Part 15 (2/2)

”Your diagnosis, I believe, is amazingly accurate,” he said after a moment, turning round with the map in his hands. ”Though, of course, I can have no idea how you should guess--”

John Silence shrugged his shoulders expressively. ”Merely my impression,” he said. ”If you pay attention to impressions, and do not allow them to be confused by deductions of the intellect, you will often find them surprisingly, uncannily, accurate.”

Colonel Wragge resumed his seat and laid the map upon his knees. His face was very thoughtful as he plunged abruptly again into his story.

”On coming into possession,” he said, looking us alternately in the face, ”I found a crop of stories of the most extraordinary and impossible kind I had ever heard--stories which at first I treated with amused indifference, but later was forced to regard seriously, if only to keep my servants. These stories I thought I traced to the fact of my brother's death--and, in a way, I think so still.”

He leant forward and handed the map to Dr. Silence.

”It's an old plan of the estate,” he explained, ”but accurate enough for our purpose, and I wish you would note the position of the plantations marked upon it, especially those near the house. That one,” indicating the spot with his finger, ”is called the Twelve Acre Plantation. It was just there, on the side nearest the house, that my brother and the head keeper met their deaths.”

He spoke as a man forced to recognise facts that he deplored, and would have preferred to leave untouched--things he personally would rather have treated with ridicule if possible. It made his words peculiarly dignified and impressive, and I listened with an increasing uneasiness as to the sort of help the doctor would look to me for later. It seemed as though I were a spectator of some drama of mystery in which any moment I might be summoned to play a part.

”It was twenty years ago,” continued the Colonel, ”but there was much talk about it at the time, unfortunately, and you may, perhaps, have heard of the affair. Stride, the keeper, was a pa.s.sionate, hot-tempered man but I regret to say, so was my brother, and quarrels between them seem to have been frequent.”

”I do not recall the affair,” said the doctor. ”May I ask what was the cause of death?” Something in his voice made me p.r.i.c.k up my ears for the reply.

”The keeper, it was said, from suffocation. And at the inquest the doctors averred that both men had been dead the same length of time when found.”

”And your brother?” asked John Silence, noticing the omission, and listening intently.

”Equally mysterious,” said our host, speaking in a low voice with effort. ”But there was one distressing feature I think I ought to mention. For those who saw the face--I did not see it myself--and though Stride carried a gun its chambers were undischarged--” He stammered and hesitated with confusion. Again that sense of terror moved between his words. He stuck.

”Yes,” said the chief listener sympathetically.

”My brother's face, they said, looked as though it had been scorched. It had been swept, as it were, by something that burned--blasted. It was, I am told, quite dreadful. The bodies were found lying side by side, faces downwards, both pointing away from the wood, as though they had been in the act of running, and not more than a dozen yards from its edge.”

Dr. Silence made no comment. He appeared to be studying the map attentively.

”I did not see the face myself,” repeated the other, his manner somehow expressing the sense of awe he contrived to keep out of his voice, ”but my sister unfortunately did, and her present state I believe to be entirely due to the shock it gave to her nerves. She never can be brought to refer to it, naturally, and I am even inclined to think that the memory has mercifully been permitted to vanish from her mind. But she spoke of it at the time as a face swept by flame--blasted.”

John Silence looked up from his contemplation of the map, but with the air of one who wished to listen, not to speak, and presently Colonel Wragge went on with his account. He stood on the mat, his broad shoulders hiding most of the mantelpiece.

”They all centred about this particular plantation, these stories. That was to be expected, for the people here are as superst.i.tious as Irish peasantry, and though I made one or two examples among them to stop the foolish talk, it had no effect, and new versions came to my ears every week. You may imagine how little good dismissals did, when I tell you that the servants dismissed themselves. It was not the house servants, but the men who worked on the estate outside. The keepers gave notice one after another, none of them with any reason I could accept; the foresters refused to enter the wood, and the beaters to beat in it. Word flew all over the countryside that Twelve Acre Plantation was a place to be avoided, day or night.

”There came a point,” the Colonel went on, now well in his swing, ”when I felt compelled to make investigations on my own account. I could not kill the thing by ignoring it; so I collected and a.n.a.lysed the stories at first hand. For this Twelve Acre Wood, you will see by the map, comes rather near home. Its lower end, if you will look, almost touches the end of the back lawn, as I will show you tomorrow, and its dense growth of pines forms the chief protection the house enjoys from the east winds that blow up from the sea. And in olden days, before my brother interfered with it and frightened all the game away, it was one of the best pheasant coverts on the whole estate.”

”And what form, if I may ask, did this interference take?” asked Dr.

Silence.

”In detail, I cannot tell you, for I do not know--except that I understand it was the subject of his frequent differences with the head keeper; but during the last two years of his life, when he gave up travelling and settled down here, he took a special interest in this wood, and for some unaccountable reason began to build a low stone wall around it. This wall was never finished, but you shall see the ruins tomorrow in the daylight.”

”And the result of your investigations--these stories, I mean?” the doctor broke in, anxious to keep him to the main issues.

”Yes, I'm coming to that,” he said slowly, ”but the wood first, for this wood out of which they grew like mushrooms has nothing in any way peculiar about it. It is very thickly grown, and rises to a clearer part in the centre, a sort of mound where there is a circle of large boulders--old Druid stones, I'm told. At another place there's a small pond. There's nothing distinctive about it that I could mention--just an ordinary pine-wood, a very ordinary pine-wood--only the trees are a bit twisted in the trunks, some of 'em, and very dense. Nothing more.

”And the stories? Well, none of them had anything to do with my poor brother, or the keeper, as you might have expected; and they were all odd--such odd things, I mean, to invent or imagine. I never could make out how these people got such notions into their heads.”

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