by Marion Bryce
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 innkeeper 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 ov
er 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 faraway 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.
Suddenly, in the midst of her distress, she smiled to herself.
At least Miss Tarver had shown herself in her true colours, and was no more to be considered. Juliet felt that she could almost forgive her for her readiness to believe the worst. It was dreadful, yes, and shameful that anyone else should think for a moment that David could be capable of such a deed, but in Miss Tarver, perhaps, the thought had not been inexcusable. On the whole, it was so nice of her to break the engagement that she might be forgiven the ridiculous reason she had advanced for doing it. Of course, Juliet assured herself, it was a mere pretext, because no one could possibly believe it. And in this manner she continued to reiterate her conviction that the suspicions entertained of her lover were all assumed for some darkly obscure purpose.
So the morning wore away. A shower or two passed down the valley, but under the thick tent of the beech leaves she scarcely felt it. She was, besides, dressed for bad weather; and the grey and mournful face of the day was in harmony with her mood.
There was something comforting in this high perch. She seemed more aloof from the troubles and despair of the last few days than she had imagined possible. There was a calm, a remoteness, about the grey mountains, disappearing and reappearing from behind their screen of cloud but unchanged and unmoved by what went on around and among them, that was in some way reassuring.
The burn that ran at the bottom of the hill on which she sat, hurrying down to the loch in such turbulent foaming haste, she was able to compare, with a sad smile, to herself. The loch, she thought, was wide and impassive as justice, which did not allow itself to be influenced by the emotions. The burn would get down just the same without so much turmoil and fuss; and she would see David’s name cleared, equally surely, if she waited calmly on events, instead of burning her heart out in hopeless impatience and anxiety.
As she gazed, with some such thoughts as these, down to the stream that splashed on its way below her, her attention was caught by a movement in the bushes half-way down the steep slope at the top of which she was sitting.
The day was windless and no leaf moved on any tree. There must be some animal among the shrubs that covered the embankment, some large animal, since its movements caused so much commotion; for, as she watched, first one bush and then another stirred and bent and was shaken as if by something thrusting its way through the dense growth.
What could it be? A sheep, perhaps; there were many of them on the hillsides. This must be one that had strayed far from the rest. And yet would a sheep make so much stir? Juliet drew back a little behind the trunk of the beech-tree. Could it be a deer? She could not hear any sound of the creature’s advance, for the air was full of the clamour of the burn, but she could trace the direction of its progress by shaking leaves and swinging boughs. It seemed to be gradually mounting the slope.
Suddenly a head emerged from the waving mass of a rhododendron, and with astonishment Juliet saw that it was that of Julia Romaninov.
Her first impulse was to lean forward and call her, but as she did so the cry died unheard upon her lips. For the manner of Julia’s advance struck her as very odd. The girl was bending nearly double, and moving with a caution that seemed very strange and unnecessary. What was the matter? Was she stalking something? Crouching as she was in the bushes, she would not be seen by anyone on the path below. Did she not want to be seen? It looked more and more like it. But why in the world should Julia creep along as if she feared to be observed? Where was she going, and why?
Suddenly Juliet came to a quick decision: she would find out what Julia Romaninov was doing.
She backed hurriedly into the bracken, and made her way slowly and cautiously around the clearing under the beech-tree to the edge of the hill again, keeping under cover of the fern and heather. When she peered over, Julia had disappeared from view beneath the rhododendrons.
For a minute Juliet’s eyes searched the side of the slope below. Then she drew back her head quickly, for she had caught sight of another bush shaking uneasily a little way beyond the gap in which she had had her first glimpse of the cause of the disturbance. Cowering low in the bracken she crept along the top, keeping a foot or two from the edge, where the rock fell nearly perpendicularly for a few yards before its angle changed to the comparatively gradual, though actually steep slope of the hill which Julia was climbing.
From time to time she looked cautiously
between clumps of fern or heath, to make sure that she was keeping level with her unconscious quarry.
The front of the hill swung round in a bold curve till it reached the castle; and it soon became evident that, if both girls continued to advance along the lines they were following, they would converge at a point where the end of the battlemented wall met the great holly hedge that formed two sides of the garden enclosure.
Juliet perceived this when she was not more than a dozen yards from the corner, and dropped at full length to the soft ground, at a spot where she could see between the stalks and under the leaves, and yet herself remain concealed. She had not long to wait. In a minute, Julia’s face appeared over the brow of the hill. She pulled herself up by a young fir sapling that hung over the brink, and stood for a moment, flushed and panting after her long climb. She was dressed in a greenish tweed, which blended with the woodland surroundings, and her shoulder was turned to the place where Juliet lay wondering whether she would be discovered.
Fronting them, the end of the little turret, with which the wall of the old fortress now came to a sudden termination, could be seen rearing its grey stones above the dark glossy foliage of the hedge, which grew here with peculiar vigour and continued to the extreme edge of the cliff, and even farther.
What was Juliet’s surprise to see Julia, when she had found her breath, and taken one quick look round as if to satisfy herself she was unobserved, suddenly cast herself down, in her turn, upon the damp earth, and inserting her head beneath the prickly barricade of the holly leaves, begin to crawl and wriggle forward until she had completely disappeared under it. What in the world could she be doing?
