“I am going to wait here,” he said. “Take it inside and have a look.”
“It proves there was someone here,” I said.
“I never doubted it,” he replied.
“Helena said she did.”
“There may have been someone there, forcing her to speak as she did.”
I had thought of that, too. “I have a feeling that something’s wrong,” I told him, “but it’s so hard to butt in when you don’t know. After all, I haven’t seen Helena for eight years. I haven’t known her well since her marriage. That’s twenty years, and there’s all this Alarian business.”
I held the paper closely inside my hand until I gained the safety of our sitting room, where I pulled the open curtain tight across the window before I looked at it. The air of the old place had so caught me that I felt I might be looking on the key to some mystery of life and death.
I cannot speak Alarian, but German is spoken in Rheatia and I do speak German. Alarian is a Turkish language written in Latin characters with a large number of borrowed words. I know nothing of Turkish, but its general appearance is familiar to me. I learned a lot of things as a boy, collecting stamps. At least I can distinguish that language group from other groups, which isn’t much of a feat. This paper was slightly crumpled. On it, in ink, were scrawled twelve words that I was quite sure were Alarian. Not one word could I distinguish, yet I suddenly felt guilty staring at that note intended for other eyes. Only the language had saved me from reading it. I stuffed the thing in my pocket, and started back for John. We must stop spying. Probably the whole business was nonsense, anyway, and if not, the man who had come may have been a messenger from the Queen, and it was conceivable that she would not wish him to discover that she had confided in us. Probably she regretted that confidence, now. We were outsiders, we could do her harm, but no good.
When I got back to the bench, John was gone. He was not near the bush, either. I sat down to wait. No use hurrying and scurrying around a dark garden in frantic search for a missing man when that man was six feet one, and as heavy as John. Still, I felt uneasy. If there were one midnight prowler, there might so easily be two. And the bench where I was sitting was open on all sides. I went back to the bush, and leaned against the wall. It was a good enough place to wait, since we had not agreed on any meeting place. The time seemed eternal. I was getting sleepy again. The garden was still. Too still. Only the leaves rustled a little. I could almost imagine that I could hear the stars gossiping among themselves. Something that was probably an owl made a cool, fluttering sound. I shifted my position. Where could he be? And suddenly I fell backward. The wall had given way, something fell on me and I heard a muttered curse. An unseen pair of hands threw me into some bushes. I tried to scramble to my feet, but the bushes were full of thorns. I have hated roses ever since. I scratched my face and hands in my efforts, then something struck me glancingly on the jaw, and I fell back again.