“The mystic bone!” he murmured ironically. (The epithet has stuck.)
“What are you suggesting, Lord Ludlow?” I asked brusquely, for my feathers were perhaps a little ruffled.
“I should say you needed to have your sight examined.”
“It has been, recently, and pronounced excellent.”
“Then why not consult our friend Doctor Aire, professionally? He has had something to do with mental cases.”
I was going to retort when Alberta’s even tones admonished me “not to notice his nonsense or he’d get vain”; so I let it go at that.
As for Miss Lebetwood’s hour before the tragedy, she had soon relaxed her pace among the strawberry trees, and the wave of anger had ebbed away. She found herself nearby the tennis court. Feeling, she said, very much ashamed of her lack of self-control, she postponed returning to the House as long as possible, and began to search industriously for some of the lost tennis balls. She failed to recover a single one, and at length, noticing that the planted grove was becoming thick with twilight, and glancing at her wrist-watch, she realized that she must hasten back to the House unless she were to miss tea, and appear more ungracious than ever. She did not, of course, know of the plan to rehearse “Noah’s Flood,” for neither Cosgrove nor anyone else had she seen. Aire had spied her just emerging from the thickets to the lawn. From the time of her outburst against him, she was not to see her betrothed again until, when half-way across the lawn a few rods above the gate-house, she saw him kneeling, as she thought, and dying, as it proved, beside the small tower.
All this, certainly, was threadbare to tell by this morning; backward and forward the courses had been traced until there was disgust at the resultlessness of it all. But now I returned from Salt to find a new problem had arisen in the company. Miss Lebetwood (who with Millicent Mertoun was now engaging in the last of Salt’s private conferences) had said that since Cosgrove had not found her by the tennis court, it was extremely unlikely that he had ever looked for her at all; and once she had uttered these words, every person in the conservatory was acutely aware what a non sequitur yawning lies in the seemingly harmless assumption that because a man stares hard and plunges into some bushes he is of necessity searching for something beyond those bushes. Well then, what had Cosgrove been doing, and where, from leaving the Hall until receiving his death-blow by the tower?
In vain we attempted to make out for him an itinerary which would account for the afternoon. All that the united company could supply was one fact sandwiched between two uncertainties, and even that fact had been offered by the servants’ hall. I may record the items thus:
First uncertainty: Doctor Aire, who left me alone in the armoury a good quarter of an hour after Cosgrove departed from the Hall, says that before seeing Maryvale, he caught a glimpse of what may have been a human face among some dogwood shrubs a little to the right of the cypress grove. But whether it was Cosgrove’s face, or that of an intruder, or “the prodigious Parson’s” (who is so familiar that he seems no intruder), or whether it was no face at all, Aire refuses to commit himself. He seems rather inclined to believe himself the victim of an illusion. The scientific mind, I suppose. (Query—Could this have been the gorilla-man? If so, we have the first evidence to substantiate any definite person’s presence about the time and place of Cosgrove’s death.)
Fact, from Wheeler, the youthful chauffeur, via Blenkinson’s document: Cosgrove beckoned to Wheeler from behind a corner of the garage at about ten minutes past four. Answering the signal, Wheeler had been conducted to a place out of sight among the decaying stonework. (Stables and garage occupy part, but not all the site of the ruined south-east portion of the castle.) “I want no one to overhear us,” said the Irishman, “and I want you to keep eternally silent about what I am going to say.” For emphasis he placed a pound note in Wheeler’s hand. “There will be five more for you at the end of my stay here if you do what I bid you and hold your tongue.” Wheeler swore eternal fidelity, and Cosgrove gave his orders. “It’s almost nothing I want. To-night there will be a foolish entertainment in the House, and everyone will have the costume of an animal. The costumes, I know, are in the storerooms on the second floor. Now, I have a friend who must enter the House to me without anyone being the wiser. He can come in during the mummery if he has the appearance of an animal, and I want you to see that he finds his costume. You know my room?” Wheeler said he did not, and Cosgrove explained that he occupied the room next the inner conservatory wall. “The tower there juts out corresponding to the one on the other side between the Hall of the Moth and the conservatory. At a quarter past nine I shall drop the costume from the tower window; it will be an extra progeny for the elephant, or some such vanity. I want you to be on hand from the time I mentioned until my friend comes a little later, and I want you to see that he gets into the costume and into the Hall, where the performance begins about ten. My friend will also come beneath my window, but I shall no longer be in my room; so you must be there to meet him.” Wheeler guaranteed satisfaction, and was sure that he and Cosgrove had not been seen during this colloquy. (Nor had they been, but they had been heard. Morgan, overhauling a saddle in a harness-closet just beyond the wall, could verify the tones of the men’s voices, but had distinguished none of the sense. In vain, later, he tried to wrest Wheeler’s secret from him.)
Second uncertainty: Belvoir believes, but is not prepared to swear, that just as he and Miss Mertoun and the Baron approached the gate-house from the direction of Aidenn Water, he saw Cosgrove on the lawn. Two things make Belvoir doubt if he actually did see the Irishman or not. First, he was talking about and thinking about something else at the time, and the sight was no more than a surface impression, so to speak, on his mind. Furthermore, he may have been tricked by the twilight, for the huge shadow of the gate-house reached across the lawn just there, even ascending the wall of the House part way. If he saw the Irishman in the shadow, the image must have been extremely vague, for not only is the distance considerable from where the three were walking, but Cosgrove, it must be borne in mind, was wearing a black coat and dark blue breeches. Belvoir is extremely uneasy on the prongs of his dilemma. (Those with him saw nothing.) Asked what position Cosgrove was in, he answers curiously enough that if he saw the Irishman at all, he had lifted the canvas cover part way and was regarding the unexplainable battle-axe.