“I don’t see why you emphasize the point.”
“Well, look here, where it was taken from, about shoulder height. Now, assuming naturally that the man who took it wanted it for business purposes, why didn’t he take this axe here, something less than a yard further up? There’s real power in this fellow. Or was the intruder fumbling around in the dark in a room he wasn’t acquainted with? And then the blood.”
“Ah, yes; I have been waiting with interest to hear your decision there.”
“No decision is possible immediately, if you ask me where it came from. I have no kit with me, of course. I accept for the time Pendleton’s assurance that it belongs to the missing pig, slaughtered in we don’t know what ritualistic manner. But the position of the blood on the weapon is what annoys me. You recall it?”
“The handle was slobbered with it.”
“And only a few spots on the blade. That would assure us the killing was done with the axe, even if the weapon weren’t so inefficient. Ah!” He lifted his hands in an attitude of dismay, a stiffish caryatid-like pose. “Pendleton’s right. No good comes of talking of these things. They’ll unravel. I’m going to get cleaned up for the rehearsal at five, Mr. Bannerlee. I’ve been discussing transplantings with old Finlay the gardener, and my hands have tested some extra fine dirt.”
I saw the Doctor swing his body out of the armoury with the regularity of an automaton, his trunk stiff and upright, his narrow legs working like scissors; I heard the Doctor enter on the winding stair.
Then, alone in the armoury, into which the first faint smoke of dusk was creeping, among so many instruments of death, where the intruder of the night before had stolen while the mockery of cards was in progress in the Hall, and where he might steal again—there, then, I was not at ease. I had flickers of apprehension, and the room seemed musty, close. Both mentally and bodily I felt cabined, confined. More than half an hour remaining before we were due in the Hall, I resolved upon taking a light breather up the Vale, to stir my sluggard blood and puff away my fancies.
No one appeared on the lawn or in the environs of the House. As I faced north up the Vale a fairish breeze met me face to face, and I realized that the storm was still in the atmosphere. The airy armies high above the hills were marshalling once more. A little while later the sun, not far above the ridge, was flecked with cloud, and the smouldering embers of the beechen hangers were, one might say, extinguished to black ashes.
By the time the glories of colour were lost on the hillsides, I had reached the clearing beyond which lurked the cottage of the sisters Delambre. This stood in a gorge-like recess, where flowed the small stream with the ridiculous bridge which I had noted when first I journeyed down the Vale. Good, full inspirations of the untainted air had restored physical tone, and my thoughts, too, were less troubled, perplexed. I was free of most of the jangling discord of the day, of Belvoir with his eternal harping on morals as accidental products, of Ludlow in his vigilance to combat offensive ideas, of Lib and Bob and their little bickerings, of Cosgrove and all the enmities that had heaped around him: Bob’s and the Baron’s and Charlton Oxford’s, and—almost—the abrupt flaming of the Irishman and his bride-to-be. That single incident must have impressed the houseful of us as rudely as a dozen ordinary quarrels of man to man.