“How? Well now you’re getting rather beyond me, old chap. I can only tell you that he retired suddenly, but not a day too soon. The climate of India became no longer healthy for him, you understand.”
There was no misunderstanding the significance of the speaker’s tone. Helston Varne was becoming more and more vividly interested.
“So? Did he turn the knowledge he’d gained to official account then?” he said. “Go back on them, for instance?”
“There again I can’t tell you anything definite. But some of us—very few of us—know that he didn’t retire a day too soon.”
“H’m,” and Helston Varne selected another cheroot from the box and lighted it slowly and deliberately. “But I thought these secret societies were far reaching, indeed world-wide reaching. Would he be much safer—or any safer at all—anywhere he went?”
“That too, is more than I can say. But you saw something of him at home. Did he seem all right there? You say he’s buried in some out of the way country place. Well, did it strike you he might be—what shall we say—sort of in hiding?”
“N-no. I can’t say it did, exactly. He told me he’d lost a lot of dibs over some damn silly invention he’d thought to make a pot over, and was glad to live in a shack which he got for nothing because it was supposed to be haunted.”
Outwardly cool, the speaker was conscious of a stirring awakening. He began to see light—vivid light, but he was not going to give things away. His kinsman clearly had never heard of the Heath Hover mystery, and now to him, Helston Varne, the Heath Hover mystery began to take on an interest which had been dropping of late to expiring point.
It is strange how a long sought solution will suddenly come as in a flash. The Heath Hover mystery had so far baffled this man to whom the unravelling of mysteries was as the breath of life, baffled him because there had been absolutely nothing to go upon. Once he had thought there was, and that was the day he had been an unwilling prisoner in the Heath Hover cellar. But that had evaded him, and since then he had owned himself puzzled. And now just a few casual conversational remarks let fall by his kinsman, here, away on the Indian frontier, seemed to let a whole flood of light in upon it. At that moment indeed he was very nearly piecing together the whole puzzle. His said kinsman’s voice broke the absorption of his thoughts.
“Hand the cheroot box across, Helston—Thanks—By the way you were saying, if I remember right, that Mervyn had got a niece stopping with him. What’s she like?”