"Come in, children," Dr. Fell said, scarcely glancing at the door. "I confess I was reassured when I knew it was you."
Chapter 13
Rampole let the stick slide through his hand until its ferrule clanged on the floor; then he leaned on it. He said, "Dr. — " and found that his voice had gone into a crazy key,
The girl was laughing, pressing her hand to her mouth.
"We thought―" Rampole said, swallowing.
"Yes," nodded the doctor, "you thought I was the murderer, or a ghost. I was afraid you might see my candle from Yew Cottage and come over to investigate, but there was no way to block the window. Look here, my dear girl, you'd better sit down. I admire your nerve in coming up here. As for me―"
From his pocket he took an old-style derringer revolver and weighed the heavy weapon in his palm reflectively. He wheezed, nodding again.
"Because, children, I rather think we're up against a very dangerous man. Here, sit down."
"But what are you doing here, sir?" Rampole asked.
Dr. Fell laid the pistol on the table beside the candle. He pointed to what looked like a stack of manuscript ledgers, rotten and mildewed, and to a bundle of brown dry letters; with a large handkerchief he tried to mop the dust from his hands.
"Since you're here," he rumbled, "we might as well go into it. I was ransacking…. No, my lad, don't sit on the edge of that bed; it's full of unpleasant things. Here, on the edge of the table. You, my dear," to Dorothy, "may have the straight chair; the others are full of spiders.
"Anthony kept accounts, of course," he continued. "I fancied I should find 'em if I poked about…. The question is, what was Anthony hiding from his family. I must tell you, I think we're in for mother old, old story about buried treasure."
Dorothy, sitting very quiet in her wet raincoat, turned slowly to look at Rampole. She only observed:
"I knew it. I said so. And after I found those verses―"
"Ah, the verses!" grunted Dr. Fell. "Yes. I shall want to look at those. My young friend mentioned 'em. But all you have to do is read Anthony's diary to get a hint about what he did. He hated his family; he said they'd suffer for ridiculing his verse. So he turned his verse into a means to taunt them. I'm no very good accountant, but I can see from these," he tapped the ledgers, "that he left 'em precious little cash out of a large fortune. He couldn't beggar them, of course, because the lands — the biggest source of revenue-were entailed. But I rather think he put a gigantic sum beyond their reach. Bullion? Plate? Jewels? I don't know. You'll remember, he keeps referring in the diary to `the things one can buy to defeat them,' meaning his relatives; and again he says, `I have the beauties safe.' Have you forgotten his signet, `All that I have I carry with me?' — 'Omnia mea mecum porto."'
"And left the clue in the verses?" asked Rampole. "Telling where the hiding-place is?"
Dr. Fell threw back his ancient box-pleated cape and drew out pipe and tobacco-pouch. Reeling out the black ribbon, he adjusted his glasses more firmly.
"There are other clues," he said, meditatively.
"In the diary?"
"Partly. 'For instance, why was Anthony so strong in the arms? He was rather puny when he became governor; nothing about him developed except his arms and shoulders. We know that…. Eh?"
"Yes, of course."
The doctor nodded his big head. "Then again, you saw that deeply worn groove in the stone railing of the balcony over there. Eh? It was about of a size to contain a man's thumb," added the doctor, examining his own thumb reflectively.
"You mean a secret mechanism?" asked Rampole.
"Again," said the doctor, "again — and this is important — why did he leave, behind him a key to the balcony door? Why the balcony door? If he left those instructions in the vault, all that his heirs would need to get at them would be three keys: one to the corridor door of this room, one to the vault, and one to the iron box inside the vault. Why, then, include that fourth key?"
"Well, clearly because his instructions entailed going out on the balcony," said Rampole. "That was what Sir Benjamin said when he was talking about a death-trap out there…. Look here, sir! By that groove the size of a man's thumb, do you mean a spring, a mechanism, to be pressed so that―"
"Oh, nonsense!" said the doctor. "I didn't say a man's thumb went there. A man's thumb, even in the course of thirty years, wouldn't have worn that groove. But I'll tell you what would have done it. A rope."
Rampole slid off the edge of the table. He glanced over at the balcony door, closed and sinister in the faint light of the candle.
"Why," he repeated aloud — "why was Anthony so strong in the arms?"
"Or, if you want more questions," boomed the doctor, sitting up straight, "why is the destiny of everybody so intimately concerned with that well? Everything leads straight to the well. - There's Anthony's son, of course, the second Starberth who was a governor of this prison. He's the one who threw us all off the track. He died of a broken neck, like his father, and started the tradition. If he'd died in bed, there wouldn't have been any tradition, and we could examine the death of Anthony, his father, without any hocus-pocus. We could see it as the isolated problem it is. But it didn't happen that way. Anthony's son had to be governor of this prison when the cholera wiped out most of its inmates, and those poor devils went mad down in their airless cells. Well, the governor of the prison went mad from the same fever. He had it, too, and his delusions were too strong for him. You know what an effect that diary of his father's had on all of us? Then what sort of effect do you imagine it had on a nervous, bogey-ridden man who had been stricken with cholera in the bogey-ridden nineteenth century? What do you suppose is the effect on the brain of living just above the exhalations of a swamp where hanged men have been thrown to rot? — Anthony could hardly have hated his own son enough to want him to get up from his bed in delirium and throw himself from that balcony. But that's what the second governor did."
Rumbling, Dr. Fell exhaled his breath so hard that it almost blew out the candle, and Rampole jumped. For a moment the big room was quiet: dead men's books, dead men's chairs, and now the ancient sickness of their brains had become as terrible here as the face of the Iron Maiden. A rat scurried across the floor. Dorothy Starberth had put her hand on Rampole's sleeve; you would have said that she saw ghosts.
"And Anthony-?" Rampole put in, with an effort.
For a time Dr. Fell sat with his big shock of hair bowed.
"It must have taken him a long time," he remarked, vacantly, "to have worn so deep a groove in the stone. He had to do it all alone, and in the dead of night-time, when nobody could see him. Of course, there were no guards on that side of the prison, so he could escape unnoticed… Still, I'm inclined to think he had a confederate for the first few years, until he could develop his own strength. His own terrific strength would come with patience, but until then he had to have a confederate up raise and lower him. Probably, afterwards, he did away with the man…."
"Wait, please!" said Rampole, hitting the table. "You say that the groove was worn by a rope because Anthony spent years…"
"Hauling himself up and down it."
"Into the well," the other observed, slowly. He. had a sudden vision of a weird spiderish figure in black, swinging on a rope under the night sky. A lamp or two would be burning in the prison. The stars would be out. And Anthony would dangle by night where dead men dangled in daytime, working his way down to the well..
Yes. Somewhere down in that broad well, God knew where, he had spent year's in hollowing out a cache. Or possibly every night he had swung down to examine his treasures there. The reek from the well would dissolve his own sanity as it later dissolved his son's; but more subtly, for he was a harder man. He would see dead men climbing up from the well to knock at his balcony door. He would hear them whispering together at night, because he had decked their flesh with his wealth, and planted gold among their bones. Many nights he must have seen the rats eating in the well. It was only when he saw the rats in his own bed that he believed the dead men were coming to carry him down with them, soon.