“I don’t see what you were in a sweat about,” said Crofts, turning to Ludlow. “Cosgrove wouldn’t have matured his plans in a generation.”
“That’s where you’re sure to be wrong, sir,” contradicted Salt. “The truth is, nobody except Sir Brooke could have had an idea how near Cosgrove’s coup was to takin’ place. One or two more parties to sound, a little time to work out the final details and give the final orders—and the fat would have been in the fire! Why, the papers say Ireland’s half-mad to-day as it is.”
“Where do you come in?” asked Crofts belligerently, fixing his eye on Oxford this time, and that well-nurtured gentleman lost countenance, but Salt made answer.
“Mr. Oxford has been pretty close to Mr. Cosgrove all along, as you’ll recall,” he said to our host. “He may have excited Mr. Cosgrove once or twice, but that was in another connection altogether.” Although guardedly, the Superintendent gave a swift look toward Miss Lebetwood. I intercepted it. “Another connection altogether. I think perhaps that it was due to Mr. Oxford keepin’ such a good watch on Mr. Cosgrove and his servant that Sir Brooke made up his mind to come down here when he did and have the cards laid plain on the table.”
“This servant, who was he?” put in the insatiable Crofts. “Cosgrove never brought a servant to any house of mine before.”
“He’s in the mortuary, too, now.”
“What, the gorilla-man!” I exclaimed.
It was so. I comprehended many things in an instant, and Salt’s re-enforcement of them came tumbling after. The creature I had met near the top of Mynydd Tarw, who had dwelt in the cleft of the hill, had been an Irishman, Cosgrove’s servant. That was an Irish yell he had yelled plump in my face, some adjuration to bid a demon begone, for he must have taken me for a fiend of the mist when I fell in his path. The unaccountable burned paper in Cosgrove’s grate was a message from this man; he it was whom Cosgrove had intended to smuggle into the House as an “extra progeny for the elephant.”
I recollected our meeting, how he had seemed to be straining, staggering, spent with haste, even before he had encountered me and found a new cause for flight. The presumption was strong that he had lately met with some alarming experience. What could that have been? Had he seen the black-bearded unknown, the menagerie-keeper? There was nothing in that person’s colloquy with me to suggest it.
More likely the gorilla-man had run across Sir Brooke. Still, in the mere encounter there could have been no cause for terror; neither was anything to the other, and the Knight was hardly a figure to inspire awe. What was more probable than a meeting on the Water bank above the tennis court? One man was skulking secretly; the other had lost his way. Possibly there had been a collision, or perhaps the prowler had only seen the shape of Sir Brooke taking form in the fog, then suddenly falling in the Water at a fatal mis-step. That abrupt fall, perhaps one choking cry, no more, before the instant total disappearance of the body beneath the tunnel arch (of which the gorilla-man could have no knowledge)—these account sufficiently for the fear in Cosgrove’s servant, spurring him hillward. This, I believe—and it is Salt’s belief as well as mine—is the true story.