“I was bending down, peering at what I thought must be my drawing, when I heard a sharp hiss of breath, and started up, and saw Vivian with his arm uplifted and a bare blade in his hand, and death threatening in his eyes. In sheer self-defence I caught at the flint weapon in my pocket, and dashed at him in blind fear of my life, and the next instant he lay dead upon the stones.
“I think that is all,” Mr. Selby continued after a pause, “and it only remains for me to say to you, Mr. Dyson, that I cannot conceive what means enabled you to run me down.”
“I followed many indications,” said Dyson, “and I am bound to disclaim all credit for acuteness, as I have made several gross blunders. Your celestial cypher did not, I confess, give me much trouble; I saw at once that terms of astronomy were substituted for common words and phrases. You had lost something black, or something black had been stolen from you; a celestial globe is a copy of the heavens, so I knew you meant you had a copy of what you had lost. Obviously, then, I came to the conclusion that you had lost a black object with characters or symbols written or inscribed on it, since the object in question certainly contained valuable information and all information must be written or pictured. ‘Our old orbit remains unchanged’; evidently our old course or arrangement. ‘The number of my sign’ must mean the number of my house, the allusion being to the signs of the zodiac. I need not say that ‘the other side of the moon’ can stand for nothing but some place where no one else has been; and ‘some other house’ is some other place of meeting, the ‘house’ being the old term ‘house of the heavens.’ Then my next step was to find the ‘ black heaven’ that had been stolen, and by a process of exhaustion I did so.”
“You have got the tablet?”
“Certainly. And on the back of it, on the slip of paper you have mentioned, I read ‘inroad,’ which puzzled me a good deal, till I thought of Grey’s Inn Road; you forgot the second n. ‘Stony-hearted step’ immediately suggested the phrase of De Quincey you have alluded to; and I made the wild but correct shot, that you were a man who lived in or near the Gray’s Inn Road, and had the habit of walking in Oxford Street, for you remember how the opium-eater dwells on his wearying promenades along that thoroughfare? On the theory of improbability, which I have explained to my friend here, I concluded that occasionally, at all events, you would choose the way by Guildford Street, Russell Square, and Great Russell Street, and I knew that if I watched long enough I should see you. But how was I to recognize my man? I noticed the ‘screever’ opposite my rooms, and got him to draw every day a large hand, in the gesture so familiar to us all, upon the wall behind him. I thought that when the unknown person did pass he would certainly betray some emotion at the sudden vision of the sign, to him the most terrible of symbols. You know the rest. Ah, as to catching you an hour later, that was, I confess, a refinement. From the fact of your having occupied the same rooms for so many years, in a neighbourhood moreover where lodgers are migratory to excess, I drew the conclusion that you were a man of fixed habit, and I was sure that after you had got over your fright you would return for the walk down Oxford Street. You did, by way of New Oxford Street, and I was waiting at the corner.”
“Your conclusions are admirable,” said Mr. Selby. “I may tell you that I had my stroll down Oxford Street the night Sir Thomas Vivian died. And I think that is all I have to say.”
“Scarcely,” said Dyson. “How about the treasure?”
“I had rather we did not speak of that,” said Mr. Selby, with a whitening of the skin about the temples.
“Oh, nonsense, sir, we are not blackmailers. Besides, you know you are in our power.”
“Then, as you put it like that, Mr. Dyson, I must tell you I returned to the place. I went on a little farther than before.”
The man stopped short; his mouth began to twitch, his lips moved apart, and he drew in quick breaths, sobbing.
“Well, well,” said Dyson, “I dare say you have done comfortably.”
“Comfortably,” Selby went on, constraining himself with an effort, “yes, so comfortably that hell burns hot within me for ever. I only brought one thing away from that awful house within the hills; it was lying just beyond the spot where I found the flint knife.”
“Why did you not bring more?”
The whole bodily frame of the wretched man visibly shrank and wasted; his face grew yellow as tallow, and the sweat dropped from his brows. The spectacle was both revolting and terrible, and when the voice came it sounded like the hissing of a snake.
“Because the keepers are still there, and I saw them, and because of this,” and he pulled out a small piece of curious gold-work and held it up.
“There,” he said, “that is the Pain of the Goat.”
Phillipps and Dyson cried out together in horror at the revolting obscenity of the thing.
“Put it away, man; hide it, for Heaven’s sake, hide it!”
“I brought that with me; that is all,” he said.
“You do not wonder that I did not stay long in a place where those who live are a little higher than the beasts, and where what you have seen is surpassed a thousandfold?”
“Take this,” said Dyson, “I brought it with me in case it might be useful”; and he drew out the black tablet, and handed it to the shaking, horrible man.
“And now,” said Dyson, “will you go out?”
The two friends sat silent a little while, facing one another with restless eyes and lips that quivered.
“I wish to say that I believe him,” said Phillipps.
“My dear Phillipps,” said Dyson as he threw the windows wide open, “I do not know that, after all, my blunders in this queer case were so very absurd.”
THE SECRET GLORY
Note
One of the schoolmasters in “The Secret Glory” has views on the subject of football similar to those entertained by a well-known schoolmaster whose Biography appeared many years ago. That is the only link between the villain of invention and the good man of real life.
Preface
Some years ago I met my old master, Sir Frank Benson—he was Mr. F. R. Benson then—and he asked me in his friendly way what I had been doing lately.
“I am just finishing a book,” I replied, “a book that everybody will hate.”
“As usual,” said the Don Quixote of our English stage—if I knew any nobler title to bestow upon him, I would, bestow it—“as usual; running your head against a stone wall!”
Well, I don’t know about “as usual”; there may be something to be said for the personal criticism or there may not; but it has struck me that Sir Frank’s remark is a very good description of “The Secret Glory,” the book I had in mind as I talked to him. It is emphatically the history of an unfortunate fellow who ran his head against stone walls from the beginning to the end. He could think nothing and do nothing after the common fashion of the world; even when he “went wrong,” he did so in a highly unusual and eccentric manner. It will be for the reader to determine whether he were a saint who had lost his way in the centuries or merely an undeveloped lunatic; I hold no passionate view on either side. In every age, there are people great and small for whom the times are out of joint, for whom everything is, somehow, wrong and askew. Consider Hamlet; an amiable man and an intelligent man. But what a mess he made of it! Fortunately, my hero—or idiot, which you will—was not called upon to intermeddle with affairs of State, and so only brought himself to grief: if it were grief; for the least chink of the door should be kept open, I am inclined to hold, for the other point of view. I have just been rereading Kipling’s “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat,” the tale of the Brahmin Prime Minister of the Native State in India, who saw all the world and the glory of it, in the West as well as in the East, and suddenly abjured all to become a hermit in the wood. Was he mad, or was he supremely wise? It is just a matter of opinion.
The origin and genesis of “The Secret Glory” were odd enough. Once on a time, I read the life of a famous schoolmaster, one of th
e most notable schoolmasters of these later days. I believe he was an excellent man in every way; but, somehow, that “Life” got on my nerves. I thought that the School Songs—for which, amongst other things, this master was famous—were drivel; I thought his views about football, regarded, not as a good game, but as the discipline and guide of life, were rot, and poisonous rot at that. In a word, the “Life” of this excellent man got my back up.
Very good. The year after, schoolmasters and football had ceased to engage my attention. I was deeply interested in a curious and minute investigation of the wonderful legend of the Holy Grail; or rather, in one aspect of that extraordinary complex. My researches led me to the connection of the Grail Legend with the vanished Celtic Church which held the field in Britain in the fifth and sixth and seventh centuries; I undertook an extraordinary and fascinating journey into a misty and uncertain region of Christian history. I must not say more here, lest—as Nurse says to the troublesome and persistent child—I “begin all over again”; but, indeed, it was a voyage on perilous seas, a journey to faery lands forlorn—and I would declare, by the way, my conviction that if there had been no Celtic Church, Keats could never have written those lines of tremendous evocation and incantation.
Again; very good. The year after, it came upon me to write a book. And I hit upon an original plan; or so I thought. I took my dislike of the good schoolmaster’s “Life,” I took my knowledge of Celtic mysteries—and combined my information.
Original, this plan! It was all thought of years before I was born. Do you remember the critic of the “Eatanswill Gazette”? He had to review for that admirable journal a work on Chinese Metaphysics. Mr. Pott tells the story of the article.
“He read up for the subject, at my desire, in the Encyclopædia Britannica…he read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information!”
CHAPTER 1
I
A heavy cloud passed swiftly away before the wind that came with the night, and far in a clear sky the evening star shone with pure brightness, a gleaming world set high above the dark earth and the black shadows in the lane. In the ending of October a great storm had blown from the west, and it was through the bare boughs of a twisted oak that Ambrose Meyrick saw the silver light of the star. As the last faint flash died in the sky he leaned against a gate and gazed upward; and then his eyes fell on the dull and weary undulations of the land, the vast circle of dun ploughland and grey meadow bounded by a dim horizon, dreary as a prison wall. He remembered with a start how late it must be; he should have been back an hour before, and he was still in the open country, a mile away at least from the outskirts of Lupton. He turned from the star and began to walk as quickly as he could along the lane through the puddles and the sticky clay, soaked with three weeks’ heavy rain.
He saw at last the faint lamps of the nearest streets where the shoemakers lived and he tramped hurriedly through this wretched quarter, past its penny shops, its raw public-house, its rawer chapel, with twelve foundation-stones on which are written the names of the twelve leading Congregationalists of Lupton, past the squalling children whose mothers were raiding and harrying them to bed. Then came the Free Library, an admirable instance, as the Lupton Mercury declared, of the adaptation of Gothic to modern requirements. From a sort of tower of this building a great arm shot out and hung a round clock-face over the street, and Meyrick experienced another shock when he saw that it was even later than he had feared. He had to get to the other side of the town, and it was past seven already! He began to run, wondering what his fate would be at his uncle’s hands, and he went by “our grand old parish church” (completely “restored” in the early ’forties), past the remains of the market-cross, converted most successfully, according to local opinion, into a drinking fountain for dogs and cattle, dodging his way among the late shoppers and the early loafers who lounged to and fro along the High Street.
He shuddered as he rang the bell at the Old Grange. He tried to put a bold face on it when the servant opened the door, and he would have gone straight down the hall into the schoolroom, but the girl stopped him.
“Master said you’re to go to the study at once, Master Meyrick, as soon as ever you come in.”
She was looking strangely at him, and the boy grew sick with dread. He was a “funk” through and through, and was frightened out of his wits about twelve times a day every day of his life. His uncle had said a few years before: “Lupton will make a man of you,” and Lupton was doing its best. The face of the miserable wretch whitened and grew wet; there was a choking sensation in his throat, and he felt very cold. Nelly Foran, the maid, still looked at him with strange, eager eyes, then whispered suddenly:
“You must go directly, Master Meyrick, Master heard the bell, I know; but I’ll make it up to you.”
Ambrose understood nothing except the approach of doom. He drew a long breath and knocked at the study door, and entered on his uncle’s command.
It was an extremely comfortable room. The red curtains were drawn close, shutting out the dreary night, and there was a great fire of coal that bubbled unctuously and shot out great jets of flame—in the schoolroom they used coke. The carpet was soft to the feet, and the chairs promised softness to the body, and the walls were well furnished with books. There were Thackeray, Dickens, Lord Lytton, uniform in red morocco, gilt extra; the Cambridge Bible for Students in many volumes, Stanley’s Life of Arnold, Coplestone’s Prælectiones Academicæ, commentaries, dictionaries, first editions of Tennyson, school and college prizes in calf, and, of course, a great brigade of Latin and Greek classics. Three of the wonderful and terrible pictures of Piranesi hung in the room; these Mr.
Horbury admired more for the subject-matter than for the treatment, in which he found, as he said, a certain lack of the aurea mediocritas—almost, indeed, a touch of morbidity. The gas was turned low, for the High Usher was writing at his desk, and a shaded lamp cast a bright circle of light on a mass of papers.
He turned round as Ambrose Meyrick came in. He had a high, bald forehead, and his fresh-coloured face was edged with reddish “mutton-chop” whiskers. There was a dangerous glint in his grey-green eyes, and his opening sentence was unpromising.
“Now, Ambrose, you must understand quite definitely that this sort of thing is not going to be tolerated any longer.”
Perhaps it would not have fared quite so badly with the unhappy lad if only his uncle had not lunched with the Head. There was a concatenation accordingly, every link in which had helped to make Ambrose Meyrick’s position hopeless. In the first place there was boiled mutton for luncheon, and this was a dish hateful to Mr. Horbury’s palate. Secondly, the wine was sherry. Of this Mr. Horbury was very fond, but unfortunately the Head’s sherry, though making a specious appeal to the taste, was in reality far from good and teemed with those fiery and irritating spirits which make the liver to burn and rage. Then Chesson had practically found fault with his chief assistant’s work. He had not, of course, told him in so many words that he was unable to teach; he had merely remarked:
“I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it, Horbury, but it struck me the other day that there was a certain lack of grip about those fellows of yours in the fifth. Some of them struck me as muddlers, if you know what I mean: there was a sort of vagueness, for example, about their construing in that chorus. Have you remarked anything of the kind yourself?”
And then, again, the Head had gone on:
“And, by the way, Horbury, I don’t quite know what to make of your nephew, Meyrick. He was your wife’s nephew, wasn’t he? Yes. Well, I hardly know whether I can explain what I feel about the boy; but I can’t help saying that there is something wrong about him. His work strikes me as good enough—in fact, quite above the form average—but, to use the musical term, he seems to be in the wrong key. Of course, it may be my fancy; but the lad reminds me of those very objectionable persons who are said to have a joke up their sleeve. I doubt whether he is taking t
he Lupton stamp; and when he gets up in the school I shall be afraid of his influence on the other boys.”
Here, again, the master detected a note of blame; and by the time he reached the Old Grange he was in an evil humour. He hardly knew which he found the more offensive—Chesson’s dish or his discourse. He was a dainty man in his feeding, and the thought of the great fat gigot pouring out a thin red stream from the gaping wound dealt to it by the Head mingled with his resentment of the indirect scolding which he considered that he had received, and on the fire just kindled every drop of that corrosive sherry was oil. He drank his tea in black silence, his rage growing fiercer for want of vent, and it is doubtful whether in his inmost heart he was altogether displeased when report was made at six o’clock that Meyrick had not come in. He saw a prospect—more than a prospect—of satisfactory relief.
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