—at least to those who are not afraid of the forest.”
Again Loo appeared to consider this. Presently she said:
“There are bears in the forest.”
“There are bears everywhere,” Bobby answered.
“There’s been a bear at Peter’s cottage,” she told him.
“Has there?” Bobby said. “What did it do?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I was afraid. I ran away. I couldn’t find Peter anywhere and so I ran away.”
“And then you tried to frighten us, too, by telling us there was a bear in the way?” Bobby asked.
“I thought it might be you had been there,” she explained. “You see, we don’t know you. But Henry George oughtn’t to have chattered at you till we were sure. Only he was frightened, too, at Peter’s cottage. Henry George,” she called.
She turned as she did so to the apple tree, but Henry George, apparently feeling that the conversation had taken an unfavourable turn, had removed himself to an upper branch, where only the tip of a depressed and drooping tail was visible. Loo, her hands behind her, gazed upwards into the tree. Two bright eyes showed themselves. Loo said:
“He won’t again. Chatter, I mean. It was because of being afraid.”
“Why were you afraid?” Olive asked. “You aren’t often afraid in the forest, are you? What frightened you?”
Loo made no answer for a moment. Then she said: “Peter wasn’t there and we couldn’t find him.” She repeated, as if wishing to change the subject: “Henry George won’t chatter at you ever again.”
“And I won’t ever even think of throwing twigs at him again,” Bobby assured her.
“I wish you would tell me a lot about Henry George,” Olive said. “How did you become such friends? Why do you call him Henry George?”
“Because it’s his name,” Loo explained. By this time she was quite close to the cottage door where Olive was sitting and Bobby standing. “I like you,” she said to Olive, but she still seemed a little doubtful about Bobby, and had the air of being ready to leap away at any moment if he were not very careful. “Is he ever angry?” she asked Olive.
“Oh, well,” said Olive, slightly embarrassed, and remembering one unfortunate day when their toothbrushes had got mixed, and she was sure, and so was Bobby, and they had both been very cold and dignified about it, after having first been very hot and undignified.
“What about you?” argued Bobby, knowing the best defence is attack. “Aren’t you ever angry?”
“Oh, yes,” she admitted readily, “but I think when you are angry you are angry like a bear and not like me or Henry George.”
“Why do you talk such a lot about bears?” Olive asked. “You’ve never seen one, have you?”
“We couldn’t find Peter,” she answered. “He’s not at his cottage and he’s not anywhere else and we couldn’t find him anywhere.”
“Well, you don’t think a bear has eaten him, do you?” Bobby asked.
She looked at him, hesitated, and then gave a quick nod.
“Well, now then,” Bobby said, surprised.
“Tea’s ready,” Mary called from inside the kitchen where she had been bustling about without paying much attention to their talk. “Come along, or the honey cakes will be spoiled.”
CHAPTER VII
FOREST HUT
THE HONEY CAKES duly done justice to—and for all her sylph-like appearance Loo displayed for them an extremely healthy appetite—Bobby and Olive started on their way home. From the cottage door Mary and Loo waved them a farewell. Looking back at those two slight girlish figures, Bobby remarked with a faint grin:
“A formidable pair. They look as if they were made of sugar and spice and all that’s nice, and yet one of them will lock a man up in a cellar for a week on bread and water, and the other will take an unlucky school attendance officer into the depths of the forest and just park her there.”
“Well, you can’t blame—” began Olive, very much on the defensive, but Bobby interrupted her.
“Cops never blame,” he said. “Not our job. Only I’m wondering what the pair of them might do if they got really peeved. Sort of if this happens in the dry, what about the green? Or is it the other way round?”
“Do you think—?” began Olive, and once more Bobby interrupted her.
“All I think is that they are the rummiest pair of kids I ever came across,” he said, “and I don’t know that I should very much care about running up against either of ’em.”
“Yes, but,” Olive said, “why was Loo afraid?”
“I don’t know,” Bobby answered, and he looked uneasy. “Something put the wind up her all right,” he admitted, “and a kid used to spending all night alone in a place like this—” He waved a hand towards the vast sea of green, silent, impenetrable, lost, that lay all around them. With old ancestral terrors stirring faintly in his mind, the old strange fears the author of Beowulf and his fellows knew so well, Bobby found himself wondering what dangers might not lurk in those dim shadows. “Well, you wouldn’t expect her to scare too easily,” he concluded.
They walked on in silence and presently Olive said:
“Perhaps it was that man going off with the bottle of flavouring that frightened her.”
“I don’t think so,” Bobby said. “She wasn’t there at the time, for one thing.”
“If he finds out what’s in it, can he just make it himself as much as he likes?” Olive asked.
“Nothing to stop him,” Bobby answered. “At least, Loo’s hermit friend could patent it, I imagine, like patent medicine. But he would have to get in first and you may be pretty sure he hasn’t. Most likely he doesn’t even know he could.”
“Then,” said Olive with decision, “he ought to be told. I think it’s such a shame. I know how angry I should be if I had a special recipe and someone just came along and snatched it—especially if they used it to make money.’’
“The world’s full of shames,” Bobby pointed out.
“No reason why there should be one more,” retorted Olive.
“Well, what do you want to do?”
“Find Mr Peter and tell him what he ought to do.”
“Loo said he wasn’t there.”
“You could leave a message. Pin it to the door or something.”
“Time we were getting home,” Bobby grumbled, but he produced the map with which he had provided himself before starting. The hermit’s cottage was not marked, but the boundary between the forest proper and the Rawdon property was clearly shown, and Bobby knew that the cottage stood exactly at a protruding extremity of the estate where it ran down into the forest land. His map showed him it was not far out of the way, and, finding presently a path that led in the required direction, they followed it.
“There ought to be a stream somewhere about and then the cottage shouldn’t be more than about a hundred yards away,” he remarked.
Immediately afterwards they found the stream, a small, shallow, but quickly running brook, in places so narrow it could be stepped across. Here and there it made small pools of clear, fresh water, a foot or two deep. Bending over one of these pools was a youngish man with black hair and eyes, a dark complexion, a large, prominent nose. He was smartly dressed, rather too smartly, indeed, for a forest ramble, and on the grass by his side lay an umbrella and a small dispatch case. He was busily washing his hands and when he heard their approach he looked round in a quick, startled way. Then without a word, his hands still dripping as he withdrew them from the water, without stopping to wipe them, he snatched up umbrella and dispatch case. But that flew open with the violent jerk he gave it as he caught it up, and the contents, papers and photographs chiefly, scattered on the ground. He scooped them up with a kind of panic-str
icken haste, yet not so quickly as to prevent Bobby catching a clear, though momentary, view of one—a large unmounted print or engraving—crammed them into the dispatch case, and dashed away as hard as he could tear. Yet not along the path, but across the stream and into the woodland opposite, where trees and bushes soon hid him from sight, where pursuit, if Bobby had contemplated it, would not have been easy.
“What’s the matter with him?” Olive asked, staring after his disappearing figure. “Did we frighten him?”
“Looks like it,” said Bobby.
“Why?” asked Olive.
“In my uniform days, in London,” Bobby observed meditatively, “I think I should have run after him just to find out why.”
“He was only washing his hands,” Olive said.
“A symbolic act sometimes,” Bobby remarked.
“What do you mean?” Olive demanded. “There’s no harm in washing your hands. When he saw us he ran like—like—”
“Like billy-oh,” Bobby suggested.
He went a little nearer that clear, shining pool in which the handwashing had taken place. He stared at the water, at the smooth grassy bank. He saw nothing to interest him. The water flowed. The grass had taken no visible print. Bobby said:
“Did you see that photo or something of the sort the chap dropped?”
“Was it a photo?” Olive asked. “I thought it was a picture. I only had a glimpse. He snatched it up in such a hurry before he ran off.”
“Photograph of a picture perhaps,” Bobby said. “It looked like an El Greco. I didn’t see it clearly enough to be sure, but that’s what it looked like. I don’t suppose I should have spotted it, only for that talk about two El Grecos being missing from Sir Alfred Rawdon’s place. But I did seem to catch a glimpse of those elongated arms and legs El Greco used to perpetrate, and there was a kind of huddle of a stormy sky behind that looked his sort of style. I wonder if that’s why he was scared, because we saw it.”
“He was startled and frightened as soon as he saw us coming,” Olive pointed out. “That’s why his dispatch case came open, because he snatched it up in such a hurry and gave it a jerk. Besides, why should he mind our seeing it?”
“Only an idea,” Bobby answered. “It reminded me of that chap Turner told us about, the one at the ‘Rawdon Arms’ I mean. You remember? Turner said there had been a fellow there asking questions about El Greco pictures. I wonder if this is the same lad? Something must have started him off talking like that. If he is on the track of lost paintings, so perhaps is someone else as well. If it’s like that, he may have thought we were rivals on the same trail, and he didn’t want to be spotted himself. Didn’t want possible rivals to know he was on the hunt, too.”
They thought little more of the incident, which did not in itself seem to be of any great importance or interest. A hundred yards or so farther on they came in sight of a small cottage, if indeed, so small, ill built, half ruinous it seemed, it deserved any other name than that of hovel.
CHAPTER VIII
MISSING AXE
APPARENTLY IT HAD never known the touch of paint. Its walls were of thin boarding that in some places had been patched by what looked like bits of old fencing. Elsewhere the primitive method of moss and dry clay had been used. The one window showed more rags than glass. The roof was of corrugated iron, kept in position by the simple device of placing upon it a number of heavy stones. The door hung half open upon broken hinges, so that there was no possibility of closing it securely. Stove piping poked out from one side and in places was tied up with rope. A roughly built stone oven and fireplace two or three yards away suggested that during the summer at least most of the necessary cooking was done out of doors. Near by was a small pile of sticks cut into convenient size for use as fuel. There was no attempt at a garden. The situation was superb. Close behind the hut, sheltering it beneath wide spreading branches stood a stately beech, a magnificent and lovely tree. In front, open ground, a stretch of level and smooth turf, that in the spring must have been beautiful with cowslip and bluebell and daisy, ran down to the banks of the tiny running brook and then rose again to the denser masses of the wood beyond. Indeed, the only blot upon a peaceful woodland scene was the squalid little hut itself. Olive, viewing it with much distaste, said:
“No one can really live there, can they?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Bobby answered.
He had seen as bad, though perhaps never worse. Except perhaps the half-hut, half-cave he had come across once on a dumping ground for London rubbish. And he knew of habitations by the marshy banks of the Thames estuary where the power and the glory of the London docks tail off towards the sea. He was thinking, too, of the building laws. Probably, though, the hut had been put up without notice or permission and now by lapse of time had acquired the status of a fait accompli.
“Well, it’s no wonder, anyhow,” Olive remarked, “that Sir Alfred Rawdon doesn’t want any rent.”
“Habitation for a hermit,” Bobby said, but he spoke absently, for now that they were nearer he could see more plainly through the sagging door of the hut into the interior and what he saw he did not much like. The disorder and confusion within seemed to him greater even than the exterior had suggested. Something, he reminded himself, had frightened Loo. Nor was it only Loo who had experienced fear. The stranger they had seen by the banks of the stream near by had fallen into panic swiftly and easily, as if already he knew of a reason for alarm. The cottage, squat and ugly and deserted looking, crouching there in the shade of the great overhanging tree, as though it lurked in hiding for an evil purpose, began to take on for Bobby a strange, vague atmosphere of apprehension and of fear. Olive, it seemed, felt the same, for she touched Bobby’s arm and said softly:
“I don’t like this place. It’s ugly. Let’s go away. There’s no one there.”
“May as well have a look,” Bobby said.
They came nearer and stood in the doorway. They could see then that the place had been carefully and systematically wrecked. Scant and wretched as were the furnishings of the hut, nothing remained intact. The bed had been little more than a heap of rags and now those rags had been tossed hither and thither. The cooking utensils had been three in number—a kettle, an iron pot, a frying pan. They had been flung into a corner with part of what had been the bed. Even the table, though made only of rough boards nailed across two small wooden cases, had been broken and the two wooden cases smashed up. As in the habitations of primitive people, the floor was merely of beaten earth that by long use had grown hard and smooth, but there were marks to show attempts had been made in spots to dig it up or at least to probe it deeply with some sharp instrument. The work of destruction could not have taken long, there was so little to destroy. But it had been thorough. Oddly enough, the most breakable objects in the place, the crockery, a few cups and plates on a shelf had not been touched. Ranged in order still, they looked down from their prim and equal rows upon the ruin beneath.
“What’s been happening?” Bobby asked Olive, who was standing in the doorway, looking quite distressed over this scene of what appeared merely stupid, senseless destruction.
“It looks as if a lunatic had been here,” she said. “Or has someone been smashing up the poor old man’s belongings just out of spite?”
“That wouldn’t explain why there’s been a start to dig up the floor, or why the crockery hasn’t been touched,” Bobby remarked. “It looks to me as if the place had been pretty thoroughly searched.”
“What for?” Olive asked.
“Gold perhaps,” Bobby answered. “It seems there was a story about the old boy paying in gold for all he bought. Stories like that soon get about. Secret hoards. That sort of yarn. Turner said something about attempts at robbery, didn’t he? All this looks to me like another. Perhaps that’s what scared Loo and made her talk about bears. She may have seen the thieves at work.”
“Would that frighten Loo?” Olive asked. “She dealt with that school attendance woman firmly eno
ugh. I wonder what’s become of the old hermit?”
Bobby was turning over a pile of debris in one corner.
“What are you doing?” Olive asked.
“Looking for an axe,” Bobby explained.
“An axe! Why? Whatever for?”
“The old boy must have had some sort of chopper for cutting up firewood,” Bobby remarked. “He evidently used wood for fuel, and those bits of dry branches outside are all cut clean to a convenient length. There must have been an axe or hatchet or something like it to do that with.”
“He may have it with him,” Olive suggested.
“So he may,” agreed Bobby. “Anyhow, there doesn’t seem anything of the sort lying about. I just thought it a bit queer. Look here,” he added, holding out a book, which lay, all torn and battered, the binding half wrenched off, behind the old, rusty, apparently little-used stove. “Horace,” he said.
Bobby had forgotten most of the Latin he had once at school and university so laboriously acquired, but he retained enough of it to recognize the Odes. The book had been printed in the eighteenth century and the binding had been calf, decorated very richly in the style known as pointillé.
“Do hermits read Latin?” Bobby asked. He was turning over the leaves, many of them now torn and soiled from the treatment the book seemed to have recently received. “Look here,” he said. “Pencil notes in English. Attempts at translation. Rummy. No one can ever read Horace without having a shot at translating him.”
“There’s another book here,” Olive said, picking it up.
Bobby took it from her. A Virgil this time—the Georgics. It was of later date than the Horace, but it, too, had been richly bound, in a fine tooled leather now damp stained and dilapidated.
“Strong on Latin, our hermit,” Bobby remarked.
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