“Nothing, my lord,” Stubbs answered. “To tell you the truth, I have long thought Mr. John mad, and it is possible that his madness has taken this turn. But I am equally sure that there is nothing for him to discover, if he spends every day of his life here.”
“All the same I don’t like it,” the owner objected. “Whoever has been here has no right here. It is odd that I had some notion of this before we came. You may depend upon it that this was why he fixed himself at the Gatehouse.”
“He may have had something of the sort in his mind,” Stubbs admitted. “But I don’t think so, my lord. More probably, being here and idle, he took to wandering in for lack of something to do.”
“And by and by, had a key made and strayed into the Muniment Room! No, that won’t do, Stubbs. And frankly there should be closer supervision here. It should not have remained for me to discover this.”
He began to descend, leaving Stubbs to digest the remark; who for his part thought honestly that too much was being made of the matter. Probably the intruder was John Audley; the man had a bee in his bonnet, and what more likely than that he should be taken with a craze to haunt the house which he believed was his own? But the agent was too prudent to defend himself while the young man’s vexation was fresh. He followed him down in silence, and before many minutes had passed, they were in the open air, and had locked the door behind them.
Clouds hung low on the tops of the trees, mist veiled the view, and a small rain was falling on the wet lawn. Nevertheless the young man moved into the open. “Come this way,” he said.
The lawyer turned up the collar of his coat and followed him unwillingly. “Where does he get in?” my lord asked. It seemed as if the longer he dwelt on the matter the less he liked it. “Not by that door—the lock is rusty. The key had shrieked in it. Probably he enters by one of the windows in the new part.”
He walked towards the middle of the lawn and Stubbs, thankful that he wore Wellington boots, followed him.
The lawyer thought that he had never seen the house wear so dreary an aspect as it wore under the gray weeping sky. But his lordship was more practical. “These windows look the most likely,” he said after a short survey: and he dragged his unwilling attendant to the point he had marked.
A nearer view strengthened his suspicions. On the sill of one of the windows were scratches and stains. “You see?” he said. “It should not have been left to me to discover this! Probably John Audley comes from the Gatehouse by the Yew Walk.” He turned to measure the distance with his eye, the distance which divided the spot from the Iron Gate. “That’s it,” he said, “he comes——”