John Silence Stories · Case III (2/5) (1/4)

I

By some means which I never could fathom, John Silence always contrived to keep the compartment to himself, and as the train had a clear run of two hours before the first stop, there was ample time to go over the preliminary facts of the case. He had telephoned to me that very morning, and even through the disguise of the miles of wire the thrill of incalculable adventure had sounded in his voice.

“As if it were an ordinary country visit,” he called, in reply to my question; “and don’t forget to bring your gun.”

“With blank cartridges, I suppose?” for I knew his rigid principles with regard to the taking of life, and guessed that the guns were merely for some obvious purpose of disguise.

Then he thanked me for coming, mentioned the train, snapped down the receiver, and left me, vibrating with the excitement of anticipation, to do my packing. For the honour of accompanying Dr. John Silence on one of his big cases was what many would have considered an empty honour⁠—and risky. Certainly the adventure held all manner of possibilities, and I arrived at Waterloo with the feelings of a man who is about to embark on some dangerous and peculiar mission in which the dangers he expects to run will not be the ordinary dangers to life and limb, but of some secret character difficult to name and still more difficult to cope with.

“The Manor House has a high sound,” he told me, as we sat with our feet up and talked, “but I believe it is little more than an overgrown farmhouse in the desolate heather country beyond D⁠⸺, and its owner, Colonel Wragge, a retired soldier with a taste for books, lives there practically alone, I understand, with an elderly invalid sister. So you need not look forward to a lively visit, unless the case provides some excitement of its own.”

“Which is likely?”

By way of reply he handed me a letter marked “Private.” It was dated a week ago, and signed “Yours faithfully, Horace Wragge.”

“He heard of me, you see, through Captain Anderson,” the doctor explained modestly, as though his fame were not almost worldwide; “you remember that Indian obsession case⁠—”

I read the letter. Why it should have been marked private was difficult to understand. It was very brief, direct, and to the point. It referred by way of introduction to Captain Anderson, and then stated quite simply that the writer needed help of a peculiar kind and asked for a personal interview⁠—a morning interview, since it was impossible for him to be absent from the house at night. The letter was dignified even to the point of abruptness, and it is difficult to explain how it managed to convey to me the impression of a strong man, shaken and perplexed. Perhaps the restraint of the wording, and the mystery of the affair had something to do with it; and the reference to the Anderson case, the horror of which lay still vivid in my memory, may have touched the sense of something rather ominous and alarming. But, whatever the cause, there was no doubt that an impression of serious peril rose somehow out of that white paper with the few lines of firm writing, and the spirit of a deep uneasiness ran between the words and reached the mind without any visible form of expression.

“And when you saw him⁠—?” I asked, returning the letter as the train rushed clattering noisily through Clapham Junction.

“I have not seen him,” was the reply. “The man’s mind was charged to the brim when he wrote that; full of vivid mental pictures. Notice the restraint of it. For the main character of his case psychometry could be depended upon, and the scrap of paper his hand has touched is sufficient to give to another mind⁠—a sensitive and sympathetic mind⁠—clear mental pictures of what is going on. I think I have a very sound general idea of his problem.”

“So there may be excitement, after all?”

John Silence waited a moment before he replied.

“Something very serious is amiss there,” he said gravely, at length. “Someone⁠—not himself, I gather⁠—has been meddling with a rather dangerous kind of gunpowder. So⁠—yes, there may be excitement, as you put it.”

“And my duties?” I asked, with a decidedly growing interest. “Remember, I am your ‘assistant.’ ”

“Behave like an intelligent confidential secretary. Observe everything, without seeming to. Say nothing⁠—nothing that means anything. Be present at all interviews. I may ask a good deal of you, for if my impressions are correct this is⁠—”

He broke off suddenly.

“But I won’t tell you my impressions yet,” he resumed after a moment’s thought. “Just watch and listen as the case proceeds. Form your own impressions and cultivate your intuitions. We come as ordinary visitors, of course,” he added, a twinkle showing for an instant in his eye; “hence, the guns.”

Though disappointed not to hear more, I recognised the wisdom of his words and knew how valueless my impressions would be once the powerful suggestion of having heard his own lay behind them. I likewise reflected that intuition joined to a sense of humour was of more use to a man than double the quantity of mere “brains,” as such.

Before putting the letter away, however, he handed it back, telling me to place it against my forehead for a few moments and then describe any pictures that came spontaneously into my mind.

“Don’t deliberately look for anything. Just imagine you see the inside of the eyelid, and wait for pictures that rise against its dark screen.”

I followed his instructions, making my mind as nearly blank as possible. But no visions came. I saw nothing but the lines of light that pass to and fro like the changes of a kaleidoscope across the blackness. A momentary sensation of warmth came and went curiously.

“You see⁠—what?” he asked presently.

“Nothing,” I was obliged to admit disappointedly; “nothing but the usual flashes of light one always sees. Only, perhaps, they are more vivid than usual.”

He said nothing by way of comment or reply.

“And they group themselves now and then,” I continued, with painful candour, for I longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, “group themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that flash about sometimes look like triangles and crosses⁠—almost like geometrical figures. Nothing more.”

I opened my eyes again, and gave him back the letter.

“It makes my head hot,” I said, feeling somehow unworthy for not seeing anything of interest. But the look in his eyes arrested my attention at once.

“That sensation of heat is important,” he said significantly.

“It was certainly real, and rather uncomfortable,” I replied, hoping he would expand and explain. “There was a distinct feeling of warmth⁠—internal warmth somewhere⁠—oppressive in a sense.”

“That is interesting,” he remarked, putting the letter back in his pocket, and settling himself in the corner with newspapers and books. He vouchsafed nothing more, and I knew the uselessness of trying to make him talk. Following his example I settled likewise with magazines into my corner. But when I closed my eyes again to look for the flashing lights and the sensation of heat, I found nothing but the usual phantasmagoria of the day’s events⁠—faces, scenes, memories⁠—and in due course I fell asleep and then saw nothing at all of any kind.

When we left the train, after six hours’ travelling, at a little wayside station standing without trees in a world of sand and heather, the late October shadows had already dropped their sombre veil upon the landscape, and the sun dipped almost out of sight behind the moorland hills. In a high dogcart, behind a fast horse, we were soon rattling across the undulating stretches of an open and bleak country, the keen air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and bracken strong about us. Bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon, and the coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told us the sea lay. Occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the road among straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to shift past us with a movement of their own in the gloom, were the only signs of humanity and civilisation that we saw, until at the end of a bracing five miles the lights of the lodge gates flared before us and we plunged into a thick grove of pine trees that concealed the Manor House up to the moment of actual arrival.

Colonel Wragge himself met us in the hall. He was the typical army officer who had seen service, real service, and found himself in the process. He was tall and well built, broad in the shoulders, but lean as a greyhound, with grave eyes, rather stern, and a moustache turning grey. I judged him to be about sixty years of age, but his movements showed a suppleness of strength and agility that contradicted the years. The face was full of character and resolution, the face of a man to be depended upon, and the straight grey eyes, it seemed to me, wore a veil of perplexed anxiety that he made no attempt to disguise. The whole appearance of the man at once clothed the adventure with gravity and importance. A matter that gave such a man cause for serious alarm, I felt, must be something real and of genuine moment.

His speech and manner, as he welcomed us, were like his letter, simple and sincere. He had a nature as direct and undeviating as a bullet. Thus, he showed plainly his surprise that Dr. Silence had not come alone.

“My confidential secretary, Mr. Hubbard,” the doctor said, introducing me, and the steady gaze and powerful shake of the hand I then received were well calculated, I remember thinking, to drive home the impression that here was a man who was not to be trifled with, and whose perplexity must spring from some very real and tangible cause. And, quite obviously, he was relieved that we had come. His welcome was unmistakably genuine.

He led us at once into a room, half library, half smoking-room, that opened out of the low-ceilinged hall. The Manor House gave the impression of a rambling and glorified farmhouse, solid, ancient, comfortable, and wholly unpretentious. And so it was. Only the heat of the place struck me as unnatural. This room with the blazing fire may have seemed uncomfortably warm after the long drive through the night air; yet it seemed to me that the hall itself, and the whole atmosphere of the house, breathed a warmth that hardly belonged to well-filled grates or the pipes of hot air and water. It was not the heat of the greenhouse; it was an oppressive heat that somehow got into the head and mind. It stirred a curious sense of uneasiness in me, and I caught myself thinking of the sensation of warmth that had emanated from the letter in the train.

I heard him thanking Dr. Silence for having come; there was no preamble, and the exchange of civilities was of the briefest description. Evidently here was a man who, like my companion, loved action rather than talk. His manner was straightforward and direct. I saw him in a flash: puzzled, worried, harassed into a state of alarm by something he could not comprehend; forced to deal with things he would have preferred to despise, yet facing it all with dogged seriousness and making no attempt to conceal that he felt secretly ashamed of his incompetence.

“So I cannot offer you much entertainment beyond that of my own company, and the queer business that has been going on here, and is still going on,” he said, with a slight inclination of the head towards me by way of including me in his confidence.

“I think, Colonel Wragge,” replied John Silence impressively, “that we shall none of us find the time hangs heavy. I gather we shall have our hands full.”

The two men looked at one another for the space of some seconds, and there was an indefinable quality in their silence which for the first time made me admit a swift question into my mind; and I wondered a little at my rashness in coming with so little reflection into a big case of this incalculable doctor. But no answer suggested itself, and to withdraw was, of course, inconceivable. The gates had closed behind me now, and the spirit of the adventure was already besieging my mind with its advance guard of a thousand little hopes and fears.

Explaining that he would wait till after dinner to discuss anything serious, as no reference was ever made before his sister, he led the way upstairs and showed us personally to our rooms; and it was just as I was finishing dressing that a knock came at my door and Dr. Silence entered.

He was always what is called a serious man, so that even in moments of comedy you felt he never lost sight of the profound gravity of life, but as he came across the room to me I caught the expression of his face and understood in a flash that he was now in his most grave and earnest mood. He looked almost troubled. I stopped fumbling with my black tie and stared.

“It is serious,” he said, speaking in a low voice, “more so even than I imagined. Colonel Wragge’s control over his thoughts concealed a great deal in my psychometrising of the letter. I looked in to warn you to keep yourself well in hand⁠—generally speaking.”

“Haunted house?” I asked, conscious of a distinct shiver down my back.

But he smiled gravely at the question.

“Haunted House of Life more likely,” he replied, and a look came into his eyes which I had only seen there when a human soul was in the toils and he was thick in the fight of rescue. He was stirred in the deeps.

“Colonel Wragge⁠—or the sister?” I asked hurriedly, for the gong was sounding.

“Neither directly,” he said from the door. “Something far older, something very, very remote indeed. This thing has to do with the ages, unless I am mistaken greatly, the ages on which the mists of memory have long lain undisturbed.”

He came across the floor very quickly with a finger on his lips, looking at me with a peculiar searchingness of gaze.

“Are you aware yet of anything⁠—odd here?” he asked in a whisper. “Anything you cannot quite define, for instance. Tell me, Hubbard, for I want to know all your impressions. They may help me.”

I shook my head, avoiding his gaze, for there was something in the eyes that scared me a little. But he was so in earnest that I set my mind keenly searching.

“Nothing yet,” I replied truthfully, wishing I could confess to a real emotion; “nothing but the strange heat of the place.”

He gave a little jump forward in my direction.

“The heat again, that’s it!” he exclaimed, as though glad of my corroboration. “And how would you describe it, perhaps?” he asked quickly, with a hand on the door knob.

“It doesn’t seem like ordinary physical heat,” I said, casting about in my thoughts for a definition.

“More a mental heat,” he interrupted, “a glowing of thought and desire, a sort of feverish warmth of the spirit. Isn’t that it?”

I admitted that he had exactly described my sensations.

“Good!” he said, as he opened the door, and with an indescribable gesture that combined a warning to be ready with a sign of praise for my correct intuition, he was gone.

I hurried after him, and found the two men waiting for me in front of the fire.

“I ought to warn you,” our host was saying as I came in, “that my sister, whom you will meet at dinner, is not aware of the real object of your visit. She is under the impression that we are interested in the same line of study⁠—folklore⁠—and that your researches have led to my seeking acquaintance. She comes to dinner in her chair, you know. It will be a great pleasure to her to meet you both. We have few visitors.”