"By whom?" she asked quietly.
"By you a little and by Tiel very much!"
"How have I deceived you?"
I looked at her a trifle foolishly. After all, I ought to have realised that she must have had some curious adventure in getting into the islands. She had never told me she hadn"t, and now I had merely found out what it was.
"You never told me about your governess adventure--or Mr Craigie--or that you were called Holland," I said rather lamely.
She merely laughed.
"You never asked me about my adventures, or I should have. They were not very discreditable after all."
"Well, anyhow," I said, "Tiel has deceived me grossly, and I am going to wring an explanation out of him!"
She laid her hand beseechingly on my arm.
"Don"t quarrel with him!" she said earnestly. "It will do no good. We may think what we like of some of the things he does, but we have got to trust him!"
"Trust him! But how can I? He told me he preached last Sunday,--I find it was a lie. He said n.o.body in the parish suspected anything,--in consequence of his not preaching, I find they are all "talking." He mismanaged your coming here so badly that if old Craigie weren"t next door to an imbecile we should all have been arrested days ago. How can I trust him now?"
"Say nothing to him now," she said in a low voice. "Wait till to-morrow! I think he will tell you then very frankly."
There was something so significant and yet beseeching in her voice that I consented, though not very graciously.
"I can hardly picture Herr Tiel being very "frank"!" I replied. "But if you ask me----"
I bowed my obedience, and then catching up her hand pressed it to my lips, saying--
"I trust you absolutely!"
When I looked up I caught a look in her eye that I could make nothing of at all. It was beyond question very kind, yet there seemed to be something sorrowful too. It made her look so ravishing that I think I would have taken her in my arms there and then, had not Tiel returned at that moment.
"Well," asked Eileen, "what did you tell Mr Craigie?"
"I said that you were secretly married to Mr Wilson, whose parents would cut him off without a penny if they suspected the entanglement, and this was the only plan by which you could spend a few days together. Of course I swore him to secrecy."
For a moment I hesitated whether to resent this liberty, or to feel a little pleased, or to be amused. Eileen laughed gaily, and so I laughed too. And that was the end (so far) of my afternoon adventure.
III.
THURSDAY NIGHT.
I went up to my room early in the evening. Eileen had been very silent, and about nine o"clock she bade us good-night and left us. To sit alone with Tiel, feeling as I did and yet bound by a promise not to upbraid him, was intolerable, and so I left the parlour a few minutes after she did. As I went down the pa.s.sage to the back, my way lit only by the candle I was carrying, I was struck with a sound I had heard in that house before, only never so loudly. It was the droning of the wind through the crevices of some door, and the whining melancholy note in the stillness of that house of divided plotters and confidences withheld, did nothing to raise my spirits.
When I reached my room I realised what had caused the droning. The wind had changed to a new quarter, and as another consequence my chimney was smoking badly and the room was filled with a pungent blue cloud. It is curious how events arise as consequences of trifling and utterly different circ.u.mstances. I tried opening my door and then my window, but still the fire smoked and the cloud refused to disperse.
Then I had an inspiration. I have mentioned a large cupboard. It was so large as almost to be a minute room, and I remembered that it had a skylight in its sloping roof. I opened this, and as the room at once began to clear, I left it open.
And then I paced the floor and smoked and thought. What was to be made of these very disquieting events? Clearly Tiel was either a much less capable and clever man than he was reputed--a bit of a fraud in fact--or else he was carrying his fondness for mystery and for suddenly springing brilliant surprises, like conjuring tricks, upon people, to the most extreme lengths. If he were really carrying out a cunning deliberate policy in not preaching last Sunday, good and well, but it was intolerable that he should have deceived me about it. It seemed quite a feasible theory to suppose that he had got out of conducting the service on some excuse in order that he might be asked to stay longer and preach next Sunday instead. But then he had deliberately told me he had preached, and that the people had been so pleased that they had invited him to preach again. It sounded like a schoolboy"s boastfulness!
Of course if he were the sort of man who would (like myself) have drawn the line at conducting a bogus religious service, I could quite well understand his getting out of it somehow. But when I remembered his tale of the murder of the real Mr Burnett, I dismissed that hypothesis.
Besides, why deceive me in any case? I daresay I should have felt a little anxious as to the result if he had evaded the duty he had professed to come up and perform, but would he care twopence about that? I did not believe it.
And then his method of getting Eileen into the islands, though ingenious enough (if not very original), had been marred by the most inconceivable recklessness. Surely some better scheme could have been devised for getting her out of the Craigies" house than a sudden flight without a word of explanation--and a flight, moreover, to another house in the same island where gossip would certainly spread in the course of a very few days. Of course Mr Craigie"s extraordinary character gave the scheme a chance it never deserved, but was Tiel really so diabolically clever that he actually counted on that? How could he have known so much of Craigie"s character? Indeed, that explanation was inconceivable.
And then again, why had Eileen consented to such a wild plan? That neither of them should have realised its drawbacks seemed quite extraordinary. There must be some deep cunning about it that escaped me altogether. If it were not so, we were lost indeed! And so I resolved to believe that there was more wisdom in the scheme than I realised, and simply leave it at that.
Thereupon I sat down and wrote for an hour or two to keep me from thinking further on the subject, and at last about midnight I resolved to go to bed. The want of fresh air had been troubling me greatly, and it struck me that a safe way of getting a little would be to put my head through the open skylight for a few minutes. It was quite dark in the cupboard, so that no light could escape; and I brought a chair along, stood on it, and looked out, with my head projecting from the midst of the sloping slates, and a beautiful cool breeze refreshing my face.
So cool was the wind that there was evidently north in it, and this was confirmed by the sky, which literally blazed with stars. I could see dimly but pretty distinctly the outbuildings at the back of the house, and the road that led to the highway, and the dark rim of hills beyond.
Suddenly I heard the back door gently open, and still as I had stood on my chair before, I became like a statue now. In a moment the figure of Tiel appeared, and from a flash of light I saw that he carried his electric torch. He walked slowly towards the highroad till he came to a low wall that divided the fields at the side, and then from behind the wall up jumped the form of a man, illuminated for an instant by a flash from the torch, and then just distinguishable in the gloom.
I held my breath and waited for the crack of a pistol-shot, gently withdrawing my head a little, and prepared to rush down and take part in the fray. But there was not a sound save a low murmur of voices, far too distant and too hushed for me to catch a syllable of what they were saying. And then after two or three minutes I saw Tiel turn and start to stroll back again. But at that moment my observations ceased, for I stepped hastily down from my chair and stood breathlessly waiting for him to run up to my room.
He was quiet almost as a mouse. I had not heard him pa.s.s through the house as he went out, and I barely heard a sound now as he returned.
But I heard enough to know that he had gone off to bed, and did not propose to pay me a visit.
"What in Heaven"s name did it mean?" I asked myself.
A dozen wild and alarming theories flashed through my mind, and then at last I saw a ray of comfort. Perhaps this was only a rendezvous with Ashington, or some subordinate in his pay. It was not a very brilliant ray, for the more I thought over it, the more unlikely it seemed that a rendezvous should take place at that spot and in that inconvenient fashion, when there was nothing to prevent Ashington or his emissary from entering the house by the front door and holding their conversation in the parlour. However, it seemed absolutely the only solution, short of supposing that the house was watched, and so I accepted it for what it was worth in the meantime, and turned into bed.
My sleep was very broken, and in the early morning I felt so wide awake, and my thoughts were so restlessly busy, that I jumped up and resolved to have another peep out of the skylight. Very quietly I climbed on the chair and put my head through again. There was the man, pacing slowly away from me, from the wall towards the highroad! I studied his back closely, and of two things I felt certain: he was not a sailor of any sort--officer or bluejacket--and yet he walked like a drilled man. A tall, square-shouldered fellow, in dark plain clothes, who walks with a short step and a stiff back--what does that suggest?
A policeman of some sort--constable or detective, no doubt about that!
At the road he turned, evidently to stroll back again, and down went my head, I did not venture to look out again, nor was there any need. I dressed quickly, and this time put on my uniform. This precaution seemed urgently--and ominously--called for! And then I slipped downstairs, went to the front hall, and up the other stairs, and quietly called "Tiel!" For I confess I was not disposed to sit for two or three hours waiting for information.
At my second cry he appeared at his bedroom door, prompt as usual.
"What"s the matter?" he asked.
"Who did you speak to last night?" I asked point-blank.
He looked at me for an instant and then smiled.
"Good heavens, it wasn"t you, was it?" he inquired.
"Me!" I exclaimed.
"I wondered how you knew otherwise."
I told him briefly.
"And now tell me exactly what happened!" I demanded.
"Certainly," said he quietly. "I went out, as I often do last thing at night, to see that the coast is clear, and this time I found it wasn"t.