"Forgive me!" boomed Dr. Fell, looking particularly half-witted. "But your climate can still hold surprises for the stranger. At this latitude, in the middle of May, does it begin to get dark at seven o'clock?"
"In these parts, Dr. Fell," their host informed him, "we are not on daylight-saving time. Forget the clock in New York and everywhere else. I am not accustomed to making inaccurate statements."
"In the second place," cried Valerie Huret, who had struck a pose like the Goddess of Reason, "at any moment it's going to pour with rain. I've just remembered; I left my car around the side of the house. It's a convertible, and open. If anybody else has an open car . . ."
Alan made a move towards the door. Henry Maynard stopped him.
"Gently, both of you! There is no need to go; George will see to it. When you have visited us more often, Valerie, you will learn that no car suffers rain-damage with George in attendance. However! Any storm will be brief, but it may be violent." Alarm rang through his voice. "Where's Madge? Where are the two boys? Where's Miss Bruce? She accompanied Dr. Fell and Mr. Grantham; I saw her from the library. But . . ."
"The last time I looked," Valerie pointed to the window, "they were down on the beach. Yancey Beale and that tough-looking light-haired boy were throwing stones out over the water to see who could throw farther. The girls were with them."
Henry Maynard's lips tightened.
"For almost two weeks, ladies and gentlemen, I have been wondering when they would start on baseball. My brother, himself once captain of the Little Potatoes Hard to Peel, was patron and Maecenas of a teen-age team called the Bearcats. There is baseball equipment all over the cellar. And, since Rip Hillboro fancies himself as a pitcher . . ."
"You're a dried-up old bastard, Hank!" Bob Crandall said without rancor and almost with affection. "What's the matter with baseball?"
"There's nothing the matter with baseball, if you happen to like it. I don't. I was merely wondering—"
"And in the third place," cried Valerie, sticking insistently to her main theme, "let's us go downstairs, Bob! You're not a dried-up old . . . what I mean is, let's us forget chess and baseball too." Her tones grew coy and honeyed. "There are other things, aren't there? While I sort of hint at it, in a nice way, you can just tell me some more limericks and typographical errors. You have got some more of those, haven't you?"
"Woman, I've got a bushel of 'em. Come along."
Henry Maynard drew a breath of relief as they left the study. But he had not in any sense heard the last of them. Due to the carelessness either of Mrs. Huret or of Mr. Crandall, the door did not quite close. A confused murmur, no words distinct, could be heard from the enclosed staircase to the floor below. Then, suddenly, something else jabbed through serenity. Valerie Huret's voice went shrilling up.
"You're a nice man; you're too nice, really!"
"Now look, Semiramis!"
"You don't know what's happening here! I can't bear it!"
"Sh-h!"
"I can't bear it, I tell you!"
But they heard no more. They would have heard no more in any case. A deluge burst; the windows blurred and grew darker with driving rain.
More emotional pressures, but from what source? It was no use speculating, Alan decided. He turned back, and was looking round the walls when Henry Maynard caught his eye.
"It will have occurred to you, Mr. Grantham, that this room has a nautical flavor foreign to my essential tastes. Yes, that is the ship's bell from the Palmetto, rescued like her logbook when she sank in the Caribbean. There over the Sheraton desk—head and shoulders, full beard, gray naval uniform—is Luke Maynard himself. It is not a water-color, though it appears to be. Actually it is a photograph, enormously enlarged and tinted by hand. You, Dr. Fell, are goggling at the picture as though it stunned you. May I ask your thoughts?"
"Why, sir. . . . (harrumph!) ... to begin with, I was thinking of colors."
"Colors, sir?"
"Various Confederate uniforms (harrumph!) which in past days I have seen at museums here in the South. Their colors varied considerably."
"Yes?"
Rain roared against the windows. Dr. Fell poked at the carpet with the ferrule of his stick.
"Some were of the customary and conventional gray. Others looked so close to what nowadays we should call air force blue that without C.S.A. on the belt-buckle I might have ascribed the uniform to the wrong side." A sniff rumbled in Dr. Fell's nose. "Then, again, as any human being must, I was thinking—O my hat!—of Commodore Maynard and his violent death on the beach."
"That happened so long ago, Dr. Fell, that surely it need not detain us?"
"To a degree, I fear, it must always detain us. And in the third place, as Mrs. Huret would say," he whacked his stick on the floor, "my thoughts (or feelings) are purely personal. I have come from some considerable distance in response to your letters of weeks ago. I arrive from the hotel, not a little dishevelled, in response to the urgency of your telephone call. Confound it, sir, what do you want of me?"
"Ah, yes. What I want of you!"
Here their host took on a bustling air.
"Sit down, gentlemen; make yourselves comfortable. You will find cigarettes on the writing-table. Or a cigar, if Dr. Fell would prefer one? . . . There, that is better. At least you have sat down.
"Speaking of Commodore Maynard, there on the wall towards the billiard-room is a water-color: some contemporary artist's conception of the Palmetto leaving Charleston harbor on her last voyage. Observe the flag she flies at her mizzen-peak.
"Though most people are acquainted with only one Southern flag, the famous battle-flag of stars and bars, at various times the Confederacy adopted four different ones. That flown by the Palmetto—you will also see it in pictures of the Alabama—was the second to be adopted: a white ensign with the smaller square of the battle-flag in the upper left-hand corner. Firebrands objected to this as looking far too much like a flag of surrender. They said—"
"During a recent affair outside New York," boomed Dr. Fell, "some argument and confusion arose relating to the number of stars in the Confederate flag. But why, by thunder, are we entangled with flags now? What does this mean?"
"It means," replied Henry Maynard, standing beside the writing-table and brushing the fingertips of his right hand gently over its surface, "that I am straying from the subject. And you deserve better than that I will stray from the subject no longer.
"I was disturbed, Dr. Fell. I was badly disturbed, and I confess it. This arose at lunch time, after Joe Ashcroft had driven Miss Bruce to the Francis Marion Hotel to intercept Mr. Grantham; at her own request a whim of Camilla's.
"George—you remember George, the butler, who admitted you?—thought he had seen someone skulking in this room. I feared for certain papers in the Sheraton desk over there. Precipitately I rushed to the telephone and rang the hotel. I asked you, I all but entreated you, to come here at once. And now I ask you . . ."
"Yes?"
"I ask you," answered Henry Maynard, "to forget that phone call entirely."
5
Yellow lamplight fell strongly on the man's intent face. He took a cigarette from a silver box on the table, but thought better of this and put it back. The rain had slackened; it was still sluicing and splashing down the house, but the buzz of the air-conditioner could be heard again. Dr. Fell reared up in his leather chair. . "Forget it, you say?"
"If you will be so good. I was very foolish; I confess that too. I should have realized nobody could have gotten at those papers. Without smashing the desk to pieces; they are in a secret drawer. And they are still there, safe and untouched."
"May I ask, sir, the nature of these papers? For instance, are they some 'calculations' of yours?"
"Certainly not!" The other looked genuinely astonished. "Why do you ask?"
"Miss Bruce mentioned—even insisted upon—the fact that, though you still sit up here in the evening and on the terrace in the afternoon, you seem no longer preoccupied
with 'calculating something.'"
"The papers, Dr. Fell, relate only to my late brother's estate. Since there has never been any mystery about the disposition of the estate, they are of no real importance at all. Believe me, they could be lost or burnt without the slightest ill-effect to Madge or to me or to anyone else on earth."
"Then why should a threat to them upset you?"
"Because, if the truth must be told, like my daughter I suffer from moods. Have you never said to yourself, 'I must find such and such a document; it is vital to have that document; what if it were missing?'—though it is not vital and you know it. I seldom admit this foible; the cold reasoner must not seem a sham or a fraud. But I go to an extreme—and then change my mind."
"It is not the first time, I believe, you have changed your mind in the past fortnight May I revert to that presently?"
"If you insist Meanwhile, you are thinking . . . ?"
"It would be difficult," grunted Dr. Fell, puffing out his cheeks, "properly to formulate such thoughts as exist. 'Blow hot, blow cold,' or perhaps blow the whole business. This won't do; it won't do at all! Is my quest of a thousand miles to end in moonshine and wild geese? And you were so very urgent! If you had not been so urgent, I told my friends on the way here, I should have preferred to spend the afternoon exploring Charleston or visiting Fort Sumter."
"Oh, Fort Sumter!" Henry Maynard said abruptly. "Come with me, please."
All his tight-lipped reserve had gone. Beckoning them to their feet, he conducted them to a door in the left-hand wall. This opened into a good-sized billiard-room, also oak-panelled, with a covered table, a rack of cues, and a padded seat under the two windows facing front. With a conspiratorial air their guide led the way through it into the farthermost room on the top floor at the front of the north wing.
A lumber-room of dingy white-plaster walls and bare board floor, it was as littered with old trunks, with discarded household effects, as the other rooms had been swept and neat. Unlike study or billiard-room, there was an air-conditioner in neither of two windows. Both were open, with fine-mesh screens hooked into place.
"The rain has stopped," said Henry Maynard. "It lasted hardly more than ten minutes, as I predicted; the sun is coming out. Look here!"
He bustled to the far window, and put the tip of an extended forefinger against the wire screen.
"There is Fort Sumter, Dr. Fell."
"Where?"
"Where I am pointing. Over the top of that flagstaff below the window, take a line bearing slightly left out across the harbor. You see the smallish dark-gray mass against the water? One moment!"
Opening the top of a cabin trunk near the window, he fished out a pair of heavy field-glasses in their leather case. He took the glasses from the case and handed them to Dr. Fell.
"Put these to your eyes; adjust the focus . . ."
"The focus, sir, is already adjusted."
"Then take the line I have indicated. Move the glasses to your left. . .so! Have you got it now?"
"Oh, ah!" Dr. Fell was puffing with concentration. "I have got the fort; I see it clearly. Some kind of small steamer appears to be drawing away from it"
"That's the excursion-steamer returning. You would have been too late for it today in any case; it leaves the Municipal Yacht Basin at two o'clock. You can always go tomorrow, of course. Meanwhile, if a distant view will suffice . . . ?"
"The distant view," said Dr. Fell, "will do admirably. Harrumph! A Union officer named Major Anderson, I understand, surrendered Fort Sumter to the Confederates in April of '61? When did Federal forces retake it?"
"They never did 'retake' it in the sense you mean."
"Oh?"
"At the beginning of '65 the fort was a wreck. It had been under heavy bombardment for almost two years, notably from a monster Parrott gun on Cummings Point. But it was still defensible, with a garrison of six hundred. In February Sherman marched north from Georgia. Sumter's garrison, fearing they might be cut off if Sherman struck at Charleston—which he never did—slipped out and joined what remained of the Confederate Army. And Brigadier General Anderson, formerly Major Anderson, returned to raise the flag he had lowered four years before."
Henry Maynard swept out his hand.
"I set little store by history, gentlemen. The past is dead; let it remain buried; don't rattle the bones! And yet certain comments are called for."
"What comments, sir?"
"To the Union, from the very start of the war, Charleston and Fort Sumter had been symbols of Southern defiance they would have given anything to recapture. And they were always trying.
"But by water they hadn't a hope. Any attacking ship could be caught in a murderous crossfire between Sumter and Moultrie. In April of '63 Admiral Du Pont tried to force a passage with nine Federal Ironclads. The ironclads took a beating without even getting close; five were disabled and one destroyed. This led to the combined land-and-sea attack by General Gillmore and Admiral Dahlgren. In August they tried again with ironclads; again they failed, as they failed in every direction until the defenders had abandoned all works. Your own comments, Dr. Fell?"
Dr. Fell lowered the glasses and straightened up.
"For one so scornful of the past, sir," he said, "you seem remarkably well informed about it."
"I am conscientious; no more than that. I consider it my duty to be informed."
"And have you no other duty?"
"To whom?"
"Come!" Dr. Fell inclined his head towards the window. "Look down there, I beg, much closer at hand than Fort Sumter."
"Yes?"
"There is the beach spread out below us, dark gray from rain. On that stretch of beach, only two years after the time about which you have been so glib, an ancestor of yours was brutally done to death in unmarked sand. But you won't discuss this; you won't touch it, you won't go near it!"
"Did I say I would not discuss it?" Henry Maynard drew himself up. "I said only, if memory serves, that the subject need not detain us. We lack full evidence for a solution. Lacking such evidence, which has been distorted or suppressed, we can do little more than travel in a circle. However! If you insist on rattling those dead bones for our present pleasure, I shall be happy to supply you with what few details I have beyond the sketch in the newspaper account. Is there anything else?"
"Is there anything else?" thundered Dr. Fell. "Archons of Athens, is there anything else? Well, yes. There is the situation in this house.
"Last Friday night a scarecrow was stolen from the garden. Call that ludicrous, if you like. Miss Bruce saw, or claims to have seen, some prowler entering or leaving a downstairs room. Call that ludicrous too; say she was drugged or dreaming. Today you yourself are thrown almost into a fit by the report of someone 'skulking' in your study.
"These ludicrous instances are piling up. Do you ask me to whom you owe a duty? To your daughter! To your guests! Even to yourself! Your daughter is reported as jumpy; Camilla Bruce is jumpy; Mrs. Huret is distinctly jumpy; you, sir, are as jumpy as any of them. Surely there is something here worth investigating? And yet all you can do is tell me to forget it entirely!"
"Now, there," retorted Henry Maynard, touching the careful knot of his tie, "there again I must correct you. I said to forget the phone call; I said no more than that. I distinctly recall observing, just before we came upstairs, that we had at least one matter to discuss. And so we have: the source of all my worry to begin with. Back to the study, please."
Taking the field-glasses from Dr. Fell, he replaced them in their case and returned the case to the trunk. With some dignity he led the way through lumber-room and billiard-room, carefully closing each door when Dr. Fell had maneuvered through sideways. In the study, after switching off the floor-lamp by the chess-table, he went to the antique desk below the colored photograph of Commodore Maynard, and ran his fingertips over its sloping lid.
"In here," he went on, "I have an old exercise-book containing a diary for the year 1867 kept by Miss India Keate of Charl
eston, then eighteen years old.
"Luke Maynard was not ray great-grandfather, as some suppose. He was my great-grandfather's younger brother, and a bachelor. In '67 the head of the family, my great-grandfather Henry, seems to have been a character even more stern than Luke. But he was hospitable, as stern characters of the day so often could be.
"India Keate, a close friend of great-grandfather Henry's youngest daughter, spent part of the month of April in this house. Her diary contains the only supplementary details we have about Commodore Maynard's death. 1 will give you the diary, Dr. Fell, for your consideration at leisure."
Then his voice sharpened.
"But that must wait! My own constant worry, which goes on and on interminably, may be expressed in one word. Madge."
"And my question," returned Dr. Fell, "may also be expressed in one word. Why?"
"It's not easy to explain."
"Will you try to explain?"
Henry Maynard turned from the desk and faced them, his eyes growing unsteady.
"Madge is so innocent!" he said. "Or, if not altogether innocent in thought, let's agree she is warm-hearted, well-meaning, and rather naive.
"She was born in Paris in 1938, registered at the American consulate, and baptized at the American church in the Avenue George V. Her mother, whose portrait hangs above the mantelpiece in the library downstairs, died about a year later. Early in 1940 I brought the child to America in charge of an English nurse who remained with us only for a year or two. Madge was brought up in New York; we moved to Connecticut just under a decade ago.
"But I never know what the girl is thinking, or quite how to deal with her. I feel constrained; today they would say inhibited. Am I over-protective too?
"Young men have been flocking around Madge since she reached her teens. Recently the field, if I may so express this, has narrowed itself down to two: Rip Hillboro and Yancey Beale. I want her to marry, of course. But I want her to make the right choice. It is bound to be Rip or Yancey; who else is there? Unless—" he stopped.
Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22 Page 6
