Читать книгу The Monk of Hambleton - Armstrong Livingston - Страница 6

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From the shock of that gruesome discovery, Simon Varr reeled back both mentally and physically. Involuntarily, he threw up a hand to shield his eyes, then got the best of his terror and fell to rubbing them, pretending to himself that this had been the intention behind the gesture; doubtless their vision was blurred and had deceived him into thinking the unthinkable—

He dropped his hand presently, blinked once or twice and prepared to make a more careful scrutiny of the monk's appearance. He was balked in this courageous essay. The apparition, if such it were, had acted in accordance with tradition and had vanished. While his eyes were covered it had departed, whether to left or right or merely into thin air he could not tell. He did not debate the question, either—he simply thanked his stars it was gone!

It was with considerable reluctance that he resumed his way up the path, but the daylight at the end of the trail looked inviting and reassuring compared to the twilight in the woods and he covered the distance to the spot where the monk had stood in a sort of a dogtrot.

It was here that he made a fresh discovery as he collided rather heavily with some obstruction in the path, an obstruction that gave way as his body impinged upon it, but that nearly tripped him as it fell between his legs.

He picked it up, but did not pause to examine it. The light ahead still lured and he continued his flight toward it, bearing his find with him.

He drew a deep breath of thankfulness as he finally emerged from the woods into the comforting aura of the kitchen garden; his eyes rested upon and were wonderfully soothed by a row of peaceful cabbages. Never before had he noticed how beautiful a cabbage can be, but to a man fresh from dalliance with a ghost there is something very steadying and sustaining in a glimpse of that most stolid and solid of vegetables.

There was a granite bowlder near-by on which he dropped gratefully for a minute's rest. It was while reaching for a handkerchief to pat his moist forehead that he was reminded of the object he had picked up and still carried. He looked at it now, and found that it was a heavy stick which must have been thrust firmly into the center of the path in the woods; one end of it was split, and into the cleft had been thrust a bit of folded paper—brown paper, he noted, of cheap quality, but what really took his eye as he drew it free was his own name in typewritten letters on the outside.

Evidently this was intended for him, and he was about to open it to see what message it might contain when the sound of hurrying steps from the direction of the path diverted him from his purpose. Whatever the contents of the paper might be, they were for him alone. Prompted by an instinct for secrecy which was part of his psychological cosmos, he thrust the missive into the breast-pocket of his coat and turned—with a little tremor from his nerves—to see who was coming.

It was a woman who burst from the shelter of the trees—a woman in some haste and quite obviously in some alarm. She was panting from her exertions, for she ceased running only when she reached the open, as Varr had done before her. A close-fitting felt hat was slightly askew on her head, and a once jaunty red feather that thrust up from it was now hanging limp and dejected, broken perhaps by some low-hanging branch she had failed to duck. She was dressed in a two-piece outing costume of knitted wool, and she looked just now as if those garments were too warm for comfort.

Her face brightened as she observed Varr seated on the rock, and she came toward him promptly. He brightened, too, welcoming any human being of tangible flesh and blood at that moment, although there was no living person whom he habitually detested more than he did his wife's sister, Miss October Copley. Her evident perturbation, however, gave him an uneasy premonition that he was about to hear more of his monk. But he left it to her to introduce the subject.

"Well, Ocky—reducing?"

"Not much!" answered the lady briefly. "Scared!"

She did not seat herself beside him on the bowlder, but chose instead to drop at full length on a patch of green turf at his feet. With such breath as remained to her she expelled a sigh of relief.

"Scared, eh? I didn't suppose there was anything on earth that could scare you!"

She pounced instantly on his phraseology. "Perhaps not—on earth!" In a smaller voice than she was wont to employ, she added timidly, "Simon, d-do you believe in ghosts?"

"Ghosts!" He fortified himself by a glance at the cabbages. "Talk sense, Ocky!"

"Who says it isn't sense?" snapped Miss Copley. "Anyway, I just got the shock of my long and exciting life. See here, Simon—didn't you come up that path a few minutes ago?"

"I did. What of it?"

"I was sure it was you ahead of me as we crossed the meadow. Tell me, did you meet anything—I mean, any one?"

"What do you mean? Did you?"

"Y-yes. A figure in black—dressed something like a monk. I didn't meet him, exactly—he dodged into the woods as I came along. That is, I suppose he did—he just seemed to vanish!"

"Oh—he seemed to vanish, did he?" Varr shifted nervously on his granite throne. "You say he was dressed like a monk? Did—did you see his face?"

"No, I couldn't see that—"

"Ah! You couldn't, eh?" He rubbed the palms of his hands on his handkerchief as he probed a little deeper. "Too far away, I suppose."

"No. He had on a mask."

"A mask!" Comprehension came to him at once, and he inwardly cursed himself for an imaginative fool before continuing. "Well, Ocky, to tell you the truth, I did see him—right here at the head of the trail. He had his back to the light so I couldn't make out any mask. Er—what made you think of ghosts?"

"Because I had such a creepy feeling when I saw him. Didn't you?"

"Humph. For a moment, perhaps."

"Did you pass each other after you met?"

"Why—why— Confound it—no! He just disappeared!"

"Gosh!" said Miss Copley fervently. "Simon, it was a spook! I know it was! Have you ever seen or heard of a monk around here before?"

"N-no. But that doesn't mean anything. There's no law that says they can't travel if they want to."

"But what would a monk be doing on a private path through this property? Why should he disappear from people? Why should he wear a mask? Monks don't wear masks." She reflected a moment. "Come to think of it, he wasn't dressed exactly like a monk—Simon! did you ever see a picture of those creatures of the Spanish Inquisition? 'Familiars' I think they used to call them. They dressed that way and wore masks!"

"Humph." Despite that skeptic snort, Varr was conscious of a nervous chill. "You've been drinking too much coffee, Ocky! Indigestion!"

"Oh!" cried Miss Copley suddenly. She raised herself on an elbow and looked all about her on the ground. "Oh—pshaw!"

"Eh? What is it?"

"Coffee! Your mentioning it just reminded me! I was coming back from a walk and I stopped at Wimpelheimer's to get a pound of it—I knew it was needed at the house. Now it's gone! I must have dropped it when that creature frightened me." She looked woebegone. "It's not very far back, but I'm so tired!"

"Are you?" repeated Varr restlessly.

"You'll get it for me, won't you, Simon?" She regarded him appealingly. "Oh—please!"

He got up from the rock and glanced at her with marked distaste. His gaze traveled to the dark entrance of the trail, came back to rest briefly on the consoling cabbages, went again to the trail. He took an irresolute, halting step—and then was struck by an inspiration that cleared his brow as if by magic.

"What do I keep a houseful of idle servants for?" he demanded crisply. "Let Bates hunt it up—he'd better take a torch."

"Simon—you're scared!"

"Don't be ridiculous. Anyway, it's going to storm. I felt a drop of rain a moment ago. Come along to the house and stop your nonsense about monks and familiars and—and ghosts!"

Perhaps the last word came out a little uncertainly, but as he strode through the kitchen garden and around to the front door, followed closely by Miss Copley, he decided with pardonable pride that he had extricated himself from an embarrassing position with his accustomed masterful dexterity. The thought comforted him, for he vaguely realized that he had come close to experiencing a nervous panic during those minutes in the woods.

A white-haired man, still lithe, erect and agile despite his years, opened the door for them as their steps sounded on the planking of the veranda. This was Bates, the butler, a faithful retainer who had served the father of Lucy Varr and her sister a full decade before passing with the house and land into the keeping of the younger daughter and her husband. At the time of Mr. Copley's death, Varr had tentatively suggested letting the man go, but his wife had protested against that idea and had gained her point by shrewdly convincing her husband that good servants were becoming increasingly difficult to find and that Bates could never be replaced for less than twice his wages. It was one of the very rare occasions when Simon had credited the gentle, self-effacing lady with showing sound sense.

The butler had just lighted the big lamp in the hall—electricity had not yet found its way into the old house—and the warm cheerfulness of the homely scene went far to rehabilitating Simon's convalescent nerve. Ghosts did not fit into this atmosphere. Bates did—Bates was almost as satisfying as a cabbage. Of course, Ocky would promptly do her best to spoil it—! He could have dispensed willingly with the examination to which she immediately subjected the servant.

"Bates, has any one called?"

"No, Miss Ocky."

"No one at all?"

"No, Miss Ocky." His wrinkled face showed his surprise at the repetition.

"How about the back door? Any one come there?"

"No one, Miss Ocky."

"Well, have you seen any one around the grounds? A man dressed like a monk? Wearing a mask?"

"A monk? In a mask?" The old man smiled indulgently at this quaint whimsy, which might have come more suitably from the little girl with flying pigtails whom he used to chase out of his pantry than from this sensible, middle-aged woman who was waiting with apparent seriousness for his answer. "A monk in a mask? Good gracious, no, Miss Ocky!"

"All right." Miss Copley sent a significant glance at Varr, which he acknowledged by wrinkling his nose disdainfully. "By the way, Bates—I left a pound of coffee a little ways down the short-cut, you might step out and get it before dinner."

"Yes, Miss Ocky."

"You ought to find it right in the middle of the path."

"Yes, Miss Ocky."

Bates waited, and when nothing further appeared to be forthcoming he betook himself wonderingly to his usual habitat in the rear quarter of the house. Monks in masks, indeed! And why did any one want to leave a pound of coffee down a trail with rain commencing to fall? He shook his head despondently over a Miss Ocky returned from foreign parts so changed from the Miss Ocky of the old days.

She seemed inclined to renew the ghostly topic of conversation when left alone with her brother-in-law, but Simon gave her no chance. He stalked off down the hall and entered his study, a small room that opened off the comfortable, old-fashioned parlor. He closed the door from the hall behind him, and also, for the sake of greater privacy, the door that communicated with the living-room. Then he seated himself at a roll-top desk and turned up the wick of the lamp that was burning dimly in a wall bracket, close at hand.

He had remembered, as he left Miss Ocky to her eerie fancies, the note which he had retrieved from the cleft stick. She had driven the recollection of it from his mind by her idle chatter about ghosts! He took the slip of paper from his pocket and unfolded it.

A few typewritten lines jumped to his eye, and he nodded as if that were as he had expected. Before reading the text, however, he leaned back in his chair and strove to recall the exact circumstances under which he had discovered the missive. He had been hurrying—no, blast it, he had been scuttling like a scared rabbit!—along the trail and had run into the stick, which had been jabbed into the ground where he could not fail to notice it—and at the very spot where the figure in black had been standing! Apparition—pooh! If there was one thing certain about the whole silly business it was that the note had been put there by that—that creature. Simon did not profess to be versed in the lore of spooks, but he could not vision an ambassador from another world leaving behind him a tangible message composed on an earthly typewriter—! Pooh, and again, pooh!

He paused at this stage of his reflections to grin at the thought of Ocky, denied the knowledge of this consolatory bit of evidence. He hadn't mentioned it to her, and he wouldn't. Let her go on believing in ghosts! He was hugely pleased to think that there really existed one thing that could get under the skin of that hard-boiled human!

He was still smiling grimly as he finally began to read the message—but the smile had faded away before he finished.

"Woe unto thee, stiff-necked son of Belial! Woe unto thee, oppresor of the defensless! Woe unto thee, who hast ground the faces of the poor, who hast turned the hopes of thy neighbers to ashes! Woe! Woe! Woe! Take heed to thy ways and mend them, lest thou be destroyed by the thunderbolts of wrath!"

A hand-written signature in a sprawling fist concluded the communication; heavy, labored characters, inscribed in a crimson fluid by a blunt pen, formed two words: "The Monk."

Simon Varr read the thing through twice. He laid it on the desk before him and stared at it as though it had some power to hypnotize him. A pulse of anger beat in his temple, but it was a more subdued anger than his quick temper usually produced. His mental processes had ceased to function normally as they sank beneath a wave of bewilderment such as had submerged them in the woods. Feebly, they came again to the surface.

This message was an event entirely outside the range of his previous experience. He had heard of anonymous letters, naturally, and he knew that the correct and courageous thing to do was to ignore them as if they did not exist. But anonymous letters, as he understood them, were brought by the postman and placed on the breakfast table with the morning mail; they weren't planted in the middle of a lonely copse by gentlemen attired as Spanish Inquisitioners!

The letter on his desk seemed to leer at its recipient and challenge him to ignore it.

What did it mean? Who had sent it? Was it a genuine warning and threat, or was it merely an elaborate hoax? He pondered the latter possibility quite at length—and thanked his stars that he had not told Ocky about it. Simon Varr was not the man to relish a jest against himself, and if Ocky ever heard about it and it subsequently proved to be the work of a practical joker—well, she would never let him forget that he hadn't gone after the pound of coffee!

But the theory that it might be a hoax grew more and more implausible as he contemplated it. He was positive he knew no one capable of such a prank, and to suppose that any stranger had gone to so much trouble to play a trick on him was absurd.

He had no lack of enemies—he knew that. Had one of them chosen this fantastic method of declaring war on him? In that case he could certainly afford to ignore the letter as coming from a source unworthy of serious consideration. A worth-while enemy does not give a warning; he strikes. The cheapest thing about a rattlesnake is its rattle. Varr started to run over a list of recognized foemen who might have done this ill-natured deed, but presently desisted; their name was legion.