9
Much later—it must have been past three in the morning—Logan was waked from his troubled sleep by a curious sound. His nerves on edge, he sat up in bed, scarcely knowing where he was, and befuddled by finding himself tangled in an old-fangled nightshirt, until he remembered that Tompkins had laid out for him this antique garment. The only source of light in the room was the extinguished candle, of course; and Logan reached for the candlestick, but thought better of it, and listened.
The noise was the sound of slow sliding. Blinking, he looked toward the door. So far as he could see anything at all, it seemed to him that the door was very slightly ajar. And then he knew the source of the sliding-sound: someone must have dislodged slightly the chair he had used as barrier, must have got a hand round the edge of the door, and must be quietly shoving chair and reinforcing chest inward, so that whoever was outside might squeeze within.
Logan snatched his pistol from under the pillow. It wouldn’t do to use the gun except in the last extremity, though. He slid silently out of bed to the floor, and rolled under the bedstead. If someone meant to cut his throat, there in the blackness, whoever it was would stab an empty bed.
That sliding-noise had ceased now; what had wanted to enter presumably had glided in. To Logan, taut on the floor under the bed, came the thought of Old Askival, who was supposed to walk the narrow passages of the Old House, and had driven the wastrel Donald to the New House. Whatever had entered surely made no noise at all: a thrill ran through Logan’s body. Holding his breath and straining his sight, after what seemed like a quarter of an hour—really some five seconds, probably—he made out the dimmest of dim shapes bending over the bed, its legs right before Logan’s nose. Gripping the pistol in his left hand, Logan seized an ankle of the intruder and gave a mighty tug.
A stifled cry, and the thing was on the floor beside him, and Logan flung himself upon it in a tangle of arms and legs, thrusting the pistol against the thing’s head. The shape made very little resistance. Shape? The body under Logan was not a man’s shape. And most certainly it was not Lady MacAskival or old Agnes. “You’ve hurt my head,” the shape murmured, resentful and panting. In the faintest of whispers— “Really! Are men always so violent when they’re waked in the middle of the night?”
It had been a near thing; that little pistol, thrust against the girl’s temple, might have gone off. “Oh!” said Logan, shocked and embarrassed. “Did I cut you?” He ran his hand through the mass of her hair, searching for a wound.
“I think not,” the girl said, brushing aside his hand. “You were good enough merely to stun me. Now do you mind sitting somewhere else than on me? I’m rather out of breath. Sit on the bed. How queer you look in that nightgown! It must have been one of Sir Alastair’s, who was twice your size; I wonder it hangs together still. And keep your voice low, for Dr. Jackman walks the passages at all hours, like a wraith, and he would put an end to Hugh Logan if he found me with you. I’m ever so sorry to put you in danger—or more danger—and to wake you from a sound sleep, and to invade your bedroom; but you and I must talk tonight. There, that’s much better! You do look silly, perched in that old nightgown on that old bed, but it can’t be helped. Oh, you have a little gun? That’s clever of you. I wish I had one of my own. I have keys—although Dr. Jackman doesn’t know it—to nearly every room in the house except the gunroom, and the cellars where they keep those explosives: Dr. Jackman put new locks on those. Do you mind if I sit on the other end of the bed? The floor’s rather hard. Thank you: now we can make matters clear.”
The minx—Logan’s eyes, adjusted to the dark, could make her out vaguely—was fully dressed, except that she was barefoot, as usual. Either she was an idiot, which he doubted, or else she was the bravest woman he ever had come upon. “Miss MacAskival,” he said, “what is outside this house? What drove Rab out of his mind? It may be, I suppose, that Donley was forced back to land, after he took my boat; but he was a tired man when I saw him last, and I can’t imagine him knocking Carruthers on the head and chasing Rab right up to the door.”
“Now that you have knocked me on the head,” said Mary MacAskival, “and have sat on me, you may as well commence calling me Mary, Hugh Logan. We’ve not time, just now, to talk of what may be outside; for I must tell you of what’s within. You have no faith in me, have you? You’ve been talking with Dr. Jackman. What did he tell you of me?”
He had no faith in anyone in the Old House, Logan thought; indeed, he had begun to doubt his own sanity. But he would be blunt with this girl, and see if she could make a case for herself. “He told me, Mary MacAskival,” Logan said, “that you were eccentric.”
There in the dark, the girl laughed softly; she was a cool one. “Why, that’s true enough, Hugh Logan: all the MacAskivals have their oddities. I fancy that old Mr. Duncan MacAskival, who sent you to me, has his peculiarities.”
“That he has. But he’s no girl of fifteen.”
“Fifteen?” She sounded startled. “Whatever do you mean?”
“You are fifteen, aren’t you?”
“Fifteen!” She stifled her merriment. “I’m past twenty, Hugh Logan, though it’s little I am. Whatever possessed Dr. Jackman to tell you such a thing?” Her voice rang true.
“And he said you were too fond of men.”
“Fond of men? I’m not fond of Dr. Jackman, I can tell you. I never see any men to be fond of, here in Carnglass, Dr. Jackman’s crew are half afraid of me—particularly Niven the tinker, who knows I am a witch—and I’m thoroughly afraid of them, although I never let them guess it. With whom am I supposed to be infatuated?” A tone of suppressed anger had come into her voice.
“When you were thirteen, Jackman said, you—why, you loved a gardener here in Carnglass.”
At first Logan thought she had begun to sob; but then he realized she was choking in an endeavor to keep from breaking into imprudent shrieks of laughter. “Malcolm Mor MacAskival,” she managed, at last. “Malcolm Mor! Of course I loved him. I do still. He carried messages for me and contrived to get them posted in Loch Boisdale, and so they discharged him. And he worships the ground I tread, because I am The MacAskival. He has a great white beard, and is upward of seventy. Are you jealous of him?”
It was impossible not to believe her: Jackman was plausible, but Mary MacAskival was all candor. “What a consummate liar Jackman is!” Logan played with Donley’s little gun.
“To be sure he is; didn’t I tell you so, Hugh? He lives by lies. But into nearly every lie he works a tiny grain of truth, for the sake of appearances. Well, then: what other mischief have I been working, according to your friend Dr. Jackman?”
“He implied, Mary MacAskival, that you suffer from delusions of grandeur. He said you must have told me—by ‘me’ he means our fictitious bank-clerk, of course—that you were to inherit Carnglass and all the rest from your aunt, while in truth you are a pauper.”
“Would it matter to you if I were a pauper?” She was serious now; he thought her firm chin went up.
“Not in the least.”
“Well, then, as a matter of fact, Hugh Logan, I have more money than has Lady MacAskival. She never has loved me, but she has no one else who signifies; and so, more than five years ago, she gifted Carnglass to me, and more than half her securities. She told me that would baffle the Exchequer; for in this country, you know, one can escape death-duties by giving away one’s property, so long as one does it five years before one’s death. Five years ago my aunt still had her wits about her—enough to make a lawful will, at any rate; and she put Carnglass and the rest into trust for me; and six months from now, when I am twenty-one, I can do what I like with my own.”
This revelation reminded Logan of his proper business in Carnglass, which the troubles of the past few days had almost driven out of his head. “Then Lady MacAskival couldn’t sell Carnglass to my principal even if she chose? It’s yours? And will you sell?”
“Hugh Logan! Here we sit whispering, with a gang of murderers and conspirators in the house, and The MacAskival honoring you with a call at four in the morning in your bedchamber, and you talk of title-deeds! You are a man of law. But no, I wouldn’t sell: Carnglass is my world. Yet Duncan MacAskival being an old man, and a kinsman, and having his heart set on the matter, I might arrange for him a life-tenure of the Old House. And I, and any husband I might choose to have, could live at the New House. When I wrote Duncan MacAskival that last letter—the note that brought you here, Hugh—I made up my mind that I would not bring him here upon a wild-goose chase altogether. If a lease of the Old House will satisfy him, he shall have it. But Dr. Jackman will be a nasty tenant for us to evict, Hugh Logan.”
And then, in part volunteering the story and in part prompted by Logan’s questions, the girl gave him her account of Dr. Edmund Jackman. Three years before, when Mary still had been at school, old Lady MacAskival had gone to London for a month, in winter. For half a century, Lady MacAskival had been very odd; and now whatever rationality remained to her was giving way. On her infrequent London visits, she had tended more and more to surround herself with peculiar company: Indian pseudo-mystics, and fortune-tellers with pretensions to decent manners, and mediums of various sorts. Lady MacAskival detested anything resembling orthodox religion, but rejoiced in any oddity which flirted with faces that glowered up from the abyss; and she believed, or half believed. She was ignorant, superstitious, vain, and rich—and she had a bad conscience. Moreover, she was extremely lonely. To her, in time, was presented a Dr. Edmund Jackman, “a scholar, my dear, and a progressive politician, and a diplomat, and a man who knows all about the occult. He has just come back from a trip to Roumania.” Dr. Edmund Jackman spent a great deal of time in Lady MacAskival’s London drawing-room, that winter three years gone. In the spring, he was invited to Carnglass, and came for a visit of two months. And then there was another visit, lengthier; and another.
By the end of the year of lengthy visits, Edmund Jackman was wholly master of Lady MacAskival’s mind, or what remained of it; and master, too, of her money, and of Carnglass. Dr. Jackman was useful in many ways. He kept her avaricious London kinsfolk from troubling her. He took her affairs out of the hands of her ineffectual solicitors, and gave them his personal attention. Gradually he dismissed her feckless Island servants, even the farmhands, and reduced household costs, and brought in some hard-featured, but doubtless dependable, men from London and Glasgow, until only old Agnes remained of the former staff. He spent much of her income, too, on “schemes for political education.”
This Mary MacAskival had learnt from the mumbling lips of her old aunt, in that darkened room hung with Spanish leather, listening to the ramblings of that stricken brain, convinced sometimes that she was near to madness herself. This she whispered to Hugh Logan, curled at the other end of the bed. And she had learnt other things from Dr. Jackman himself, and from Royall, and from scraps of servants’ conversation overheard in the passages.
Her solitary years with Lady MacAskival had given the girl an insight into the old woman’s mind and soul, Logan perceived, so complete that she could speak almost for, rather than of, her dying aunt. She understood, and nearly shared, the terrors of that room hung with Spanish leather. And she knew what talents gave Jackman his power over the old woman.
More than all his other services, what made Dr. Jackman indispensable to Lady MacAskival was this: he kept Sir Alastair away from the door of her room. Lady MacAskival always had suspected that Alastair was lurking outside that door, even though she had buried him under the great stone in St. Merin’s Chapel so many years ago. Every day she sent the footman with a message for Alastair to be placed in the tomb at St. Merin’s Chapel, imploring Alastair to forgive her, and to stay up there at the top of Carnglass where he belonged. Yet twice she had glimpsed Alastair, unrelenting, in the narrow passages. He would come back, and gobble at her bedroom door on windy nights, and she lay in dread that one night he might cross the threshold.
Dr. Jackman had saved her from that: he had bound Sir Alastair by a mystical chain, he told Lady MacAskival, and so long as she possessed the loyalty of Dr. Jackman, no tall stern old man, who ought to be in his tomb, would cross the threshold. Of course it was essential to retain the wholehearted loyalty of Dr. Jackman, and that could be secured by agreeing with him in all things. Once or twice, when she had demurred from some plan of his, Dr. Jackman had come to her bedside, with Mr. Royall beside him, and had described in awful detail what would be the consequences if Sir Alastair made his way in. She had fallen into a fit, and old Agnes had been too terrified to speak. At all costs, Dr. Edmund Jackman must be kept in a good humor; and sometimes the costs ran very high. It was a great pity that willful girl Mary did not take to Dr. Jackman.
For months now, Dr. Jackman and Mr. Royall had lived at the Old House all the time, except for brief cruises about the islands. Dr. Jackman demonstrated to Lady MacAskival his control over the risen dead by certain seances in her room. Tables rose, and chairs fell over, and horrid white shapes loomed up—but never, Dr. Jackman promised, the shape of Alastair. And presently Dr. Jackman revealed to her that he always had been in Carnglass; and had been there infinitely long before she, as Miss Ann Robertson, had been married to Colonel Sir Alastair MacAskival. For Dr. Jackman was not simply human. He was a part of Carnglass, and its master from time out of mind. He had been there before the Viking rovers came. He was the Firgower, the Goat-Man. And he saw all things, past, present, and future, through his Third Eye, which quivered in the middle of his forehead. By watching Lady MacAskival with his Third Eye, he could relieve her of all pain, and put her to sleep at will.
Yet it did not seem quite right that Dr. Jackman should marry her niece. He had told Lady MacAskival many times that he must do so; that the thing was ordered by the Presences under the rocks of Carnglass; that thus Carnglass would be his in the eyes of the puny law of men, as well as by the decree of nature. Still, it did not seem right. Mary belonged to the living, not to be a being beyond good and evil. Lady MacAskival dared not deny Dr. Jackman, however; she said only, in great fear and pain, “Then you must ask Mary herself.”
Dr. Jackman did not neglect Miss Mary MacAskival. Upon her he bestowed much valuable time, endeavoring to instruct her in progressive social views and in a proper understanding of occult lore. He had compelled her to come to him in his study at least an hour a day, to listen to his peculiar talk. Almost always he had been quite civil; but once or twice he had threatened her, and then he had been ghastly. He talked politics and necromancy to her, a queer mixture. The one, she thought, was as mad as the other, or perhaps the politics was a little the madder.
“If I had known the least little bit about politics and economics and all that,” she said to Hugh, “Dr. Jackman would have converted me. But I was utterly ignorant, so he could make no impression. I was altogether too stupid.” The politics, so far as Logan could determine from Mary’s imperfect exposition, were Marxist, or a variant thereof. “He has been so eager to have me serve the Party,” she said. “But the Party, so far as I could make out, meant to destroy a great many people to bring about peace everywhere, and meant to make everybody precisely alike so everyone could be perfectly happy, forever and ever. That’s nonsense. You’re a solicitor—or is it a barrister, Hugh?—and you know. I don’t at all want to be like Dr. Jackman, or like Niven the tinker; and I don’t want them to be like me. So after a time I simply stared at Dr. Jackman, and said ‘Indeed?’ now and then, and he grew discouraged. My tactics worked like a bomb.”
“Like a bomb?” asked Hugh Logan, startled.
“Oh, you know—that’s one of the things we said at school, ‘like a bomb.’ Everything good or successful is like a bomb. You know, don’t you?” Sometimes this astounding girl seemed old as the hills, and at other times younger than the fifteen years Jackman had assigned to her. She was a hoyden of sorts, but quite innocent. “Don’t you ever say ‘like a bomb,’ Hugh? But then, I suppose you never attended a girls’ school.”
So Jackman had abandoned his endeavor to enlist Miss MacAskival in The Cause. Yet he had persisted in his instruction in the occult. “He really believes in it all, Hugh. Mr. Royall doesn’t believe, or believes only a little; but Dr. Jackman is stranger than my old aunt. He was shot in the head in Spain—oh, did he tell you that?—and I think that he has been more clever and more dangerous in various ways since he came from the hospital; but also he sees things that no one else sees, and hears sounds that no one else hears. And he has become a part of Carnglass. I mean that. He has read everything that may be read concerning Carnglass; and all the old tales have got into his brain the way romances got into Don Quixote’s head: but so evilly, Hugh. He did not say he was the Firgower simply to frighten my aunt; he believes it. He frightens even Mr. Royall. And then, of a sudden, he will drop that weird talk and begin discussing politics. Or he may become quite sensible, and make plans to scout round the islands, and to keep in touch with people on the mainland, and to send messages to the Continent, and to set off gelignite when he’s ready.”
“Explosives?”
“Oh, yes, he has a crypt full of it; but I’ll tell you of that presently. He didn’t mean me to hear about the explosives, but there are places in my Old House where I can eavesdrop, if I must.” She seemed to take a schoolgirl satisfaction in that art.
Royall, to judge by Mary MacAskival’s description, was what someone once called “the humanitarian with the guillotine.” Wholly devoted to Jackman, he was forever talking of the sufferings of the working classes. But he spoke of the men who served him and Jackman, and sometimes of people in general, as “that scum.” Systematic and humorless, once upon a time he had been a successful civil servant. Then, however, political fanaticism had swallowed him, and there remained of the man only an emaciated body and a hatred of life, which he disguised from himself as hatred of the “expropriating classes.” Mary MacAskival thought that Royall would have snuffed out her life, if it had served his interest—or the Party’s interest—with no more scruple than as if she had been a mouse.
Edmund Jackman was more subtle and interesting. Possibly, Logan thought as he listened to the girl, Jackman once had known the good and had deliberately chosen the evil—and ever after had been haunted by that memory. “Evil, be thou my good.” Fearless and very clever, somewhere early in life he must have taken the sinister track. And never had he contrived to turn back.
“When the horror is upon Dr. Jackman,” Mary was whispering, “I think I would faint, only that he reminds me of Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy tale, and that makes me laugh inside, even though the rest of me is shaking.” The horror came upon him once or twice nearly every day, and then he looked like a damned soul. “I think he is remembering things he has done. Once, when he meant to break my will, he hinted at what he had to do in Spain. I think he killed patients in hospitals with doses of poison, so that they would not tell tales. Perhaps, in the beginning, the people who gave him his orders saw the streak of good in him, and so they hardened him by ordering him to do all the worst things that could be done.” The girl shivered.
After the civil war in Spain, it seemed, Jackman had vanished into eastern Europe; and had reappeared in England for a time during the second World War; and next had turned up in Roumania. There, somehow, he had fallen into disfavor with the people who gave him his orders. Possibly he had gone too far in his measures, having come to love terror for its own sake. Or perhaps he had been chosen as a scapegoat, during a period when there were official pretences of moderation. In any event, he had fled out of Roumania, four years ago, returning to London; and then he had come to Carnglass. Royall, it seemed, had been with Jackman in Roumania, and the two of them had done things there of which they preferred not to speak even to each other. “Royall is like a ghost: I mean that he has no conscience left. But Jackman, I think, has memories of the difference between wrong and right, and so the horror comes upon him.”
Suddenly the girl leaned closer to Logan, who had been about to speak, and put her little hand upon his mouth. “Hush!”—this scarcely more than a hiss. Her ears, attuned to the creaks and echoes of the place, had detected something his had not. Yes: now there were stealthy footfalls in the passage. Someone moved outside the door of the room; seemed to hesitate there; passed on. The girl’s fingers were gripping Logan’s shoulder, and his hand shook as he held his pistol ready. But whatever had been outside was gone elsewhere in the labyrinth of the Old House.
How ever had Mary MacAskival endured, in her solitude, the dread strain of this perilous ordeal, month on month? “I say,” she asked him, abruptly, as if she had read his mind, “do you think I’m mad myself?” He squeezed her little hand for answer. “Sometimes I wonder if I am,” she went on, “for it seems like one unending nightmare: until you came, that is.”
Once Jackman had said to her, “Miss MacAskival, I felicitate you on your strength of mind.” Considering what the man was, he had been almost gentle with her; probably his admiration was genuine. He tolerated no rudeness toward her from any of his rough men.
“I don’t think he is interested in women as most men are,” Mary MacAskival went on. Did she blush in the darkness? “He is in love with power and terror. He wants me only because with me he could have Carnglass a while longer, and because I have money. And, I suppose, because he enjoys crushing other people’s minds. He has tried to crush mine. Had he not been so busy with other things, I believe he would have defeated me long ago.”
So long as her aunt continued to live, Jackman had no urgent motive to compel the girl to marry him: his ascendancy over Lady MacAskival gave him Carnglass and enough money. But as Lady MacAskival sank, now rarely rising from her bed, the day grew near when Jackman must marry the girl, or else run the danger of exposure and ruin.
“Once I was rash,” Mary said. “I told him and Royall that I had tolerated them only because they held my aunt’s life as security. I said that when she was gone, I’d tell everything I knew to the police.
“Dr. Jackman smiled a horrid smile. ‘Who would believe a mad girl?’ was what he said. And then he told me that if he should fail to persuade me to remain loyal to him, he and Royall might do things to me—‘painful measures, Miss MacAskival, painful for all of us’—that would make me into a different person, so that I could never be the same again. There were ‘special mental disciplines,’ he told me, and ‘certain shock treatments.’ It would be ever so much pleasanter if I simply did as he told me to. And he could be sure that I would do as he wished if I were to marry him. That was once when the horror came upon him.”
Here, at last, the girl burst into suppressed sobs. Logan’s arm went round her shoulders. “Sometimes I have thought,” she mumbled, “that I ought to give way. So much easier! But I suppose I was too proud.”
The fierce old blood of the chieftains of MacAskival, Logan thought, was strong in her; she was a sport in more ways than one. It would be a pleasure for him, if ever he got the chance—which, at the moment, seemed slim—to settle accounts on her behalf with Edmund Jackman.
Why, until she wrote to Duncan MacAskival, had she made no attempt to expose Jackman, or to escape? Because it was only gradually she had come to understand what Jackman and Royall were after; and she had known, too, that her aunt’s life was in their hands, and that they would not hesitate to snuff it out if they were pushed. From the moment Jackman established himself in the Old House, it had become increasingly difficult to send any message out of the island; a fortnight ago, it had become virtually impossible; and since Donley’s flight, she had not been permitted even to leave the house.
And there was another reason: that room in the cellars full of explosives. She thought that Jackman was eager to use them, if there were any chance for it, to destroy certain mysterious things that the government was building in the Outer Isles; but Royall was trying to restrain him. “Dr. Jackman,” she had overheard him say once, “you know what exceeding instructions has brought us already. Until word comes from Bruhl....” Royall was willing, she suspected, to rest content with gathering what information they could about those mysterious projects, and transmitting it to someone in London. But in Jackman there was some terrible compulsion to blow everything apart. “If he could, I do believe, he would explode all the world into little bits.”
So there was this: if Jackman were brought to bay, and had the opportunity, very probably he would set off the gelignite in the crypt. The Old House would go, and everyone in it; and for Mary MacAskival, the Old House and Carnglass were the center of the universe. “I know nothing about politics,” she told Logan, rather apologetically. “I suppose Jackman and Royall are traitors, and might do terrible harm to the country. But Carnglass is my country. I think of the Old House first.” Jackman would destroy himself and everyone in the Old House, almost certainly, if he despaired. “What was it the old Greek said: ‘When I am dead, let earth be mixed with fire’? I learnt that at school. Well, that is how Dr. Jackman thinks.”
She had lived with the terror, hoping vaguely that Jackman’s plans might alter and he and his men go away; that the authorities in London or Glasgow might discover the scheme and descend before Jackman could act. It was only as her aunt had sunk toward her end that the girl had been roused to some plan of action, what with her own imminent danger. And so she had got off the note to Duncan MacAskival, a schoolgirl’s design; yet it had succeeded so far as to bring Logan to her. “Until you came, I had no one at all to talk with.” Her sobbing broke out again.
Jackman and Royall, she was convinced, had no notion of what she had done or of Logan’s real identity. Once Logan had told her of his encounters with Dowie and Gare, she said that Duncan MacAskival’s cablegrams could not have reached Carnglass. The storms, and the fortunate burning of the boats, had prevented that. There was a wireless in the Old House, and Jackman sometimes used it, cautiously, in sending messages in code to people on the mainland; but some ten days before Lagg and Donley disappeared, part of the wireless set had slipped out of sight. “They thought Lagg, who was acting strangely, must have stolen it,” she said. “He didn’t. I did.” This girl was a paragon. “I do believe that if they knew who you are,” she went on, “they would make away with you, just as they did with Mr. Lagg”—for Logan had told her, hurriedly, what Donley had said of Lagg’s end.
In a very little while, Logan realized of a sudden, it would be dawn; and Mary MacAskival must be gone from his room before then. “Mary,” he said, “what is this about Lagg? Could he be alive? Could that fellow Rab really have seen him? Who is outside this house? Is it Donley, or is it only these fellows’ imagination?”
She hesitated. “I do not know,” she said. Was she concealing something? “Perhaps I ought to—but there isn’t time now. Listen: someone’s stirring already, somewhere below. There’s so much more to tell you, but it must wait. Jackman will keep us apart if he can, but perhaps he’ll be out with the men today, hunting for Donley. Now I must run.” There were, indeed, the first faint flushes of the Hebridean spring dawn visible through the windows. She leaned toward Logan. “You may kiss my cheek, if you like, for being a brave man.” Logan did that, but he said, “You seemed to be friendlier yesterday.” She sprang up, averting her face, and went to the door, and pressed an ear against it; then she opened it a crack, and peered out; then waved a little hand, and slipped through, and was gone. With this sudden vanishing, Logan almost doubted that the strange little creature ever had crouched sobbing beside him.
Logan lay awake on his bed after that, as the sun came up, full of dreads—more, perhaps, for the girl than for himself, but sufficiently concerned for Number One. About seven, there was a rap at his door, and Tompkins, that pillar of varnished iniquity, brought him morning tea. Logan would not have been surprised to be knifed as he took the tray, but Tompkins said only, “Foggy again today, sir,” and closed the door behind him. Leaving the tea untasted, Logan shaved with the hot water Tompkins had brought, hurriedly dressed, and found his way downstairs to the book-lined corridor, where for a few minutes he idled about, with a feeling of complete helplessness. Then Royall appeared from somewhere, glancing at him suspiciously; but Royall was civil enough, in his deathly way, and told him that he could breakfast in the study in the tower.
He breakfasted alone. Of Mary, there was no sign; and Tompkins told him that “Dr. Jackman and Mr. Royall and some of the men have gone out, sir, hunting that Donley person.” The breakfast was meagre, porridge and a scrambled egg of sorts—powdered egg, Logan thought. In a besieged house, supplies soon ran low. Outside the small windows, the mist clung to the gray stone. He would have liked to pry into the drawers of desk and table, but Tompkins or someone else might enter at any moment. His pistol was invisible under his heavy tweed jacket; that was something. How would it all end? He was a pawn in this deep game, and presently some one would sweep him off the board, unless Donley had got to the mainland and delivered his note to the police. And even if a police-launch should put in at Askival harbor, could that devil Jackman be prevented from sending everyone in the house up in smoke? To ponder these things, in a deceptive calm, really was the strangest part of the nightmare into which he had got himself.
About half-past eight, Mary MacAskival ran into the study—shod, for a change, and her face glowing with excitement. The nerves that girl must have! Logan put down his pipe, not knowing whether he was expected to shake hands or to kiss her; but she gave him time for neither. “Hugh,” she said, “Hugh Logan, I saw them from my window! Jackman and Royall and the others: they’re bringing something up from the shore, dragging it. Come down with me, and we’ll go out to meet them.”
Through that immense house they ran, out into the enclosed courtyard of the Victorian block. By the big door, or rather gate, three of the men were standing: Tompkins, and Anderson the footman (who looked unpleasantly like his Gallowgate brother), and a dark grinning man, supple and compact, who must be Ferd Caggia, the cook. A rifle lay at an angle against the wall by the door, back of Anderson. Caggia had just passed an odd green bottle—was it the old rum?—to Anderson, who took a swig from it. The three men stared at Logan and the girl, Anderson leering as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Mary MacAskival marched straight up to the door, Logan by her side, she quite ignoring the men until she stood right before Anderson, who barred the way. Yes, it was rum Anderson smelt of. “Open the door,” she said, calmly. “Mr. Logan and I are going out to meet Dr. Jackman.”
“What’ll ye gie me if I do?” Anderson’s words came thickly; the man was drunk. Anderson winked at Tompkins and Ferd for approval.
“Be good enough to open it.” Mary MacAskival’s green eyes glittered.
“Not for a young hizzie, not me.” Anderson laughed harshly, leaning against the door. Mary MacAskival reached past him and pulled at the bolt; it slid back.
Then Anderson took her round the waist, staring defiantly at Logan. “Ye’ll gie me something, whether I let ye oot or no, ma fine leddie.” With one raw fist, he pulled at the girl’s jacket. Logan took a step forward and gave Anderson the back of his hand.
Caught off balance, Anderson crashed against the door. His big head jerked back, his arm flew away from the girl, and he fell.
The next second, Anderson was up from the flagstones, and everything happened at once. “Davie, you know what Dr....” Tompkins began, in mild remonstrance. Ferd Caggia glided to one side, still grinning, as if he were a spectator at a match for his especial amusement. And tall Davie Anderson, rising, had grasped the rifle; already its muzzle was swinging upward, toward Logan, and there was killing in Anderson’s tipsy eyes.
Logan’s reaction was instinctive and the product of his army years, not prudential. Very swiftly, he sent his hand into his armpit and flashed out the little pistol. “Anderson,” he said, distinctly, “don’t move. Don’t move at all.” The girl stood fixed by the unbolted door, her eyes wide, very pale.
Anderson’s mouth opened; the rifle in his grip sank toward the ground. Out of the corner of his eye, Logan saw Caggia glide smoothly toward his back, and saw Caggia’s hands slip down toward something protruding just above his belt; but still Caggia smiled. “Caggia,” said Logan, “bide where you are, man.” Tompkins quivered.
Then, behind Anderson, the big door opened, and Dr. Jackman stepped softly in, his eyes sweeping across the little tableau. Without hesitation, Jackman snatched the rifle from Anderson’s hands and dealt the footman a terrible blow in the jaw with the butt of it. The man fell, stunned, and a tooth flew out of his mouth as he struck the flagstones. Behind Jackman, Royall entered; and after him, two more men, dragging something, and staring at the tableau as they came.
Jackman kicked Anderson in the face. “I told you, you ape, to mind your manners. Caggia, get this fellow to his quarters. Powert, relieve Anderson on duty at the door”—this to one of the men behind him. “Mr. Logan, I was not aware that junior bank-clerks carried revolvers on their social calls.” Jackman’s words were smooth, but his face was twisted cruelly. Rumpelstiltskin, Logan thought. “Mr. Logan,” Jackman went on, even more suavely, “now that I have disposed of Anderson, you have no more need for that pistol. Be good enough to give it to me.” Jackman held out his hand.
Royall was beside Jackman now, carrying a rifle; and Caggia was out of Logan’s line of vision, probably right at his unprotected back; and the girl, surrounded by men, was exposed to any shooting; and the odds were too great. Logan extended his palm, with the little pistol lying upon it, toward Jackman.
Then Royall drew in his breath. “Dr. Jackman,” he said, hoarsely, “see what gun that is!”
Plucking the pistol deftly out of Logan’s hand, Jackman examined it. “Quite right, Royall,” he observed. “It’s Donley’s gun Meg, isn’t it? Mr. Logan, my apologies: I was quite deceived by you—an excellent performance on your part. You are a young man of talents. After you took the gun from Donley, did you shoot him or drown him?”
Only then did Logan see what the men had dragged into the courtyard. It was the battered dead body of Donley, still streaming with water. “Don’t look, my dear,” said Jackman to Mary, considerately. “A bit of flotsam, washed up near the pier.”