“And what’s wrong with my son, madam!”
“Nothing but his family,” said the cool husky voice.
For a moment Mr. Pinkerton, utterly aghast, thought the noises he then heard were the old gentleman’s death rattle . . . except that he knew only very wicked people swore while they were dying. Then, the atmosphere apparently clearing, he heard, “By Gad, madam! I like that!”
Then all sound was closed off again, and Mr. Pinkerton sat, bewildered and blinking. The wind howled down the chimney and buffeted at the casement windows. Mr. Pinkerton glanced at his fire. It was dying in the grate. He shivered. He didn’t dare go downstairs. He looked dismally at his bed. Then, after a long time, he undressed his meagre frame, put on a pair of pyjamas that had a red band with a yellow bird looking like the Prussian eagle embroidered on it, turned off the light and got into bed, leaving the door unlatched on the off chance that Inspector Bull might come.
He lay there a long time, waiting, his heart shrinking smaller and colder in his chest. Then at last he went to sleep, and suddenly, in the middle of a series of astonishing events that he knew were certainly the stuff of dreams, since he walked through them the hero of each, he woke up, the gooseflesh standing on every half-frozen inch of his epidermis.
The thin sound of the gilded quarterboys on the church clock striking three came through the silent night. In the pale light that came from the casement window—light only in relation to the Stygian blackness of the panelled room—Mr. Pinkerton’s eyes, barely protruding above the musty eiderdown, were turned toward the Tudor chimney-piece. The only sound was a rat, gnawing again, as if it had been alarmed and stopped for a moment in the old walls. Then, even before Mr. Pinkerton heard anything, the rat stopped again. He could hear its lumbering tread in the wattles. Then Mr. Pinkerton saw a thin sliver of light in the solid wall, and the panel through which Kathleen had come so abruptly opened, so silently that the little man thought he must be dreaming again. Then he saw the round yellow ball of light from an electric torch bounce on the floor into nothingness. The light tread of stockinged feet touched his ears. In the glimmer of light from the casement, he saw a dark figure creeping toward the door, and, for a bare instant, it illuminated the thin pale face of a young man he had never seen before.
It was not even in that brief light a particularly attractive face. Its pallor, the tense drawn expression, even in the dim shadows, was apparent to Mr. Pinkerton. He could not hear the man’s feet on the rug, but he could hear his taut breath as he caught it sharply, his hand on the latch. Mr. Pinkerton lay still as an old mouse himself, not daring to breathe. As the latch clicked, and the door opened and closed, he looked back at the dark open panel. He heard a quick breath there, saw a white figure high in the dark strip behind it, heard bare feet, and saw the panel close.
Mr. Pinkerton had a sudden sick feeling in his stomach. The maid Kathleen was letting the young man out of the garret where her room was. But she couldn’t, he thought desperately, have mistaken the stairs a second time . . .
Just then, as Mr. Pinkerton was staring through the dark at the closed panel, before he could think what to think, he heard a long laboured and choking groan, shaking through the old hostel like the anguished cry of a ghost long dead . . . except that it was not a ghost. He sat bolt upright in bed, clutching the eiderdown up against his scrawny chest with freezing hands. The wind moaned outside, rattling at the casements, hitting with hard gloved hands at the seaward side of the house overlooking the salts. The groan sounded again.
Mr. Pinkerton, his heart too cold to feel how cold his feet were, slipped out of bed and turned on his light. He then put on his plaid carpet slippers, got his overcoat out of the wardrobe, put it on and stood, trembling. Through the panels came that terrifying sound again—and palpably weaker. In a flash of something, perhaps intuition, or even recognition, perhaps only the doubts and alarms precipitated suddenly by the fish with the pink sauce in his upper colon, the little Welshman knew it was Sir Lionel Atwater he had heard. The thought flashed into his mind that he had had a stroke, then, just as his younger son had said he would do. Mr. Pinkerton opened his door and stood a confused instant at the top of the staircase.
The old inn was like a rabbit warren, he knew. There must be some way to get to the room beyond without going downstairs, but he did not know it. He listened an instant, but there was no sound. Trembling, Mr. Pinkerton hurried down the stairs into the dark lounge. A single faint bulb in an old ship’s lantern burned in the entry, behind the single bottle-glass pane in the door. Mr. Pinkerton looked about. No one was there. There was no trace of the young man who had slipped down there not three minutes before.
Mr. Pinkerton paused an instant, and scuttled up the opposite steps and along a narrow crooked hall. Sir Lionel was in Number Four, and he knew vaguely where that was, because Mrs. Humpage had shown it to him the day before. It was the Old Angel’s most pretentious room, with a bed that Queen Elizabeth had slept in when she visited Rye in 1573; it adjoined a chintz-and-copper furnished sitting room looking down into the narrow inn court, where there was still the mouth of a subterranean chute that had once carried kegs up and down from the undercliff, in the golden smuggling days of Romney Marsh.
Mr. Pinkerton stopped again. He could make out the copper “4” on the door from the single light left burning in the W. C. He put his hand to the wooden latch, and hesitated. The etiquette of the situation suddenly smote him full in the face. Could a former schoolmaster and scullery maid enter the room of a knight of the realm, even if he was groaning in mortal pain? Mr. Pinkerton did not know; upon his soul he did not. Then, hearing that awful sound in his mind again, because he could not hear it in his ears at all now, he lifted the latch, and peered inside.
Through the door at the side of the room he heard the sound again, quite weak now, and weaker still as it came once more. Mr. Pinkerton bolted across the room like a rabbit across the moor, and pushed open the door. The light bulb in the old worn red velvet canopy was on. Under its stark pale filaments lay a terrible mass, heaving weakly. Mr. Pinkerton sprang across the drugget and up the little platform that held the old queen’s bed . . . and stopped there, his watery grey eyes almost popping out of his head.
It was Sir Lionel Atwater, and he had not had a stroke—except a very wicked one. Protruding from his breast, near the heart, was a long silver handle. Mr. Pinkerton recognized it instantly as a silver skewer . . . one that had once, no doubt, pinioned a boar’s head or a rump of stolen venison; and saw instantly that every feeble move the old man made, twisted over on one side, was driving it deeper into his body. He heard the breath rattling in Sir Lionel’s throat as he reached out, turned his head and closed his eyes, and plucked the skewer from the wound. There was a horrible surge of blood. Sir Lionel Atwater groaned once more. Mr. Pinkerton, shaking, bent over him.
“My son . . .”
The old man’s breath rattled the words.
“My heir . . .”
Then there was a last choking sound in Sir Lionel Atwater’s throat, and he lay quite still, the light in the ceiling of the bed going sharply out as his hand collapsed.
Mr. Pinkerton stood, the bloody skewer in his hand, frozen with horror. As suddenly as the light in the canopy had gone out, a light in the sitting room went on. Mr. Pinkerton saw standing in the door through which he had come, in long flannel nightdress and purple dressing gown and night-cap, a candle in her hand, the tiny figure of Lady Atwater. He stood utterly petrified, quite unable to move. Lady Atwater came across the room.
“Was it the fish, dear?” she asked.
Then the pale nimbus of her candle reached and included the little man in his overcoat, the meat skewer dripping blood in his hand. Lady Atwater stared for one instant and screamed, the candle dropping from her hand. She screamed again, and fell in a heap on the floor. In one instant—it seemed less than that to Mr. Pinkerton, in one way, and a million times longer in another—the room was full of people, all staring horror-stricken, from the little man still standing there paralyzed, to the murdered man in the bed. For a terrible moment they were all utterly speechless, though not as speechless