“What difference—?”
“You’ll have to ask Cosgrove; but he won’t tell you the answer, the real answer, that is. He’s put his foot down, though. No, Sir Brooke means no Bidding Feast; that’s flat.”
“How long do you suppose the festivities can be postponed?”
“A day, says Pendleton. Then if he had his way, the marriage would take place, Brooke or no.”
“The marriage! With all that ugliness and horror unexplained?”
Belvoir shrugged. “What would you have? The fact is that the blood is not so significant as we thought. Pendleton would have sent for the police to-day, I dare say, in spite of his stand last night, but the source of the blood has been found, or rather missed.”
“The source?”
“A possible or probable source. A sucking-pig with all necessary qualifications is gone from the sties. Pendleton seems to believe that a poacher may have slaughtered it, or that someone has indulged in a ritualistic blood orgy, or that—but we can’t make out what he thinks, if he knows himself. Come outside, Mr. Bannerlee, and see for yourself how the exhibits have lost their grisliness in daylight.”
We met Pendleton at the foot of the stairs. His greeting to me was effusive yet a trifle strained. He had been going up to call me; hadn’t expected that after my long—here he looked at Belvoir, bethought himself, and stammered—well, he hadn’t expected me to be up so soon. The boy Toby, he said, had at nine o’clock been sent on his bicycle through New Aidenn to the ineffable village, to fetch my bag from the inn, and incidentally to re-inquire about the reported appearance of Sir Brooke at New Aidenn station. Most of the guests, however, believed the identification had been mistaken. As a fact, Sir Brooke was quite irresponsible enough to stay overnight and not ’phone. But since the message— Were we going out? He’d come, too.
On the lawn beyond the mighty gate-house—and herefrom in the daytime we could see the narrow glitter of Aidenn Water beyond the tennis-court some distance up the bank—on the lawn the blood-pool, now a dry clot, and the hatchet with helve and blade both stained, were fenced off with guards of chicken-wire.