CHAPTER XXIII
WE FIND A PARADISE
I CAME back to Pamela; and we talked over the matter of our wedding. This was no day for a wedding; and we were not long making up our minds to put it off for a while, till I had straightened things out a little, and till our minds were lighter. The tragedy of the night weighed heavily on them.
Then I had a busy day of it. I informed the coroner of the death of Helen Ranger myself, and made arrangements for the inquest. That done I went down to the office, dealt with my work there, and also put matters in train for Pamela's becoming the administratrix of her uncle's affairs.
I came back home at six o'clock and found that she had spent most of the day in No. 19, looking after her uncle. He had been very quiet. Four hours he had sat in the dining-room, looking out on the garden; now and again he had gone into it, mooned about for a little while, aimlessly, and then come back to his chair. He was quite tractable; he was not even distressing; he seemed merely to be in a state of suspension of being.
If anything roused him, he said in the thick, slurring voice "Pan is not dead," and laughed the vacant laugh.
My resolve to take no risk was unchanged; Pamela should not suffer again from an irruption of the Abyss; she should sleep in Town. We tried to induce Woodfell to come into No. 20, that he might spend the night there; but it only seemed to distress him; and in the end we made him as comfortable as we could, and left him. I had very little fear for him. The air of No. 19 was quite clear of any oppression of horror; and I believed that not the Abyss itself could stir him from his lethargy. We dined and slept in Town; and when we returned on the morrow, all was well.
We decided that Pamela should sleep at No. 20; and I should make the concession to the proprieties of sleeping at No. 19. During the days that followed its air was serene; no uncanny sight, or sound, or feeling troubled us. The gates of the Abyss were again barred.
The inquest on Helen Ranger passed off without any trouble; there were only a few short paragraphs in the newspapers about the strange manner in which the unfortunate girl had met her death. Thanks to the promptitude with which Murthwaite's body had been removed from No. 19, his death was quite dissociated from hers; and we were spared a great newspaper mystery.
I had paid a visit to her house, found out the address of her family, and informed them of her fate. Two of her brothers came up from Yorkshire to the inquest and her funeral. They were, naturally, curious to learn about her life since her disappearance from her home. They could learn nothing. She had lately changed her servant; she had kept no letters which threw any light on her reasons for leaving home, or on her life since she had left it. I apparently could not have known anything about her before her death at No. 19; and I did not offer any information. It would have served no good purpose. They went home with their curiosity unsatisfied, leaving the winding-up of her affairs in my hands.
She was buried on the Friday; and on the Saturday Pamela and I set about the examination of Woodfell's affairs. We found the top of the big safe in his second study on the first floor, full of ancient manuscripts. Three of them were in Latin, one in Greek, and the rest in Eastern tongues I did not know. Indeed, I could only read the Latin and Greek manuscripts with great difficulty, for they were late, and the pure classic tongues had grown barbarous, obscure, and corrupted by many words from other languages. I gathered however that they dealt with ritual and sorcery, and had no doubt that they had been the foundation of Woodfell's knowledge.
I put them back in their order; and opened one of the drawers. It held £5,000 in gold and £5,000 in five-pound notes. It was indeed surprising to find so large a sum, stored away, bearing no interest. I sat staring at it, pondering; and it flashed on me suddenly that Woodfell had been prepared against the necessity of sudden flight from England.
"What a lot of money!" said Pamela in a hushed voice.
"There seems to have been no need in the world for him to have kept you so hard up," I said a little bitterly; and I opened the next drawer.
It held the title-deeds of a house in Hertfordshire, and half a dozen letters. I looked through the letters and found that they were written by a George Hind. He seemed to be care-taker and gardener. The last one was only a fortnight old; the writer gave some account of the condition of the garden, and ended his letter by saying that he had bought two more black lambs.
"Your uncle has a house in Hertfordshire it seems," I said to Pamela. "I've never heard anything about it," she said.
I opened the drawer beneath. It held £5,000 in coupon-bearing securities. Woodfell undoubtedly kept his money in the least traceable, most easily handled forms. It seemed likely that he had been living on the two hundred a year that these securities brought in; for his bank-book lay on the top of the scrip, and it showed that he had only paid into his bank two hundred a year for the last three years. I noticed that George Hind had received every month a check for £5.
I opened the fourth drawer. It held four thick leather-bound volumes. I opened one of them and found that it was a record of Woodfell's researches, written in a very neat, close handwriting.
"This is a find!" I cried. "Now we can learn all that is to be known about the mysteries."
Pamela shook her head; "I'm frightened of them," she said.
I locked up the safe; and we went to the desk which stood before the windows. I unlocked drawer after drawer, and in each I found what seemed to be rough drafts of the rites of the Abyss. There must have been some fifty of these drafts of the different rites, corrected and again corrected, the strange tongues translated into English, and the words of them written out in English letters, that the initiates, ignorant of the tongues themselves, might be able to learn them. Truly Woodfell had been a worker.
I locked up the drawers, and looked at Pamela.
"If ever the fancy takes us, we can form a circle and celebrate the rites of the Abyss ourselves," I said.
"We never will," she said quickly.
"You've lost your curiosity to learn wonderful things?" I said.
"They're too dreadful," she said.
"I believe that they are the forbidden things," I said.
We were silent a while. She looked tired; plainly in the strain that had been on her she was missing our walks in the country.
"How would it be if we went down to Hertfordshire to-morrow and saw your uncle's house? Or rather it is practically your house," I said.
"Oh, it would be delightful! I should like to get out of London for a day," she cried; and her face brightened.
"We will go," I said; and rising, I slipped my arm round her waist and kissed her. Then we went back to No. 20.
The next morning the summer sun was blazing in a cloudless sky; and leaving Woodfell in charge of Mrs. Ringrose, we caught an early train to Chorley Wood. Pamela was looking her old delightful, untroubled self; I had never seen the sun shine so brightly before. But it was not till we had left the station and were among the woods that we realized in what a nightmare we had been living, what a joy it was to be at last free from it.
We came through the woods, crossed the valley of the Chess, and mounted the ridge on which Sarrat stands. A quarter of a mile along its edge we found Woodfell House, such a house as I had dreamed of dwelling in only in my most extravagant dreams, an old, roomy, red brick house in a walled garden.
An old woman, in her Sunday best, opened the door to us, and when she learned who Pamela was, welcomed her joyfully, and called George Hind her husband, an upright, square-shouldered soldierly man, from the kitchen. Pamela recognized him, and he her; he was the man who years ago had brought her from her home to No. 19. He was as pleased to see her as his wife had been; but his pleasure was dashed by the news of the misfortune which had befallen Woodfell. He had been Woodfell's body-servant for twenty years, first in his regiment, then on his travels. Of late years, since Woodfell had lived at No. 19, he had seen very little of him; but the old attachment still subsisted.
We talked to them for a while about their master—he had not set foot in the house for three years, and then he had only come for a few hours to get some papers. Then we set about exploring the house; and they left us to ourselves, busying themselves with the cooking of our dinner. It was an admirable house, the house of a dream. The furniture was old, Chippendale Heppelthwaite, and Louis Seize; there were some flue pictures on the walls; a good library, its shelves loaded with fine eighteenth century editions of the Classics and the great English and French writers, and holding also many curious books on magic and sorcery, books which Woodfell had outgrown. In the room he had used as a study was a collection of the implements of sorcery, many of them, doubtless, brought back from his travels, an astrolabe, crystal spheres, bull-roarers of different shapes, amulets, the whole outfit of a Congo witch-doctor and an American Indian Medicine Man. I fancied that they marked an earlier stage of his researches.
After an hour in the house we went out into the garden. There was no doubt that George Hind's heart was in his work. The closely cut, smooth lawns were of the deep green which comes of plentiful watering; a thousand roses and all the flowers of the season filled the air with fragrance. The hedge of yew which divided them from the vegetable garden was clipped to a nicety, and rose into fantastic arches over the paths which broke it.
Pamela wandered about the garden with charmed eyes, bemused by its beauty: "It's a paradise—truly a paradise," she said.
"Out of which you have been shut too long. You are its proper Eve," said I.
The fresh air had made us hungry for our dinner; and we indeed enjoyed it. Mrs. Hind proved an excellent cook of the simple country fare; she gave us a vegetable soup, a roast duckling with potatoes and peas fresh from the garden, a gooseberry tart, and a great dish of strawberries and cream. Before dinner Hind took me down into a well-stocked cellar; and with it we drank an old Haute Sauterne, which had kept its fragrance, a charming summer wine.
The afternoon passed as a delightful dream; we wandered about the house, we wandered or rested in the garden. The sense of having at last come to a haven after storm and stress was strong on us, multiplying our delight. We supped under a cedar in the garden; and after supper, with infinite reluctance, we tore ourselves away to catch a train.
Half-way down the slope Pamela paused and looked back at the house: "Oh, it is hard to leave it," she said.
"Well, shall we get married and come to it for our honeymoon—on Wednesday?"
"Oh, yes," she said.
The next morning I went to my cousin and told him that I wished to have a week of my holiday at once since I proposed to get married on the Wednesday and to take my wife into the country.
"But this is very inconvenient," he said, his face clouding. "We are full up with important work. Who are you going to marry?"
"Miss Pamela Woodfell. She has fifteen thousand pounds and a charming house in Hertfordshire."
As I had expected Howard's face cleared; some vision of my buying a partnership in the firm, at a good price, floated before his mind.
"I congratulate you—heartily," he said. "But you are a reticent chap—always were. Of course it must be managed; and you only want a week you say. After all you'll only do it once. My wife must call on Miss Woodfell."
I had no difficulty in postponing that call till after we were married.
I had been keeping Marks informed by letter of what was happening in the matter of the inquest. That night he came to see me to learn the full details and to assure himself that the gates of the Abyss were truly barred.
We sat, with Pamela, in the garden of No. 19 for an hour; and when she had gone to bed, we reviewed again the happenings on the eve of the full moon. He talked about them easily enough now; but he made no attempt to account for them.
At last I said, "You're keeping something back from me. What is it? Surely I have a right to know."
He looked at me gravely, and said slowly, "Yes; I made a discovery—on that morning. And I hid it at once. I wanted to think it over. I have thought it over carefully; and I'm going to keep it a secret. These are the forbidden things; and the knowledge of them is forbidden. At what a price even the initiate may learn them, Woodfell's fate, and the deaths of Helen Ranger and Murthwaite have taught you. I have a fear that my own knowledge will sooner or later bring me misfortune, or at least that it would bring me misfortune if I revealed it. Really it is more than a fear—it is a conviction."
"I understand," I said. "But you do know?"
"I think now that I know," he said. "But shall I know in a year—when the memories and the facts are blurred, or shall I doubt again! After all the closing of the Abyss coincides with the extinction of Woodfell's mind."
I pondered his words a little while; then I said, "What was it you stamped out in the garden path?"
He shook his head.
We left the garden, and No. 19, and settled ourselves down in my study. We had no desire to sit in Woodfell's, where that statue with the appalling face still lay along the floor. I asked him what would the other celebrants do now that they had lost Woodfell's guidance.
"I don't know. What can they do? Without him they can do nothing. They'll get no help from me. I have had my fill of the for bidden things."
I turned the talk to the pleasanter theme of my coming marriage and asked him to be one of our witnesses at the registrar's.
He consented cheerfully and said, "It is a happy event which will help blur the painful memories of that horrible morning."