‘I was bending down, peering at what I thought must be my drawing, when I heard a sharp hiss of breath, and started up, and saw Vivian with his arm uplifted and a bare blade in his hand, and death threatening in his eyes. In sheer self-defence I caught at the flint weapon in my pocket, and dashed at him in blind fear of my life, and the next instant he lay dead upon the stones.
‘I think that is all,’ Mr. Selby continued after a pause, ‘and it only remains for me to say to you, Mr. Dyson, that I cannot conceive what means enabled you to run me down.’
‘I followed many indications,’ said Dyson, ‘and I am bound to disclaim all credit for acuteness, as I have made several gross blunders. Your celestial cypher did not, I confess, give me much trouble; I saw at once that terms of astronomy were substituted for common words and phrases. You had lost something black, or something black had been stolen from you; a celestial globe is a copy of the heavens, so I knew you meant you had a copy of what you had lost. Obviously, then, I came to the conclusion that you had lost a black object with characters or symbols written or inscribed on it, since the object in question certainly contained valuable information and all information must be written or pictured. “Our old orbit remains unchanged”; evidently our old course or arrangement. “The number of my sign” must mean the number of my house, the allusion being to the signs of the zodiac. I need not say that “the other side of the moon” can stand for nothing but some place where no one else has been; and “some other house” is some other place of meeting, the “house” being the old term “house of the heavens.” Then my next step was to find the “black heaven” that had been stolen, and by a process of exhaustion I did so.’
‘You have got the tablet?’
‘Certainly. And on the back of it, on the slip of paper you have mentioned, I read ‘inroad,’ which puzzled me a good deal, till I thought of Grey’s Inn Road; you forgot the second n. “Stony-hearted step ——” immediately suggested the phrase of De Quincey you have alluded to; and I made the wild but correct shot, that you were a man who lived in or near the Gray’s Inn Road, and had the habit of walking in Oxford Street, for you remember how the opium-eater dwells on his wearying promenades along that thoroughfare. On the theory of improbability, which I have explained to my friend here, I concluded that occasionally, at all events, you would choose the way by Guildford Street, Russell Square, and Great Russell Street, and I knew that if I watched long enough I should see you. But how was I to recognize my man? I noticed the screever opposite my rooms, and got him to draw every day a large hand, in the gesture so familiar to us all, upon the wall behind him. I thought that when the unknown person did pass he would certainly betray some emotion at the sudden vision of the sign, to him the most terrible of symbols. You know the rest. Ah, as to catching you an hour later, that was, I confess, a refinement. From the fact of your having occupied the same rooms for so many years, in a neighbourhood moreover where lodgers are migratory to excess, I drew the conclusion that you were a man of fixed habit, and I was sure that after you had got over your fright you would return for the walk down Oxford Street. You did, by way of New Oxford Street, and I was waiting at the corner.’
‘Your conclusions are admirable,’ said Mr. Selby. ‘I may tell you that I had my stroll down Oxford Street the night Sir Thomas Vivian died. And I think that is all I have to say.’
‘Scarcely,’ said Dyson. ‘How about the treasure?’
‘I had rather we did not speak of that,’ said Mr. Selby, with a whitening of the skin about the temples.
‘Oh, nonsense, sir, we are not blackmailers. Besides, you know you are in our power.’
‘Then, as you put it like that, Mr. Dyson, I must tell you I returned to the place. I went on a little farther than before.’
The man stopped short; his mouth began to twitch, his lips moved apart, and he drew in quick breaths, sobbing.
‘Well, well,’ said Dyson, ‘I dare say you have done comfortably.’
‘Comfortably,’ Selby went on, constraining himself with an effort, ‘yes, so comfortably that hell burns hot within me for ever. I only brought one thing away from that awful house within the hills; it was lying just beyond the spot where I found the flint knife.’
‘Why did you not bring more?’
The whole bodily frame of the wretched man visibly shrank and wasted; his face grew yellow as tallow, and the sweat dropped from his brows. The spectacle was both revolting and terrible, and when the voice came it sounded like the hissing of a snake.
‘Because the keepers are still there, and I saw them, and because of this,’ and he pulled out a small piece of curious gold-work and held it up.
‘There,’ he said, ‘that is the Pain of the Goat.’
Phillipps and Dyson cried out together in horror at the revolting obscenity of the thing.
‘Put it away, man; hide it, for Heaven’s sake, hide it!’
‘I brought that with me; that is all,’ he said. ‘You do not wonder that I did not stay long in a place where those who live are a little higher than the beasts, and where what you have seen is surpassed a thousandfold?’
‘Take this,’ said Dyson, ‘I brought it with me in case it might be useful ‘; and he drew out the black tablet, and handed it to the shaking, horrible man.
‘And now,’ said Dyson, ‘will you go out?’
The two friends sat silent a little while, facing one another with restless eyes and lips that quivered.
‘I wish to say that I believe him,’ said Phillipps.
‘My dear Phillipps,’ said Dyson as he threw the windows wide open, ‘I do not know that, after all, my blunders in this queer case were so very absurd.’
The Bowmen
It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. But it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin and disaster came so near that their shadow fell over London far away; and, without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them and grew faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into their souls.
On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little English company, there was one point above all other points in our battle line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat, but of utter annihilation. With the permission of the Censorship and of the military expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a salient, and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the English force as a whole would be shattered, the Allied left would be turned, and Sedan would inevitably follow.
All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The men joked at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. But the shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being steadily battered into scrap iron.
There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, "It is at its worst; it can blow no harder," and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches.
There were no stouter