Chapter II (3)

He had furnished the house to suit his mood, and the room which he chiefly favoured--a room at the back, with a great bay window thrown out upon the grass, and the floor just a step below the level of the garden--had the very look of some old parlour where Mr. Hardcastle might have sipped his port, and Kate stitched at her samplers. Here he was sitting at ten o'clock in the evening, about a month after he had left London, when the first of the incidents occurred. It was nothing very startling in itself--merely the sound of some small thing falling upon the boards of the floor and rolling into a corner--a crisp, sharp sound, as though a pebble had dropped.

Caston looked up from his book, at the first hardly curious. But in a minute or so, it occurred to him that he was alone, and that he had dropped nothing. Moreover, the sound had travelled from the other side of the room. He was not as yet curious enough to rise from his chair, and a round satin-wood table impeded his view. But he looked about the room, and could see nothing from which an ornament could have dropped. He turned back to his book, but his attention wandered. Once or twice he looked sharply up, as though he expected to find another occupant in the room. Finally he rose, and walking round the table, he saw what seemed to be a big glass bead sparkling in the lamplight on the dark-stained boards in a corner of the room. He picked the object up, and found it to be not a large bead, but a small knob or handle of cut-glass. He knew now whence it had come.

Against the wall stood a small Louis Seize table in white and gold, which he remembered to have picked up at a sale, with some other furniture, at some old mansion, across the water, in the New Forest. He had paid no particular attention to the table, had never even troubled to look inside of it. It had the appearance of being a lady's secretaire or something of the kind. But there were three shallow drawers, one above the other, in the middle part of it--it was what is inelegantly called a kidney table--and these drawers were fitted with small glass knobs such as that which he held in his hand.

Caston went over to the table, and saw that one of the knobs was missing. He stooped to replace it, and at once stood erect again, with the knob in his hand and a puzzled expression upon his face. He had expected that the handles would fit on to projecting screws. But he found that they were set into brass rings, and firmly set. This one which he held seemed to have been wrenched out of its setting by some violent jerk. He tried the drawers, but they were locked. There were some papers and books spread upon the top. He removed them, and found upon the white polish a half-erased crest. It was plain that the middle part of the top was a lid and lifted up, but it was now locked down. Caston did not replace the books and papers. He returned to his chair. The servants probably had been curious. No doubt they had tried to open the drawers, and in the attempt had loosened one of the handles.

Caston was content with the explanation--for that night. But the next evening, at the same hour, the legs of the table rattled on the wooden floor. He sprang up from his seat. The table was shaking. He stepped quickly across to it, and then stopped with his heart leaping in his breast. The books and papers had not been replaced, and he had seen--it might be that his eyes had played him a trick, but he had _seen_--a small slim hand suddenly withdrawn from the lid of the table. The hand had been lying flat upon its palm--Caston had just time enough to see that--and it was the left hand.

"That's exactly the position," he said to himself, "in which one would place the left hand to hold the table steady while one tried to force the drawers open with one's right."

He stood without a movement, but the hand did not appear again; and then he found himself saying in a quiet voice of reassurance:

"Can I help at all?"

The sound of his own words stirred him abruptly to laughter. Common sense reasserted itself; his eyes had played him a trick. Too much tobacco, very likely, was the cause and origin of his romantic vision. But, none the less, he remained standing quite still, with his eyes fixed upon the table's polished lid, for some minutes; and when he went back at last to his chair, from time to time he glanced abruptly from his book, in the hope that he might once more detect the hand upon the table. But he was disappointed.

The next morning he saw the old gardener sweeping the leaves from the front lawn, and he at once and rather eagerly went out to him.

"I think you told me, Hayes, that this house is supposed to be haunted," he said, with a laugh at the supposition.

The gardener took off his hat and scratched his head reflectively.

"Well, they do say, sir, as it is. But I've never seen anything myself, nor can I rightly say that I've ever come across anyone who has. A pack o' nonsense, I call it."

"Very likely, Hayes," said Caston. "And what sort of a person is it who's supposed to walk?"

"An old man in grey stockings," replied the gardener. "That's what I've heard. But what he's supposed to be doing I don't know, sir, any more than I know why there should be so much fuss about his wearing grey stockings. Live men do that, after all."

"To be sure," replied Caston. "You may count them by dozens on bicycles if you stand for an hour or two above the road here." And he went back to the house. It was quite clear that his visitant of last night, if there had been one, was not the native spectre of this small old manor-house.

"The slim white hand I saw," Caston argued, "belonged to no old man in grey stockings or out of them. It was the hand of a quite young woman. But if she doesn't belong to the house, if she isn't one of the fixtures to be taken on by the incoming tenant--if, in a word, she's a trespasser--how in the world did she find her way here?"

Caston suddenly saw an answer to the question--a queer and a rather attractive answer, especially to a man who had fed for a month on solitude and had grown liable to fancies. He had all through this lonely month been gradually washing from his body and his mind the dust of his own times. He had sought to reproduce the quiet of an older age, and in the seeking had perhaps done more than reproduce. That was his thought. He had, perhaps, by ever so little, penetrated the dark veil which hides from men all days but their own--just enough, say, to catch a glimpse of a hand. He himself was becoming more and more harmonious with his house; the cries of the outer world hardly reached his ears in that little parlour which opened on to the hidden garden. It seemed to him that other times, through some thinning out of the thick curtain of his senses, were becoming actual and real just to him.

"The first month passed," he said to himself. "I was undisturbed; no sign was made. I was still too near to what I had left behind--London and the rest of it. But now I pass more and more over the threshold into that other century. First of all, I was only aware of a movement, a presence; then I was able to see--nothing much, it is true--only a small hand. But tonight I may see her to whom the hand belongs. In a week I may be admitted into her company."

Thus he argued, pretending to himself the while that he was merely playing with his fancy, pursuing it like a ball in a game, and ready to let it fall and lie the moment that he was tired. But the sudden hum of a motor-car upon his drive, and a joyous outcry of voices, soon dispelled the pretence. A party of his friends invaded him, clamouring for luncheon, and in his mind there sprang up a fear so strong that it surprised him. They would thicken the thinning curtain between himself and her whose hand had lain upon the table. They would drag him back into his own century. The whole process of isolation would have to begin again. The talk at luncheon was all of regattas and the tonnage of yachts. Caston sat at the table with his fear increasing. His visitors were friends he would have welcomed five weeks ago, and he would have gaily taken his part in their light talk. Now it was every moment on his lips to cry out:

"Hold your tongues and go!"

They went off at three o'clock, and a lady of the party wisely nodded a dainty head at him as he stood upon the steps, and remarked:

"You hated us visiting you, Mr. Caston. You have someone in that house--someone you won't show to us."

Caston coloured to the roots of his hair.

The lady laughed. "There--I knew I was right! Let me guess who it can be."

Caston raised his head in a quick protest.

"No, there is no one." He tried to laugh easily. "That's my trouble. There is no one, I am afraid."

They had driven his visitor away, without a doubt; and though he sat very still in his arm-chair that night, careful as a hunter by no abrupt movement to scare away his quarry, he sat undisturbed. He waited until the light was grey and the birds singing upon the lawn. He went to bed disappointed as a lover whose mistress had failed to keep her tryst.

On the next day he searched for and found the catalogue of the sale at which he had bought the table. The sale had been held at a house called Bylanes, some five miles from the Beaulieu river, and the furniture was advertised as the property of Geoffrey Trimingham, Esq., deceased, and sold by his young widow. Caston's memory was quickened by these meagre details. He recollected stories which he had heard during the three days of the sale. The Triminghams were a branch of the old Norfolk family of that name, and had settled in the New Forest so far back as the reign of the first George. Geoffrey Trimingham, however, had delayed marriage until well sped in years, and then had committed the common fault of marrying a young woman, who, with no children and no traditions to detain her in a neighbourhood which she considered gloomy, had, as soon as she was free, sold off house and furniture--lock, stock, and barrel--so that she might retire to what she considered the more elegant neighbourhood of Blandford Square.

This was all very well, but it did not bring Harry Gaston very much nearer to the identification of his visitor. She was a Trimingham, probably, but even that was by no means certain; and to what generation of Triminghams she belonged, he knew no more than he knew her Christian name. He searched the house for the keys of the table, but nowhere could he find them. He had never opened the drawers, he had never raised the lid. It seemed to him that he must have bought the table without the keys at all.

He might have broken it open, of course, and from time to time, as the evenings passed in an expectation which was not fulfilled, he was tempted to take a chisel in his hand and set to work. But he resisted. The table was not his. It was _hers_, and in her presence alone it must be opened.

Thus Caston passed a week, and then one evening there fell a shadow across the open page of his book. He looked swiftly up. He saw nothing but the empty room, and the flame of the lamp burned bright and steady. She was here, then, and as the conviction grew within him to a veritable exultation, he was aware of rustling of a woman's gown. The sound came from behind him. He turned with a leap of his heart, and saw her--saw her from the crown of her small head, with its thick brown hair, to the hem of her dress--not a shadow, not a vague shape dimly to be apprehended, but as actual as flesh and blood could be. She was dressed in a gown of pale blue satin of an ancient mode, and was slender as a child. Her face, too, was the face of one little more than a child, though pain and trouble had ravaged it.

She stood as though she had just stepped from the garden on to the window-seat, and so to the floor, and in her dark eyes there was a look of the direst urgency. She moved swiftly across the room to the table, pulled at the glass handles, and sought to lift the lid, and all in a feverish haste, with her young and troubled face twitching as though she were at pains to check her tears. Caston watched her eagerly. He noticed that once more her left hand was pressed flat upon the lid, as she tried to open the drawer, and then a flash of gold caught and held his eyes. Young though she was, she wore a wedding-ring. He had barely noticed it, when she turned from the table and came straight towards him. Caston rose from his chair. He heard himself saying once more:

"Can I help?"

But this time he did not laugh upon the words. She stood before him with so pitiful an appeal, her hands clutched together in front of her, her face convulsed. He spoke with the deference due to those who have greatly suffered. Then came to him a whisper in reply, so low that he barely heard it--so low that perhaps he only imagined it.

"Yes."

Caston went across to the table, and, opening his knife, inserted it under the lid. The girl stood at his side, a gleam of hope in her eyes. Caston ran the blade of the knife along to the lock and turned it, prising up the lid. There was a sound of the splitting of wood, and the lock gave. Caston lifted the lid. It rose on hinges, and had upon the under-side a bevelled mirror, and it disclosed, when open, a fixed tray lined with blue velvet. The tray was empty.

But now that the lid was raised in the centre of the table, the side-pieces could be opened too. The girl opened the one at her hand. Caston saw a well, lined, like the rest, with velvet, and filled with the knick-knacks and belongings of a girl. She took them out hurriedly, heaping them together on the tray--a walnut-wood housewife shaped and shut like a large card-case, with scissors, thimble, needle-case, tiny penknife, all complete--for she opened it, as she opened everything in the haste and urgency of her search--a large needle-case of ivory, a walnut-wood egg, which unscrewed and showed within a reel with silk still wound upon it, and a little oval box with a label on the top of it, and the royal arms. Caston read the label:

STRINGER'S CANDY.
PREPARED AND SOLD ONLY BY THE PROPRIETOR,
R. STRINGER,
DRUGGIST TO THE KING.

The top fell from the little box, and a shower of shells rattled out of it. Bags of beads followed, wash-leather bags carefully tied up, and some of them filled with the minutest of beads. It made Caston's eyes ache to think of anyone stringing them together. In the end the well was emptied, and, with a gesture of despair, the girl slipped round to the other side of Caston. She turned back the flap upon this side.

On the other side were the implements of work; here was the finished product. She lifted out two small anti-macassars, completely made up of tiny beads in crystal and turquoise colours, and worked in the most intricate patterns. They were extraordinarily heavy, and must have taken months in the making. Under these were still more beads, in boxes and in bags and coiled in long strings. She heaped them out upon the tray, and looked into the well. Her face flashed into relief. She thrust her hands in; she drew out from the very bottom a faded bundle of letters. She clasped them for a moment close against her heart, then very swiftly, as though she feared to be stopped, she took them over to the fireplace.

A fire was burning in the grate, for the night was chilly. She dropped the bundle into the flames, and stood there while it was consumed. Caston saw the glare of the flames behind the paper light up here and there a word or a phrase, and then the edges curled over and the sparks ran across the sheets, and the letters changed to white ashes and black flakes. When all was done, she sighed and turned to Caston with a wistful smile of thanks. She moved back to the table, and with a queer orderliness which seemed somehow in keeping with her looks and manner, she replaced the beads, the little boxes, and the paraphernalia of her work carefully in the wells, and shut the table up. She turned again to Caston at the end. Just for a second she stood before him, her face not happy, but cleared of its trouble, and with a smile upon her lips. She stood, surely a living thing. Caston advanced to her. "You will stay now!" he cried, and she was gone.

This is the story as Harry Caston told it to Mrs. Wordingham when he returned to London in the autumn. She ridiculed it gently and with a trifle of anxiety, believing that solitude had bred delusions.

"Thank you," said Harry Caston grimly, and sitting up very erect. Mrs. Wordingham changed her note.

"It's the most wonderful thing to have happened to you," she said. "I should have been frightened out of my life. And you weren't?"

Harry Gaston's face hardly relaxed.

"You don't believe a word of it," he asserted sternly.

"Of course I do," she replied soothingly, "and I quite see that, with us nowhere near you, all your senses became refined, and you penetrated behind the curtain. Yes, I see all that, Harry. But she might, perhaps, have told you a little more, mightn't she? As a story, it almost sounds unfinished."

Harry Caston rose to his feet.

"I tell you what you are doing," he said, standing over her--"you are getting a little of your own back."

"But such a very little, Harry," murmured Mrs. Wordingham; and Harry Caston flung out of the room.

He did not refer to the subject again for some little while. But in the month of December, on one foggy afternoon, he arrived with a new book under his arm. He put it down on the floor beside his chair rather ostentatiously, as one inviting questions. Mrs. Wordingham was serenely unaware of the book.

"Where have you been, Harry?" she asked as she gave him a cup of tea.

"In Norfolk--shooting," he said.

"Many birds?"

"So few that we did not go out on the second day. We motored to a church instead--a very old church with a beautiful clerestory."

Mrs. Wordingham affected an intense interest.

"Old churches are wonderful," she said.

"You care no more about them than I do," said Harry Gaston brutally. "I am not going to tell you about the church."

"Oh, aren't you?" said Mrs. Wordingham.

"No. What I am going to tell you is this. The vicar is a friend of my host, and happened to be in the church when we arrived. He showed us the building himself, and then, taking us into the vestry, got out the parish register. It dates back a good many years. Well, turning over the leaves, I noticed quite carelessly an entry made by the vicar in the year 1786. It was a note of a donation which he had made to the parish as a thanksgiving for his recovery from a severe operation which had been performed upon him in Norwich by a famous surgeon of the day named Twiddy."

"Yes?" said Mrs. Wordingham.

"That little entry occupied my mind much more than the church," continued Caston. "I wondered what the vicar must have felt as he travelled into Norwich in those days of no chloroform, no antiseptics, of sloughing wounds, and hospital fevers. Not much chance of _his_ ever coming back again, eh? And then the revulsion when he did recover--the return home to Frimley-next-the-Sea alive and well! It must all have been pretty wonderful to the vicar in 1786, eh?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Wordingham submissively.

"I couldn't get him out of my head and when I returned to London a couple of days ago, I saw in a bookseller's this book."

Caston picked the volume up from the floor.

"It seems that Twiddy was no end of a swell with his knife, so some one of his devoted descendants has had a life written of him, with all his letters included. He kept up an extensive correspondence, as people did in those days. He had a shrewd eye and a knack of telling a story. There's one here which I wish you to read if you will. No, not now--when I have gone. I have put a slip of paper in at the page. I think it will interest you."

Harry Caston went away. Mrs. Wordingham had her curtains closed and her lamps lit. She drew her chair up to the fire, and she opened "The Life and Letters of Mr. Edmund Twiddy, Surgeon, of Norwich," with a shrug of the shoulders and a little grimace of discontent. But the grimace soon left her face, and when her maid came with a warning that she had accepted an invitation for that night to dinner, she found her mistress with the book still open upon her knees, and her eyes staring with a look of wonder into the fire. For this is what she had read in "The Life and Letters of Mr. Edmund Twiddy."

"I have lately had a curious case under my charge, which has given me more trouble than I care to confess. For sentiment is no part of the equipment of a surgeon. It perplexed as well as troubled me, and some clue to the explanation was only afforded me yesterday. Three months ago my servant brought me word one evening that there was a lady very urgent to see me, of the name of Mrs. Braxfield. I replied that my work was done, and she must return at a more seasonable time. But while I was giving this message the door was pushed open, and already she stood in front of me. She was a slip of a girl, very pretty to look at, and shrinking with alarm at her own audacity. Yet she held her ground.

"'Mrs. Braxfield,' I cried, 'you have no right to be married--you are much too young! Young girls hooked at your age ought to be put back.'

"'I am ill,' she said, and I nodded to the servant to leave us.

"'Very well,' I said. 'What's the matter?'

"'My throat,' said she.

"I looked at it. There was trouble, but the trouble was not so very serious, though I recognised that at some time treatment would be advisable.

"'There's no hurry at all about it,' I said, when my examination was concluded, 'but, on the whole, you are right to get it looked to soon.' I spoke roughly, for I shrank a little from having this tender bit of a girl under my knife. 'Where's your husband?'

"'He is in Spain,' she replied.

"'Oh, indeed!' said I with some surprise. 'Well, when he returns, we can talk about it.'

"Mrs. Braxfield shook her head.

"'No, I want it done now, while he's away,' she said, and nothing that I could say would shake her from her purpose. I fathered her, and bullied her, and lectured her, but she stood her ground. Her lips trembled; she was afraid of me, and still more desperately afraid of what waited for her. I could see her catch her breath and turn pale as she thought upon the ordeal. But the same sort of timid courage which had made her push into my room before I could refuse to see her, sustained her now. I raised my hands at last in despair.

"'Very well,' I said. 'Give me your husband's address. I will send a letter to him, and if he consents, we will not wait for his return.'

"'No,' she insisted stubbornly, 'I do not want him to know anything about it. But if you will not attend me, no doubt someone else will.'

"That was my trouble. The throat, look at it how you will, is a ticklish affair. If she went away from me, Heaven knows into whose hands she might fall. She had some money and was well dressed. Some quack would have used his blundering knife. I could have shaken her for her obstinacy, and would have, if I had had a hope that I would shake it out of her. But she had screwed herself up to a pitch of determination almost unbelievable in her. I could make her cry; I could not make her draw back from her resolve. Nor, on the other hand, could I allow her to go out of my house and hand herself over to be butchered by any Tom, Dick, or Harry of a barber on the look-out for a fat fee. So I gave in.

"I got her a lodging in this town, and a woman to look after her, and I did what needed to be done with as little pain as might be.

"'You won't hurt me more than you can help,' she said in a sort of childish wail. And then she shut her eyes and bore it with an extraordinary fortitude; while, for my part, I never worked more neatly or more quickly in my life, and in a few days she was quite comfortable again.

"But here she began to perplex me. For though the wound healed, and there was no fever, she did not mend. She lay from day to day in an increasing weakness, for which I could not account. I drew a chair up to her bed one morning and took my seat.

"'My dear,' I said, 'a good many of us are father-confessors as well as doctors. We needs must be at times if our patients are to get well and do us credit. You are lying here surely with a great trouble on your mind. It shall be sacred to me, but I must know it if I am to cure you.'

"The girl looked at me with a poor little smile.

"'No, there's nothing at all,' she said; and even while she spoke she lifted her head from the pillow, and a light dawned in her eyes.

"'Listen!' she said.

"I heard a step coming nearer and nearer along the pavement outside. As it grew louder, she raised herself upon her elbow, and when the footsteps ceased outside the door, her whole soul leapt into her face.

"'There will be a letter for me!' she cried, with a joyous clapping of her hands.

"The footsteps moved on and became fainter and more faint. The girl remained propped up, with her eyes fixed upon the door. But no one came.

"'It has been left in the hall,' she said, turning wistfully to me.

"'I will send it up if it is there,' said I.

"I went downstairs rather heavy at heart. Here was the reason why she did not mend. Here it was, and I saw no cure for it. There was no letter in the hall, nor did I expect to find one. I sent for the woman who waited upon her. 'Does she always expect a letter?'

"The woman nodded.

"'She knows the postman's step, sir, even when he is a long way off. She singles it out from all other sounds. If he stops at the door, I must run down upon the instant. But whether he stops or not, it is always the same thing--there is no letter for her.'

"I went upstairs again and into her room. The girl was lying upon her side, with her faced pressed into the pillow, and crying. I patted her shoulder.

"'Come, Mrs. Braxfield, you must tell me what the trouble is, and we will put our heads together and discover a remedy.'

"But she drew away from me. 'There is nothing,' she repeated. 'I am weak--that is all.'

"I could get no more from her, and the next day I besought her to tell me where I might find her husband. But upon that point, too, she was silent. Then came a night, about a week later, when she fell into a delirium, and I sat by her side and wrestled with death for her. I fought hard with what resources I had, for there was no reason why she should die but the extreme weakness into which she had fallen.

"I sat by the bed, thinking that now at last I should learn the secret which ravaged her. But there was no coherency in what she said. She talked chiefly, I remember, of a work-table and of something hidden there which she must destroy. She was continually, in her delirium, searching its drawers, opening the lid and diving amongst her embroidery and beads, as though she could not die and let the thing be found.

"So till the grey of the morning, when she came out of her delirium, turned very wistfully to me with a feeble motion of her hands, and said:

"'You have been very good to me, doctor.'

"She lay thus for a few moments, and then she cried in a low sad voice: 'Oh, Arthur, Arthur!' And with that name upon her lips she died.

"She carried her secret with her, leaving me in the dark as to who she was and how I was to lay my hands upon one of her relations. I buried the poor girl here, and I advertised for her husband in _The London Newsletter_, and I made inquiries of our ambassador in Spain. A week ago Mr. Braxfield appeared at my house. He was a man of sixty years of age, and his Christian name was Robert.

"He gave me some few details about his marriage, and from them I am able to put together the rest of the story. Mr. Braxfield is a Spanish merchant of means, and the girl, a Trimingham of that branch of the family which moved a long while since into Hampshire, was, no doubt, pressed into marriage with him owing to the straitened position of her parents. Mr. Braxfield and his young wife took up their residence in Soho Square, in London, until, at the beginning of this year, business called him once more to Spain for some months.

"His wife thereupon elected to return to her home, and there Mr. Braxfield believed her to be, until chance threw one of my advertisements in his way. Her own parents, for their part, understood that she had returned to her house in Soho Square. To me, then, the story is clear. Having married without love, she had given her heart to someone, probably after her return to her own home--someone called Arthur. Whether he had treated her ill, I cannot say. But I take it that he had grown cold, and she had looked upon this trouble with her throat as her opportunity to hold him. The risk, the suffering--these things, one can imagine her believing, must make their appeal. She had pretended to return to London. She had travelled, instead, to Norwich, letting him and him alone know what she was about. The great experiment failed. She looked for some letter; no letter came. But had letters passed? Are these letters locked up amongst the embroidery and the beads in that work-table, I wonder? Let us hope that, if they are, they trouble her no longer."

PEIFFER

PEIFFER

For a moment I was surprised to see the stout and rubicund Slingsby in Lisbon. He was drinking a vermouth and seltzer at five o'clock in the afternoon at a cafe close to the big hotel. But at that time Portugal was still a neutral country and a happy hunting ground for a good many thousand Germans. Slingsby was lolling in his chair with such exceeding indolence that I could not doubt his business was pressing and serious. I accordingly passed him by as if I had never seen him in my life before. But he called out to me. So I took a seat at his table.

Of what we talked about I have not the least recollection, for my eyes were quite captivated by a strange being who sat alone fairly close to Slingsby, at one side and a little behind him. This was a man of middle age, with reddish hair, a red, square, inflamed face and a bristly moustache. He was dressed in a dirty suit of grey flannel; he wore a battered Panama pressed down upon his head; he carried pince-nez on the bridge of his nose, and he sat with a big bock of German beer In front of him. But I never saw him touch the beer. He sat in a studied attitude of ferocity, his elbow on the table, his chin propped on the palm of his hand, his head pushed aggressively forward, and he glared at Slingsby through his glasses with the fixed stare of hatred and fury which a master workman in wax might give to a figure in a Chamber of Horrors. Indeed, it seemed to me that he must have rehearsed his bearing in some such quarter, for there was nothing natural or convinced in him from the brim of his Panama to the black patent leather tips of his white canvas shoes.

I touched Slingsby on the arm.

"Who is that man, and what have you done to him?"

Slingsby looked round unconcernedly.

"Oh, that's only Peiffer," he replied. "Peiffer making frightfulness."

"Peiffer?"

The name was quite strange to me.

"Yes. Don't you know him? He's a product of 1914," and Slingsby leaned towards me a little. "Peiffer is an officer in the German Navy. You would hardly guess it, but he is. Now that their country is at war, officers in the German Navy have a marked amount of spare time which they never had before. So Peiffer went to a wonderful Government school in Hamburg, where in twenty lessons they teach the gentle art of espionage, a sort of Berlitz school. Peiffer ate his dinners and got his degrees, so to speak, and now he's at Lisbon putting obi on me."

"It seems rather infantile, and must be annoying," I said; but Slingsby would only accept half the statement. "Infantile, yes. Annoying, not at all. For so long as Peiffer is near me, being frightful, I know he's not up to mischief."

"Mischief!" I cried. "That fellow? What mischief can he do?"

Slingsby viciously crushed the stub of his cigarette in the ashtray.

"A deuce of a lot, my friend. Don't make any mistake. Peiffer's methods are infantile and barbaric, but he has a low and fertile cunning in the matter of ideas. I know. I have had some."

And Slingsby was to have more, very much more: in the shape of a great many sleepless nights, during which he wrestled with a dreadful uncertainty to get behind that square red face and those shining pince-nez, and reach the dark places of Peiffer's mind.

The first faint wisp of cloud began to show six weeks later, when Slingsby happened to be in Spain.

"Something's up," he said, scratching his head. "But I'm hanged if I can guess what it is. See what you can make of it"; and here is the story which he told.

Three Germans dressed in the black velvet corduroy, the white stockings and the rope-soled white shoes of the Spanish peasant, arrived suddenly in the town of Cartagena, and put up at an inn in a side-street near the harbour. Cartagena, for all that it is one of the chief naval ports of Spain, is a small place, and the life of it ebbs and flows in one narrow street, the Calle Mayor; so that very little can happen which is not immediately known and discussed. The arrival of the three mysterious Germans provoked, consequently, a deal of gossip and curiosity, and the curiosity was increased when the German Consul sitting in front of the Casino loudly professed complete ignorance of these very doubtful compatriots of his, and an exceeding great contempt for them. The next morning, however, brought a new development. The three Germans complained publicly to the Alcalde. They had walked through Valencia, Alicante, and Murcia in search of work, and everywhere they had been pestered and shadowed by the police.

"Our Consul will do nothing for us," they protested indignantly. "He will not receive us, nor will any German in Cartagena. We are poor people." And having protested, they disappeared in the night.

But a few days later the three had emerged again at Almeria, and at a mean cafe in one of the narrow, blue-washed Moorish streets of the old town. Peiffer was identified as one of the three--not the Peiffer who had practised frightfulness in Lisbon, but a new and wonderful Peiffer, who inveighed against the shamelessness of German officials on the coasts of Spain. At Almeria, in fact, Peiffer made a scene at the German Vice-Consulate, and, having been handed over to the police, was fined and threatened with imprisonment. At this point the story ended.

"What do you make of it?" asked Slingsby.

"First, that Peiffer is working south; and, secondly, that he is quarrelling with his own officials."

"Yes, but quarrelling with marked publicity," said Slingsby. "That, I think we shall find, is the point of real importance. Peiffer's methods are not merely infantile; they are elaborate. He is working down South. I think that I will go to Gibraltar. I have always wished to see it."

Whether Slingsby was speaking the truth, I had not an idea. But he went to Gibraltar, and there an astonishing thing happened to him. He received a letter, and the letter came from Peiffer. Peiffer was at Algeciras, just across the bay in Spain, and he wanted an interview. He wrote for it with the most brazen impertinence.

"I cannot, owing to this with-wisdom-so-easily-to-have-been-avoided war, come myself to Gibraltar, but I will remain at your disposition here."

"_That_," said Slingsby, "from the man who was making frightfulness at me a few weeks ago, is a proof of some nerve. We will go and see Peiffer. We will stay at Algeciras from Saturday to Monday, and we will hear what he has to say."

A polite note was accordingly dispatched, and on Sunday morning Peiffer, decently clothed in a suit of serge, was shown into Slingsby's private sitting-room. He plunged at once into the story of his wanderings. We listened to it without a sign that we knew anything about it.

"So?" from time to time said Slingsby, with inflections of increasing surprise, but that was all. Then Peiffer went on to his grievances.

"Perhaps you have heard how I was treated by the Consuls?" he interrupted himself to ask suddenly.

"No," Slingsby replied calmly. "Continue!"

Peiffer wiped his forehead and his glasses. We were each one, in his way, all working for our respective countries. The work was honourable. But there were limits to endurance. All his fatigue and perils went for nothing in the eyes of comfortable officials sure of their salary. He had been fined; he had been threatened with imprisonment. It was _unverschaemt_ the way he had been treated.

"So?" said Slingsby firmly. There are fine inflections by which that simple word may be made to express most of the emotions. Slingsby's "So?" expressed a passionate agreement with the downtrodden Peiffer.

"Flesh and blood can stand it no longer," cried Peiffer, "and my heart is flesh. No, I have had enough."

Throughout the whole violent tirade, in his eyes, in his voice, in his gestures, there ran an eager, wistful plea that we should take him at his face value and believe every word he said.

"So I came to you," he said at last, slapping his knee and throwing out his hand afterwards like a man who has taken a mighty resolution. "Yes. I have no money, nothing. And they will give me none. It is _unverschaemt_. So," and he screwed up his little eyes and wagged a podgy forefinger--"so the service I had begun for my Government I will now finish for you."

Slingsby examined the carpet curiously.

"Well, there are possibly some shillings to be had if the service is good enough. I do not know. But I cannot deal in the dark. What sort of a service is it?"

"Ah!"

Peiffer hitched his chair nearer.

"It is a question of rifles--rifles for over there," and, looking out through the window, he nodded towards Gibel Musa and the coast of Morocco.

Slingsby did not so much as flinch. I almost groaned aloud. We were to be treated to the stock legend of the ports, the new edition of the Spanish prisoner story. I, the mere tourist in search of health, could have gone on with Peiffer's story myself, even to the exact number of the rifles.

"It was a great plan," Peiffer continued. "Fifty thousand rifles, no less." There always were fifty-thousand rifles. "They are buried--near the sea." They always were buried either near the sea or on the frontier of Portugal. "With ammunition. They are to be landed outside Melilla, where I have been about this very affair, and distributed amongst the Moors in the unsubdued country on the edge of the French zone."

"So?" exclaimed Slingsby with the most admirable imitation of consternation.

"Yes, but you need not fear. You shall have the rifles--when I know exactly where they are buried."

"Ah!" said Slingsby.

He had listened to the familiar rigmarole, certain that behind it there was something real and sinister which he did not know--something which he was desperately anxious to find out.

"Then you do not know where they are buried?"

"No, but I shall know if--I am allowed to go into Gibraltar. Yes, there is someone there. I must put myself into relations with him. Then I shall know, and so shall you."

So here was some part of the truth, at all events. Peiffer wanted to get into Gibraltar. His disappearance from Lisbon, his reappearance in corduroys, his quarrelsome progress down the east coast, his letter to Slingsby, and his story, were all just the items of an elaborate piece of machinery invented to open the gates of that fortress to him. Slingsby's only movement was to take his cigarette-case lazily from his pocket.

"But why in the world," he asked, "can't you get your man in Gibraltar to come out here and see you?"

Peiffer shook his head.

"He would not come. He has been told to expect me, and I shall give him certain tokens from which he can guess my trustworthiness. If I write to him, 'Come to me,' he will say 'This is a trap.'"

Slingsby raised another objection:

"But I shouldn't think that you can expect the authorities to give you a safe conduct into Gibraltar upon your story."

Peiffer swept that argument aside with a contemptuous wave of his hand.

"I have a Danish passport. See!" and he took the document from his breast pocket. It was complete, to his photograph.

"Yes, you can certainly come in on that," said Slingsby. He reflected for a moment before he added: "I have no power, of course. But I have some friends. I think you may reasonably reckon that you won't be molested."

I saw Peiffer's eyes glitter behind his glasses.

"But there's a condition," Slingsby continued sharply. "You must not leave Gibraltar without coming personally to me and giving me twenty-four hours' notice."

Peiffer was all smiles and agreement.

"But of course. We shall have matters to talk over--terms to arrange. I must see you."

"Exactly. Cross by the nine-fifty steamer tomorrow morning. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir." And suddenly Peiffer stood up and actually saluted, as though he had now taken service under Slingsby's command.

The unexpected movement almost made me vomit. Slingsby himself moved quickly away, and his face lost for a second the mask of impassivity. He stood at the window and looked across the water to the city of Gibraltar.

Slingsby had been wounded in the early days of the war, and ever since he had been greatly troubled because he was not still in the trenches in Flanders. The casualty lists filled him with shame and discontent. So many of his friends, the men who had trained and marched with him, were laying down their gallant lives. He should have been with them. But during the last few days a new knowledge and inspiration had come to him. Gibraltar! A tedious, little, unlovely town of yellow houses and coal sheds, with an undesirable climate. Yes. But above it was the rock, the heart of a thousand memories and traditions which made it beautiful. He looked at it now with its steep wooded slopes, scarred by roads and catchments and the emplacements of guns. How much of England was recorded there! To how many British sailing on great ships from far dominions this huge buttress towering to its needle-ridge was the first outpost of the homeland! And for the moment he seemed to be its particular guardian, the ear which must listen night and day lest harm come to it. Harm the Rock, and all the Empire, built with such proud and arduous labour, would stagger under the blow, from St. Kilda to distant Lyttelton. He looked across the water and imagined Gibraltar as it looked at night, its houselights twinkling like a crowded zone of stars, and its great search-beams turning the ships in the harbour and the stone of the moles into gleaming silver, and travelling far over the dark waters. No harm must come to Gibraltar. His honour was all bound up in that. This was his service, and as he thought upon it he was filled with a cold fury against the traitor who thought it so easy to make him fail. But every hint of his anger had passed from his face as he turned back into the room.

"If you bring me good information, why, we can do business," he said; and Peiffer went away.

I was extremely irritated by the whole interview, and could hardly wait for the door to close.

"What knocks me over," I cried, "is the impertinence of the man. Does he really think that any old yarn like the fifty thousand rifles is going to deceive you?"

Slingsby lit a cigarette.

"Peiffer's true to type, that's all," he answered imperturbably. "They are vain, and vanity makes them think that you will at once believe what they want you to believe. So their deceits are a little crude." Then a smile broke over his face, and to some tune with which I was unfamiliar he sang softly: "But he's coming to Gibraltar in the morning."

"You think he will?"

"I am sure of it."

"And," I added doubtfully--it was not my business to criticise--"on conditions he can walk out again?"

Slingsby's smile became a broad grin.

"His business in Gibraltar, my friend, is not with me. He will not want to meet us any more; as soon as he has done what he came for he will go--or try to go. He thinks we are fools, you see."

And in the end it seemed almost as though Peiffer was justified of his belief. He crossed the next morning. He went to a hotel of the second class; he slept in the hotel, and next morning he vanished. Suddenly there was no more Peiffer. Peiffer was not. For six hours Peiffer was not; and then at half-past five in the afternoon the telephone bell rang in an office where Slingsby was waiting. He rushed to the instrument.

"Who is it?" he cried, and I saw a wave of relief surge into his face. Peiffer had been caught outside the gates and within a hundred yards of the neutral zone. He had strolled out in the thick of the dockyard workmen going home to Linea in Spain.

"Search him and bring him up here at once," said Slingsby, and he dropped into his chair and wiped his forehead. "Phew! Thirty seconds more and he might have snapped his fingers at us." He turned to me. "I shall want a prisoner's escort here in half an hour."

I went about that business and returned in time to see Slingsby giving an admirable imitation of a Prussian police official.

"So, Peiffer," he cried sternly, "you broke your word. Do not deny it. It will be useless."

The habit of a lifetime asserted itself in Peiffer. He quailed before authority when authority began to bully.

"I did not know I was outside the walls," he faltered. "I was taking a walk. No one stopped me."

"So!" Slingsby snorted. "And these, Peiffer--what have you to say of these?"

There were four separate passports which had been found in Peiffer's pockets. He could be a Dane of Esbjerg, a Swede of Stockholm, a Norwegian of Christiania, or a Dutchman from Amsterdam. All four nationalities were open to Peiffer to select from.

"They provide you with these, no doubt, in your school at Hamburg," and Slingsby paused to collect his best German. "You are a prisoner of war. _Das ist genug_," he cried, and Peiffer climbed to the internment camp.

So far so good. Slingsby had annexed Peiffer, but more important than Peiffer was Peiffer's little plot, and that he had not got. Nor did the most careful inquiry disclose what Peiffer had done and where he had been during the time when he was not. For six hours Peiffer had been loose in Gibraltar, and Slingsby began to get troubled. He tried to assume the mentality of Peiffer, and so reach his intention, but that did not help. He got out all the reports in which Peiffer's name was mentioned and read them over again.

I saw him sit back in his chair and remain looking straight in front of him.

"Yes," he said thoughtfully, and he turned over the report to me, pointing to a passage. It was written some months before, at Melilla, on the African side of the Mediterranean, and it ran like this:

"Peiffer frequents the low houses and cafes, where he spends a good deal of money and sometimes gets drunk. When drunk he gets very arrogant, and has been known to boast that he has been three times in Bordeaux since the war began, and, thanks to his passports, can travel as easily as if the world were at peace. On such occasions he expresses the utmost contempt for neutral nations. I myself have heard him burst out: 'Wait until we have settled with our enemies. Then we will deal properly with the neutral nations. They shall explain to us on their knees. Meanwhile,' and he thumped the table, making the glasses rattle, 'let them keep quiet and hold their tongues. We shall do what we like in neutral countries.'"

I read the passage.

"Do you see that last sentence? 'We shall do what we like in neutral countries.' No man ever spoke the mind of his nation better than Peiffer did that night in a squalid cafe in Melilla."

Slingsby looked out over the harbour to where the sun was setting on the sierras. He would have given an arm to be sure of what Peiffer had set on foot behind those hills.

"I wonder," he said uneasily, and from that day he began to sleep badly.

Then came another and a most disquieting phase of the affair. Peiffer began to write letters to Slingsby. He was not comfortable. He was not being treated as an officer should be. He had no amusements, and his food was too plain. Moreover, there were Germans and Austrians up in the camp who turned up their noses at him because their birth was better than his.

"You see what these letters mean?" said Slingsby. "Peiffer wants to be sent away from the Rock."

"You are reading your own ideas into them," I replied.

But Slingsby was right. Each letter under its simple and foolish excuses was a prayer for translation to a less dangerous place. For as the days passed and no answer was vouchsafed, the prayer became a real cry of fear.