“Oh! nothing, nothing at all,” airily continued my companion. “Only at 5 AM he rang the bell at our gate, and after courteously wishing our janitor a very nice ‘good-morning’ he ventured to inquire whether you, brother Hugh, were within. On being told, with our customary truth, that you were he promptly disavowed all desire to interfere with your beauty sleep, and blandly offered to wait outside till it should please the fates to restore to you a sense of your own importance and the necessity for action. Our gate custodian, being a bit of a humourist, agreed that, on the whole, he would find it nicer and warmer outside St. Bruno’s than it was in, but vouchsafed to promise that, when you did arise, he would certainly inform you that so noble and so illustrious-looking a gentleman desired the honour of a few minutes private conversation with you.”
“Oh I shut up that rubbish,” I retorted pettishly, for I saw that Casteno’s florid periods really covered a move of a very grave and far-reaching importance. “The point is not a joke as you pretend. What we have got to decide is the best thing for me to do now Scotland Yard has put these men on my heels! I don’t want this round-table conference to-night to go wrong. I want to be free to be present at it. Indeed, we don’t want any scandal or newspaper publicity just at present. We should be able to imitate moles—moles that work in the dark.”
“That is true,” said a voice suddenly behind me, and wheeling round I found that we had been joined by the Prior. “Would you care to slip off?” he queried after a moment’s painful pause. “I could find you a good disguise as a woman, with a thick black veil, too. We have a passage that runs from this house to a little clump of bushes in a distant field. You could easily dart through that and make your way off without being caught.”
“I am afraid that would only leave you all here in a worse pickle,” I replied after some reflection. “Naylor, after all, will only wait a certain length of time, and if he finds then that I don’t materialise, as our brother at the gate promised, he will be quite wild enough to organise a raid on the place; and remember, after all, it does contain those three precious manuscripts. No; it looks as though I must face the worst after all.”
“But what on earth can he want with you?” cried Casteno petulantly.
“That’s just it,” I said. “I have got to go out and see. Well, it’s no good beating about the bush. If I have to face this unpleasant and inquisitive individual, I have to, I suppose, and the sooner I get it over the better for all of us. You two must keep a sharp watch on me, that’s all, and if you find I am hauled off to the police station on any pretence you must follow me up and try to bail me out.”
“And, failing all else, I will go down to the House of Commons this very afternoon and make a personal appeal for you to both Cuthbertson and the Home Secretary,” cried the Member of Parliament vigorously, for now he too seemed to be quite upset at the line things were taking.
“All right,” I said bravely. “I won’t thank you. We are all now too good friends, and too closely allied, to make use of conventional expressions of gratitude. I trust you—that’s sufficient—and I’ll step out and meet this turn of affairs with all the courage I can muster.”
With a curt nod I turned and left them and made my way down the staircase to the hall, and thence I passed rapidly to the door that shut off the monastery grounds from the public thoroughfare. This last was thrown open at my approach, and I proceeded to the roadway, which for a moment after I entered it looked quite deserted. Determined to carry the interview through with a high hand, however, I stepped out promptly, as though Whitehall at least was my destination, and then it was that Naylor, as I expected, found himself compelled to step from behind a tree and to show himself, which he did with an ugly twinkle of triumph in his small beady black eyes.
“Ah, you’ve come, then?” he said with a grunt, disdaining all conventional expressions of greeting.