"Yes," said Tarn, as if answering what I was thinking, "he has never been allowed to take food from any hand but mine. He will never forget you. You can come here at any hour of the day or night now with perfect safety. It's—it's the freedom of the city."
As Tarn climbed with me up to the car, he spoke again on the subject of my fee. "I suppose I should not have offered it in advance," he said. "But it occurred to me that, as I never think about clothes, I looked very poor, and that the place where I have chosen to live also looked very poor. And you did not know me. As a matter of fact, I am bothered with far more money than I want."
"Ah!" I laughed. "I could do with a little worry of that sort."
As he fixed up the lamps he thanked me warmly for what I had done for Mala, and asked what time he might expect me on the morrow. I opened my pocket-book and looked at it by the light of the lamp. "Well, I've a light day to-morrow, barring accidents. I shall be here some time in the afternoon."
The drive home was accomplished without incident. I ran the car into the coach-house and went straight to bed. But for more than an hour I could not get to sleep. I was haunted by that man and his negress wife, building theories about them, trying to account for them. Just as I was dropping off I was awakened again by a smell of bitter smoke in my nostrils—the smell of burning juniper leaves. Then I recognised that the smell was a memory-illusion, and fell asleep in real earnest.
II
I got back from my Sunday morning round before one. Helmstone was rather full of visitors that day, and there were many cars before the big hotel in the Queen's Road. As my man was driving slowly through the traffic I saw, a hundred yards away, Tarn striding along, in the same shabby clothes, with his retriever at his heel. He turned down a side-street, and I saw no more of him. On inquiry I found that he had not called at my house. He had merely been there, as he said, to give the dog his lesson.
I am a bachelor. I lunched alone on cold beef and beer, and I read the Lancet. I intended to remain materialistic and scientific, and not to be infected by that air of mystery and morbidity which seemed to hang round Tarn and his negress wife at Felonsdene. I had not been in practice for ten years without coming on strange occurrences before, and they had all lost their strangeness when the facts had been filled in. My after-luncheon visit to Felonsdene was of course professional, but if I had any chance I meant to satisfy an ordinary lay curiosity as well.
I drove myself, and the track across the downs looked worse in daylight than it had done by night. Still it seemed reasonable to suppose that what the car had done then it could do now. I could see more clearly now what had been done in the way of repairs to that ruined and long-deserted farm-house. The pointed roof over the big room where I had sat the night before had been mended and made weather-tight. The chimney-stack was new, and so were the window-casements. Adjoining the big room was a building of irregular shape that might possibly have contained three or four other rooms, roofed with new corrugated iron. One or two outbuildings looked as if they had been newly constructed from old materials. But that part of the farm-house which had originally been two-storied had been left quite untouched. Half the roof of it was down, the windows were without glass, and one saw through them the broken stairs and torn wall-paper peeling off and flapping in the brisk March breeze. On the grass-field beyond the court-yard two good Alderney cows were grazing. Most of the land looked neglected; but Tarn had no help and had everything to do himself. An orchard of stunted and miserable-looking fruit trees was sheltered by a dip of the land from north and east.