III. The Mystery of the Well (1)

    Cyprian Paynter did not know what he expected to see rise out of the well—the corpse of the murdered man or merely the spirit of the fountain. Anyhow, neither of them rose out of it, and he recognized after an instant that this was, after all, perhaps the more natural course of things. Once more he pulled himself together, walked to the edge of the well and looked down. He saw, as before, a dim glimmer of water, at that depth no brighter than ink; he fancied he still heard a faint convulsion and murmur, but it gradually subsided to an utter stillness. Short of suicidally diving in, there was nothing to be done. He realized that, with all his equipment, he had not even brought anything like a rope or basket, and at length decided to return for them. As he retraced his steps to the entrance, he recurred to, and took stock of, his more solid discoveries. Somebody had gone into the wood, killed the Squire and thrown him down the well, but he did not admit for a moment that it was his friend the poet; but if the latter had actually been seen coming out of the wood the matter was serious. As he walked the rapidly darkening twilight was cloven with red gleams, that made him almost fancy for a moment that some fantastic criminal had set fire to the tiny forest as he fled. A second glance showed him nothing but one of those red sunsets in which such serene days sometimes close.
    As he came out of the gloomy gate of trees into the full glow he saw a dark figure standing quite still in the dim bracken, on the spot where he had left the woodcutter. It was not the woodcutter.
    It was topped by a tall black hat of a funeral type, and the whole figure stood so black against the field of crimson fire that edged the sky line that he could not for an instant understand or recall it. When he did, it was with an odd change in the whole channel of his thoughts.
    “Doctor Brown!” he cried. “Why, what are you doing up here?”
    “I have been talking to poor Martin,” answered the doctor, and made a rather awkward movement with his hand toward the road down to the village. Following the gesture, Paynter dimly saw another dark figure walking down in the blood-red distance. He also saw that the hand motioning was really black, and not merely in shadow; and, coming nearer, found the doctor’s dress was really funereal, down to the detail of the dark gloves. It gave the American a small but queer shock, as if this were actually an undertaker come up to bury the corpse that could not be found.
    “Poor Martin’s been looking for his chopper,” observed Doctor Brown, “but I told him I’d picked it up and kept it for him. Between ourselves, I hardly think he’s fit to be trusted with it.” Then, seeing the glance at his black garb, he added: “I’ve just been to a funeral. Did you know there’s been another loss? Poor Jake the fisherman’s wife, down in the cottage on the shore, you know. This infernal fever, of course.”
    As they both turned, facing the red evening light, Paynter instinctively made a closer study, not merely of the doctor’s clothes, but of the doctor. Dr. Burton Brown was a tall, alert man, neatly dressed, who would otherwise have had an almost military air but for his spectacles and an almost painful intellectualism in his lean brown face and bald brow. The contrast was clinched by the fact that, while his face was of the ascetic type generally conceived as clean-shaven, he had a strip of dark mustache cut too short for him to bite, and yet a mouth that often moved as if trying to bite it. He might have been a very intelligent army surgeon, but he had more the look of an engineer or one of those services that combine a military silence with a more than military science. Paynter had always respected something ruggedly reliable about the man, and after a little hesitation he told him all the discoveries.
    The doctor took the hat of the dead Squire in his hand, and examined it with frowning care. He put one finger through the hole in the crown and moved it meditatively. And Paynter realized how fanciful his own fatigue must have made him; for so silly a thing as the black finger waggling through the rent in that frayed white relic unreasonably displeased him. The doctor soon made the same discovery with professional acuteness, and applied it much further. For when Paynter began to tell him of the moving water in the well he looked at him a moment through his spectacles, and then said:
    “Did you have any lunch?”
    Paynter for the first time realized that he had, as a fact, worked and thought furiously all day without food.
    “Please don’t fancy I mean you had too much lunch,” said the medical man, with mournful humor. “On the contrary, I mean you had too little. I think you are a bit knocked out, and your nerves exaggerate things. Anyhow, let me advise you not to do any more to-night. There’s nothing to be done without ropes or some sort of fishing tackle, if with that; but I think I can get you some of the sort of grappling irons the fishermen use for dragging. Poor Jake’s got some, I know; I’ll bring them round to you tomorrow morning. The fact is, I’m staying there for a bit as he’s rather in a state, and I think is better for me to ask for the things and not a stranger. I am sure you’ll understand.”
    Paynter understood sufficiently to assent, and hardly knew why he stood vacantly watching the doctor make his way down the steep road to the shore and the fisher’s cottage. Then he threw off thoughts he had not examined, or even consciously entertained, and walked slowly and rather heavily back to the Vane Arms.
    The doctor, still funereal in manner, though no longer so in costume, appeared punctually under the wooden sign next morning, laden with what he had promised; an apparatus of hooks and a hanging net for hoisting up anything sunk to a reasonable depth. He was about to proceed on his professional round, and said nothing further to deter the American from proceeding on his own very unprofessional experiment as a detective. That buoyant amateur had indeed recovered most, if not all, of yesterday’s buoyancy, was now well fitted to pass any medical examination, and returned with all his own energy to the scene of yesterday’s labors.
    It may well have brightened and made breezier his second day’s toil that he had not only the sunlight and the bird’s singing in the little wood, to say nothing of a more scientific apparatus to work with, but also human companionship, and that of the most intelligent type. After leaving the doctor and before leaving the village he had bethought himself of seeking the little court or square where stood the quiet brown house of Andrew Ashe, solicitor, and the operations of dragging were worked in double harness. Two heads were peering over the well in the wood: one yellow-haired, lean and eager; the other redhaired, heavy and pondering; and if it be true that two heads are better than one, it is truer that four hands are better than two. In any case, their united and repeated efforts bore fruit at last, if anything so hard and meager and forlorn can be called a fruit. It weighed loosely in the net as it was lifted, and rolled out on the grassy edge of the well; it was a bone.
    Ashe picked it up and stood with it in his hand, frowning.
    “We want Doctor Brown here,” he said. “This may be the bone of some animal. Any dog or sheep might fall into a hidden well.” Then he broke off, for his companion was already detaching a second bone from the net.
    After another half hour’s effort Paynter had occasion to remark, “It must have been rather a large dog.” There were already a heap of such white fragments at his feet.
    “I have seen nothing yet,” said Ashe, speaking more plainly. “That is certainly a human bone.” “I fancy this must be a human bone,” said the American.
    And he turned away a little as he handed the other a skull.
    There was no doubt of what sort of skull; there was the one unique curve that holds the mystery of reason, and underneath it the two black holes that had held human eyes. But just above that on the left was another and smaller black hole, which was not an eye.
    Then the lawyer said, with something like an effort: “We may admit it is a man without admitting it is—any particular man. There may be something, after all, in that yarn about the drunkard; he may have tumbled into the well. Under certain conditions, after certain natural processes, I fancy, the bones might be stripped in this way, even without the skill of any assassin. We want the doctor again.”
    Then he added suddenly, and the very sound of his voice suggested that he hardly believed his own words.
    “Haven’t you got poor Vane’s hat there?”
    He took it from the silent American’s hand, and with a sort of hurry fitted it on the bony head.
    “Don’t!” said the other involuntarily.
    The lawyer had put his finger, as the doctor had done, through the hole in the hat, and it lay exactly over the hole in the skull.
    “I have the better right to shrink,” he said steadily, but in a vibrant voice. “I think I am the older friend.”
    Paynter nodded without speech, accepting the final identification. The last doubt, or hope, had departed, and he turned to the dragging apparatus, and did not speak till he had made his last find.
    The singing of the birds seemed to grow louder about them, and the dance of the green summer leaves was repeated beyond in the dance of the green summer sea. Only the great roots of the mysterious trees could be seen, the rest being far aloft, and all round it was a wood of little, lively and happy things. They might have been two innocent naturalists, or even two children fishing for eels or tittlebats on that summer holiday when Paynter pulled up something that weighed in the net more heavily than any bone. It nearly broke the meshes, and fell against a mossy stone with a clang.
    “Truth lies at the bottom of a well,” cried the American, with lift in his voice. “The woodman’s ax.”
    It lay, indeed, flat and gleaming in the grasses by the well in the wood, just as it had lain in the thicket where the woodman threw it in the beginning of all these things. But on one corner of the bright blade was a dull brown stain.
    “I see,” said Ashe, “the woodman’s ax, and therefore the Woodman. Your deductions are rapid.”
    “My deductions are reasonable,” said Paynter, “Look here, Mr. Ashe; I know what you’re thinking. I know you distrust Treherne; but I’m sure you will be just for all that. To begin with, surely the first assumption is that the woodman’s ax is used by the Woodman. What have you to say to it?”
    “I say ‘No’ to it,” replied the lawyer. “The last weapon a woodman would use would be a woodman’s ax; that is if he is a sane man.”
    “He isn’t,” said Paynter quietly; “you said you wanted the doctor’s opinion just now. The doctor’s opinion on this point is the same as my own. We both found him meandering about outside there; it’s obvious this business has gone to his head, at any rate. If the murderer were a man of business like yourself, what you say might be sound. But this murderer is a mystic. He was driven by some fanatical fad about the trees. It’s quite likely he thought there was something solemn and sacrificial about the ax, and would have liked to cut off Vane’s head before a crowd, like Charles I’s. He’s looking for the ax still, and probably thinks it a holy relic.”
    “For which reason,” said Ashe, smiling, “he instantly chucked it down a well.”
    Paynter laughed.
    “You have me there certainly,” he said. “But I think you have something else in your mind. You’ll say, I suppose, that we were all watching the wood; but were we? Frankly, I could almost fancy the peacock trees did strike me with a sort of sickness—a sleeping sickness.”
    “Well,” admitted Ashe, “you have me there too. I’m afraid I couldn’t swear I was awake all the time; but I don’t put it down to magic trees—only to a private hobby of going to bed at night. But look here, Mr. Paynter; there’s another and better argument against any outsider from the village or countryside having committed the crime. Granted he might have slipped past us somehow, and gone for the Squire. But why should he go for him in the wood? How did he know he was in the wood? You remember how suddenly the poor old boy bolted into it, on what a momentary impulse. It’s the last place where one would normally look for such a man, in the middle of the night. No, it’s an ugly thing to say, but we, the group round that garden table, were the only people who knew. Which brings me back to the one point in your remarks which I happen to think perfectly true.”
    “What was that?” inquired the other.
    “That the murderer was a mystic,” said Ashe. “But a cleverer mystic than poor old Martin.”
    Paynter made a murmur of protest, and then fell silent.
    “Let us talk plainly,” resumed the lawyer. “Treherne had all those mad motives you yourself admit against the woodcutter. He had the knowledge of Vane’s whereabouts, which nobody can possibly attribute to the woodcutter. But he had much more. Who taunted and goaded the Squire to go into the wood at all? Treherne. Who practically prophesied, like an infernal quack astrologer, that something would happen to him if he did go into the wood? Treherne. Who was, for some reason, no matter what, obviously burning with rage and restlessness all that night, kicking his legs impatiently to and fro on the cliff, and breaking out with wild words about it being all over soon? Treherne. And on top of all this, when I walked closer to the wood, whom did I see slip out of it swiftly and silently like a shadow, but turning his face once to the moon? On my oath and on my honor—Treherne.”
    “It is awful,” said Paynter, like a man stunned. “What you say is simply awful.”
    “Yes,” said Ashe seriously, “very awful, but very simple. Treherne knew where the ax was originally thrown. I saw him, on that day he lunched here first, watching it like a wolf, while Miss Vane was talking to him. On that dreadful night he could easily have picked it up as he went into the wood. He knew about the well, no doubt; who was so likely to know any old traditions about the peacock trees? He hid the hat in the trees, where perhaps he hoped (though the point is unimportant) that nobody would dare to look. Anyhow, he hid it, simply because it was the one thing that would not sink in the well. Mr. Paynter, do you think I would say this of any man in mere mean dislike? Could any man say it of any man unless the case was complete, as this is complete?”
    “It is complete,” said Paynter, very pale. “I have nothing left against it but a faint, irrational feeling; a feeling that, somehow or other, if poor Vane could stand alive before us at this moment he might tell some other and even more incredible tale.”
    Ashe made a mournful gesture.
    “Can these dry bones live?” he said.
    “Lord Thou knowest,” answered the other mechanically. “Even these dry bones—”
    And he stopped suddenly with his mouth open, a blinding light of wonder in his pale eyes.
    “See here,” he said hoarsely and hastily. “You have said the word. What does it mean? What can it mean? Dry? Why are these bones dry?”
    The lawyer started and stared down at the heap.
    “Your case complete!” cried Paynter, in mounting excitement. “Where is the water in the well? The water I saw leap like a flame? Why did it leap? Where is it gone to? Complete! We are buried under riddles.”
    Ashe stooped, picked up a bone and looked at it.
    “You are right,” he said, in a low and shaken voice: “this bone is as dry—as a bone.”
    “Yes, I am right,” replied Cyprian. “And your mystic is still as mysterious as a mystic.”
    There was a long silence. Ashe laid down the bone, picked up the ax and studied it more closely. Beyond the dull stain at the corner of the steel there was nothing unusual about it save a broad white rag wrapped round the handle, perhaps to give a better grip. The lawyer thought it worth noting, however, that the rag was certainly newer and cleaner than the chopper. But both were quite dry.
    “Mr. Paynter,” he said at last, “I admit you have scored, in the spirit if not in the letter. In strict logic, this greater puzzle is not a reply to my case. If this ax has not been dipped in water, it has been dipped in blood; and the water jumping out of the well is not an explanation of the poet jumping out of the wood. But I admit that morally and practically it does make a vital difference. We are not faced with a colossal contradiction, and we don’t know how far it extends. The body might have been broken up or boiled down to its bones by the murderer, though it may be hard to connect it with the conditions of the murder. It might conceivably have been so reduced by some property in the water and soil, for decomposition varies vastly with these things. I should not dismiss my strong prima facie case against the likely person because of these difficulties. But here we have something entirely different. That the bones themselves should remain dry in a well full of water, or a well that yesterday was full of water—that brings us to the edge of something beyond which we can make no guess. There is a new factor, enormous and quite unknown. While we can’t fit together such prodigious facts, we can’t fit together a case against Treherne or against anybody. No; there is only one thing to be done now. Since we can’t accuse Treherne, we must appeal to him. We must put the case against him frankly before him, and trust he has an explanation—and will give it. I suggest we go back and do it now.”
    Paynter, beginning to follow, hesitated a moment, and then said: “Forgive me for a kind of liberty; as you say, you are an older friend of the family. I entirely agree with your suggestion, but before you act on your present suspicions, do you know, I think Miss Vane ought to be warned a little? I rather fear all this will be a new shock to her.”
    “Very well,” said Ashe, after looking at him steadily for an instant. “Let us go across to her first.”
    From the opening of the wood they could see Barbara Vane writing at the garden table, which was littered with correspondence, and the butler with his yellow face waiting behind her chair. As the lengths of grass lessened between them, and the little group at the table grew larger and clearer in the sunlight, Paynter had a painful sense of being part of an embassy of doom. It sharpened when the girl looked up from the table and smiled on seeing them.
    “I should like to speak to you rather particularly if I may,” said the lawyer, with a touch of authority in his respect; and when the butler was dismissed he laid open the whole matter before her, speaking sympathetically, but leaving out nothing, from the strange escape of the poet from the wood to the last detail of the dry bones out of the well. No fault could be found with any one of his tones or phrases, and yet Cyprian, tingling in every nerve with the fine delicacy of his nation about the other sex, felt as if she were faced with an inquisitor. He stood about uneasily, watched the few colored clouds in the clear sky and the bright birds darting about the wood, and he heartily wished himself up the tree again.