A lovelier walk I have seldom had. The sunset was glorious, so glorious that for a while I sat like one rapt, dreaming myself back into the days of my childhood, and forgetful of everything but the beauty that lay before me.
I remembered the fair-haired little boy who day after day, as the afternoon was waning, would climb the stairs which led to a tiny garret under the roof. There was only one window in this garret, a window which faced the west and was cut in the roof itself. Looking down, one saw the red tiles running away so steeply beneath that the little boy could never glance at them without a catching of breath, and without fancying what it would be like to find oneself slipping down, down the steep descent until one reached that awful place—the world’s edge, it seemed to him—where the roof ended in a sheer and terrible abyss.
But it was to see the sunset that the little boy would climb the stairs each day, and as he dreamed himself out into that sunset it seemed a part of himself—not merely a thing at which to look.
It seemed to draw him to itself and into itself. It seemed to him as if, as he gazed, two little doors opened somewhere in his breast and his soul flew out like a white bird into the distant west. He knew that his body was still standing by the window, but he himself was away there among the purple and crimson and gold. He was walking yonder sunlit shining shore that bent round to form a bay for a golden sea. He was climbing yonder range of mountain peaks—peaks which, though built of unsubstantial cloud, were more beautiful than any show-place of the tourist’s seeking—peaks upon whose shining summit the soul might stand and look out upon the infinite—peaks which might be climbed by the fancy of those whose fortune it might never be to see an Alpine height. And when the purple and crimson had faded into citron, and the citron into gray; when the gold had paled to silver and darkened to lead; and the bird had fluttered back like a frightened thing to his breast—then the little boy would creep downstairs again, dry-eyed, but sad at heart with a strange sense of loneliness and loss.
As I sat there watching the last of the sunset, that little boy seemed to look out at me with desolate reproachful eyes, asking what the man had to give the boy in exchange for his dreams. Then a bat flew by, so closely that I felt the cold fanning of its wings upon my face, so suddenly that I drew back with a start and awoke to real life again.
Evening was already closing in. An hour ago the setting sun had looked out over the horizon’s edge and flooded the stretch of meadow-land—now so gloomy and gray—with a burst of luminous gold which tipped every grass-blade and daisy-head with liquid fire. Now on the same horizon’s edge the gusty night-rack was gathering. The glory and the glamour were gone, and darkness was already abroad. A wind which struck a chill to the heart moaned eerily over the meadows, and white mists blotted out bush and tree.
If I was to reach Baxenham before nightfall I had no time to lose; so, with a sigh for the vanished sunset and my vanished dreams, I rose to continue my walk.
Another field and a thickly-wooded plantation, and then, as I turned a bend where the path wound round among the trees, I found myself upon the sea-beach along which my path lay. In front, about a couple of miles away, I could see the church tower of Baxenham, over which red Mars burned large and lurid among a score of tiny stars that quivered near him, like arrow-heads shot wide of the mark; and low in the south the slender moon was like a finger laid to command silence on the lip of night. The beauty of the scene so possessed me that I stood still an instant with face turned seaward and bared head, and then—almost at my feet—I saw lying in the water a dark body that stirred and rocked, and stretched forth swaying arms like a creature at play. For one moment I thought it was alive, that it was some strange sea-beast come ashore, which was now seeking to regain its native element, but in the next I knew it for the body of a man, lying face downward and evidently dead.
There is horror enough in the silent and stone-cold stillness of death, but to see death put on the semblance of life, to see dead arms reach and the dead body stir and sway, as they did that night, when the incoming tide seemed to mock at death and to sport, cruel and cat-like, with its victim, is surely more horrible still.
With hands scarcely warmer than his I drew the dead man up upon the sands and turned him upon his back that I might see his face. It was the face of Green, the inquiry agent, and in his hand he held a small green bottle, which was lashed to his wrist by a handkerchief worked with his own initials, “J. B. G.” “Suicide!” I whispered to myself as I stooped to untie the handkerchief and bend back the unresisting fingers. The bottle was short and stumpy, with a wide mouth and a glass stopper secured by a string, and was labelled “Lavender Salts.” I cut the string and, drawing out the stopper, held the thing to my nose. “It is lavender salts,” I said, “or has been, for it’s light enough to be empty. No, there’s something inside it still. Let’s see what it is,” and with that I turned the bottle mouth downward over my open palm. A slip of neatly-folded paper fell out, which I hastily opened. Four words were printed upon it in rude capitals—“By order.—Captain Shannon.”