“I gather,” the secretary was saying, “that you have excellent reasons of your own for regarding this man as a dangerous character.”

  “I regard him as a rotter and I always did,” replied Hume in a rather sulky and reluctant manner. “I did have a bit of a kick up with him last night, but it didn’t make any difference to my views, nor to his either, I should think.”

  “It seems to me it might make a considerable difference,” persisted Meade. “Isn’t it true that he went away cursing not only you but especially the Governor? And he went away down the hill towards the place where the Governor was shot. It’s true he wasn’t shot till a good time after, and nobody seems to have seen his assailant; but he might have hung about in the woods and then crept out along the wall at dusk.”

  “Having helped himself to a gun from the gun-tree that grows wild in these woods, I suppose,” said the tutor sardonically. “I swear he had no gun or pistol on him when I threw him into the prickly pear.”

  “You seem to be making the speech for the defence,” said the secretary with a faint sneer. “But you yourself said he was a pretty doubtful character.”

  “I don’t think he is in the least a doubtful character,” replied the tutor in his stolid way. “I haven’t the least doubt about him myself. I think he is a loose, lying, vicious braggart and humbug; a selfish, sensual mountebank. So I’m pretty sure that he didn’t shoot the Governor, whoever else did.”

  Colonel Hayter cocked a shrewd eye at the speaker and spoke himself for the first time.

  “Ah — and what do you mean by that exactly?”

  “I mean what I say,” answered Hume. “It’s exactly because he’s that sort of rascal that he didn’t commit that sort of rascality. Agitators of his type never do things themselves; they incite other people; they hold meetings and send round the hat and then vanish, to do the same thing somewhere else. It’s a jolly different sort of person that’s left to take the risks of playing Brutus or Charlotte Corday. But I confess there are two other little bits of evidence, which I think clear the fellow completely.”

  He put two fingers in his waistcoat pocket and slowly and thoughtfully drew out a round, flat piece of glass with a broken string.

  “I picked this up on the spot where we struggled,” he said. “It’s Gregory’s eyeglass; and if you look through it you won’t see anything, except the fact that a man who wanted a lens as strong as that could see next to nothing without it. He certainly couldn’t see to shoot as far as the end of the wall from the sycamore, which is whereabouts they think the shot must have been fired from.”

  “There may be something in that,” said Hayter, “though the man might have had another glass, of course. You said you had a second reason for thinking him innocent.”

  “The second reason,” said Hume, “is that Sir Harry Smythe has just arrested him.”

  “What on earth do you mean?” asked Meade sharply. “Why, you brought us the message from Sir Harry yourself.”

  “I’m afraid I brought it rather imperfectly,” said the other, in a dull voice. “It’s quite true Sir Harry has arrested the doctor, but he’d arrested him before he heard of the attempt on Lord Tallboys. He had just arrested him for holding a seditious meeting five miles away at Pentapolis, at which he made an eloquent speech, which must have reached its beautiful peroration about the time when Tallboys was being shot at, here at the corner of the road.”

  “Good Lord!” cried Meade, staring, “you seem to know a lot about this business.”

  The rather sullen tutor lifted his head and looked straight at the secretary with a steady but rather baffling gaze.

  “Perhaps I do know a little about it,” he said. “Anyhow, I’m quite sure Gregory’s got a good alibi.”

  Barbara had listened to this curious conversation with a confused and rather painful attention; but as the case against Gregory seemed to be crumbling away, a new emotion of her own began to work its way to the surface. She began to realize that she had wanted Gregory to be made responsible, not out of any particular malice towards him, but because it would explain and dispose of the whole incident, and dismiss it from her mind along with another disturbing but hardly conscious thought. Now that the criminal had again become a nameless shadow, he began to haunt her mind with dreadful hints of identity and she had spasms of fear, in which that shadowy figure was suddenly fitted with a face.

  As has been already noted, Barbara Traill was a little morbid about her brother and the tragedy of the Traills. She was an omnivorous reader; she had been the sort of schoolgirl who is always found in a corner with a book. And this means generally, under modern conditions, that she read everything she could not understand some time before she read anything that she could. Her mind was a hotch-potch of popular science about heredity and psycho-analysis, and the whole trend of her culture tended to make her pessimistic about everything. People in this mood never have any difficulty in finding reasons for their worst fears. And it was enough for her that, the very morning before her uncle was shot, he had been publicly insulted, and even crazily threatened, by her brother.

  That sort of psychological poison works itself deeper and deeper into the brain. Barbara’s broodings branched and thickened like a dark forest; and did not stop with the thought that a dull, undeveloped schoolboy was really a maniac and a murderer. The unnatural generalizations of the books she had read pushed her farther and farther. If her brother, why not her sister? If her sister, why not herself? Here memory exaggerated and distorted the distracted demeanour of her sister in the flower-garden, till she could almost fancy that Olive had torn up the flowers with her teeth. As is always the case in such unbalanced worry, all sorts of accidents took on a terrible significance. Her sister had said, “Is there not something the matter with all of us?” What could that mean but such a family curse? Hume himself had said he was not the only mad person present. What else could that mean? Even Dr. Gregory had declared after talking to her, that her race was degenerate; did he mean that her family was degenerate? After all, he was a doctor, if he was a wicked one. Each of these hateful coincidences gave her a spiritual shock, so that she almost cried aloud when she thought of it. Meanwhile the rest of her mind went round and round in the iron circle of all such logic from hell. She told herself again and again that she was being morbid, and then told herself again and again that she was only morbid because she was mad. But she was not in the least mad, she was only young, and thousands of young people go through such a phase of nightmare, and nobody knows or helps.

  But she was moved with a curious impulse in the search for help, and it was the same impulse that had driven her back across the moonlit glade to the wooden hut upon the hill. She was actually mounting that hill again, when she met John Hume coming down.

  She poured out all her domestic terrors and suspicions in a flood, as she had poured out all her patriotic doubts and protests, with a confused confidence which rested on no defined reason or relation and yet was sure of itself.

  “So there it is,” she said at the end of her impetuous monologue. “I began by being quite sure that poor Tom had done it. But by this time I feel as if I might have done it myself.”

  “Well, that’s logical enough,” agreed Hume. “It’s about as sensible to say that you are guilty as that Tom is. And about as sensible to say the Archbishop of Canterbury is guilty as either of you.”

  She attempted to explain her highly scientific guesses about heredity, and their effect was more marked. They succeeded at least in arousing this large and slow person to a sort of animation.

  “Now the devil take all doctors and scientists,” he cried, “or rather the devil take all novelists and newspaper-men who talk about what even the doctors don’t understand! People abuse the old nurses for frightening children with bogies which pretty soon became a joke. What about the new nurses who let children frighten themselves with all the black bogies they are supposed to take seriously? My dear girl, there is nothing the matter with your brother, any more than with you. He’s only what they call a protected neurotic, which is their long-winded way of saying he has an extra skin that the Public School varnish won’t stick on, but runs off like water off a duck’s back. So much the better for him, as likely as not, in the long run. But even suppose he did remain a little more like a child than the rest of us. Is there anything particularly horrible about a child? Do you shudder when you think of your dog, merely because he’s happy and fond of you and yet can’t do the forty-eighth proposition of Euclid? Being a dog is not a disease. Being a child is not a disease. Even remaining a child is not a disease; don’t you sometimes wish we could all remain children?”

  She was of the sort that grapples with notions and suggestions one after another, as they come, and she stood silent, but her mind was busy like a mill. It was he who spoke again, and more lightly.

  “It’s like what we were saying about making examples. I think the world is much too solemn and severe about punishments; it would be far better if it were ruled like a nursery. People don’t want penal servitude and execution and all the rest. What most people want is to have their ears boxed or be sent to bed. What fun it would be to take an unscrupulous millionaire and make him stand in the corner! Such an appropriate penalty.”

  When she spoke again there was in her tones something of relief and a renewed curiosity.

  “What do you do with Tom?” she asked, “and what’s the meaning of all those funny triangles?”

  “I play the fool,” he replied gravely. “What he wants is to have his attention aroused and fixed; and foolery always does that for children; very obvious foolery. Don’t you know how they have always liked such images as the cow jumping over the moon? It’s the educational effect of riddles. Well, I have to be the riddle. I have to keep him wondering what I mean or what I shall do next. It means being an ass; but it’s the only way.”

  “Yes,” she answered slowly, “there’s something awfully rousing about riddles . . . all sorts of riddles. Even that old parson with his riddles out of Revelations makes you feel he has something to live for . . . by the way, I believe we promised to go to tea there this afternoon; I’ve been in a state to forget everything.”

  Even as she spoke she saw her sister Olive coming up the path attired in the unmistakable insignia of one paying calls, and accompanied by her sturdy husband, the Deputy Governor, who did not often attend these social functions.

  They all went down the road together and Barbara was vaguely surprised to see ahead of them on the same road, not only the sleek and varnished figure of Mr. Meade the secretary, but also the more angular outline of Colonel Hayter. The clergyman’s invitation had evidently been a comprehensive one.

  The Rev. Ernest Snow lived in a very modest manner in one of the little houses that had been erected in a row for the minor officials of the Governorate. It was at the back of this line of villas that the path ran along the garden wall and past the sycamore to the bunch of olives and finally to the corner where the Governor had fallen by the mysterious bullet. That path fringed the open desert and had all the character of a rude, beaten path for the desert pilgrims. But walking on the other side, in front of the row of houses, a traveller might well have imagined himself in any London suburb, so regular were the ornamental railings and so identical the porticos and the small front-garden plots. Nothing but a number distinguished the house of the clergyman, and the entrance to it was so prim and narrow that the group of guests from the Governorate had some difficulty in squeezing through it.

  Mr. Snow bowed over Olive’s hand with a ceremony that seemed to make his white hair a ghost of eighteenth-century powder, but also with something else that seemed at first a shade more difficult to define. It was something that went with the lowered voice and lifted hand of his profession at certain moments. His face was composed, but it would almost seem deliberately composed; and in spite of his grieved tone his eyes were very bright and steady. Barbara suddenly realized that he was conducting a funeral, and she was not far out.

  “I need not tell you, Lady Smythe,” he said in the same soft accents, “what sympathy we all feel in this terrible hour. If only from a public standpoint, the death of your distinguished uncle—”

  Olive Smythe struck in with a rather wild stare.

  “But my uncle isn’t dead, Mr. Snow. I know they said so at first, but he only got a shot in his leg and he is trying to limp about already.”

  A shock of transformation passed over the clergyman’s face, too quick for most eyes to follow; it seemed to Barbara that his jaw dropped and when it readjusted itself, it was in a grin of utterly artificial congratulation.

  “My dear lady,” he breathed, “for this relief—”

  He looked round a little vacantly at the furniture. Whether the Rev. Ernest Snow had remembered to prepare tea at tea-time, was not yet quite clear, but the preparations he had made seemed to be of a less assuaging sort. The little tables were loaded with large books, many of them lying open, and these were mostly traced with sprawling plans and designs, mostly architectural or generally archæological, in some cases apparently astronomical or astrological, but giving as a whole a hazy impression of a magician’s spells or a library of the black art.

  “Apocalyptic studies,” he stammered, “a hobby of mine. I believed that my calculations . . . . These things are written for our instruction.”

  And then Barbara felt a final stab of astonishment and alarm. For two facts became instantly and simultaneously vivid to her consciousness. The first was that the Rev. Ernest Snow had been reposing upon the fact of the Governor’s death with something very like a solemn satisfaction, and had heard of his recovery with something quite other than relief. And the second was that he spoke with the same voice that had once uttered the same words, out of the shadow of the sycamore, that sounded in her ears like a wild cry for blood.

  V

  THE THEORY OF MODERATE MURDER

  Colonel Hayter, the Chief of the Police, was moving towards the inner rooms with a motion that was casual but not accidental. Barbara indeed had rather wondered why such an official had accompanied them on a purely social visit, and she now began to entertain dim and rather incredible possibilities. The clergyman had turned away to one of the bookstands and was turning over the leaves of a volume with feverish excitement; it seemed almost that he was muttering to himself. He was a little like a man looking up a quotation on which he has been challenged.

  “I hear you have a very nice garden here, Mr. Snow,” said Hayter. “I should rather like to look at your garden.”

  Snow turned a startled face over his shoulder; he seemed at first unable to detach his mind from his preoccupation; then he said sharply but a little shakily, “There’s nothing to see in my garden; nothing at all. I was just wondering—”

  “Do you mind if I have a squint at it?” asked Hayter indifferently, and shouldered his way to the back door. There was something resolute about his action that made the others trail vaguely after him, hardly knowing what they did. Hume, who was just behind the detective, said to him in an undertone: “What do you expect to find growing in the old man’s garden?”

  Hayter looked over his shoulder with a grim geniality.

  “Only a particular sort of tree you were talking of lately,” he said.

  But when they went out into the neat and narrow strip of back garden, the only tree in sight was the sycamore spreading over the desert path, and Barbara remembered with another subconscious thrill that this was the spot from which, as the experts calculated, the bullet had been fired.

  Hayter strode across the lawn and was seen stooping over something in the tangle of tropical plants under the wall. When he straightened himself again he was seen to be holding a long and heavy cylindrical object.

  “Here is something fallen from the gun-tree you said grew in these parts,” he said grimly. “Funny that the gun should be found in Mr. Snow’s back-garden, isn’t it? Especially as it’s a double-barrelled gun with one barrel discharged.”

  Hume was staring at the big gun in the detective’s hand, and for the first time his usually stolid face wore an expression of amazement and even consternation.

  “Damn it all!” he said softly, “I forgot about that. What a rotten fool I am!”

  Few except Barbara even heard his strange whisper, and nobody could make any sense of it. Suddenly he swung round and addressed the whole company aloud, almost as if they were a public meeting.

  “Look here,” he said, “do you know what this means? This means that poor old Snow, who is probably still fussing over his hieroglyphics, is going to be charged with attempted murder.”

  “It’s a bit premature,” said Hayter, “and some would say you were interfering in our job, Mr. Hume. But I owe you something for putting us right about the other fellow, when I admit we were wrong.”

  “You were wrong about the other fellow and you are wrong about this fellow,” said Hume, frowning savagely. “But I happened to be able to offer you evidence in the other case. What evidence can I give now?”

  “Why should you have any evidence to give?” asked the other, very much puzzled.

  “Well, I have,” said Hume, “and I jolly well don’t want to give it.” He was silent for a moment and then broke out in a sort of fury: “Blast it all, can’t you see how silly it is to drag in that silly old man? Don’t you see he’d only fallen in love with his own prophecies of disaster, and was a bit put off when they didn’t come true after all?”