Answers to the telegrams Chester Kent had despatched arrived in the form of night letters, bringing information regarding the Blairs of Hedgerow House: not sufficient information to satisfy the seeker, however. Therefore, having digested their contents at breakfast, the scientist cast about him to supply the deficiency. The feet of hope led him to the shop of Elder Ira Dennett.
Besides being an able plumber and tinker, Elder Dennett performed, by vocation, the pleasurable duties of unprinted journalism. That is to say, he was the semiofficial town gossip. As Professor Kent was a conspicuous figure in the choicest titbit the Elder had acquired in stock for many years, and as the Elder had been unable to come to speech with him since the inquest (Kent had achieved some skilful dodging), there was joy in the plumber-tinker’s heart over the visit. Unhappily, it appeared that Kent was there strictly on business. He did not wish to talk of the mystery of Lonesome Cove. He wished his acetylene lamp fixed. At once, if Elder Dennett pleased.
Glum was the face of the Elder as he examined the lamp, which needed very little attention. It lightened when his visitor observed:
“I’ve been thinking a little of getting an electric car, to run about here in. There was a neat little one in town yesterday.”
“Old Blair’s,” replied Dennett. “I seen you in it. Known Mr. Blair long?”
“He offered me a lift into town, very kindly. He was a stranger to me,” said Kent truthfully, and with intent to deceive. “Who did you say he was?”
“Gosh sakes! Don’t you know who Aleck Blair is?”
“Blair? Blair?” said Kent innocently. “Is he the author of Blair’s Studies of Neuropterae?”
Elder Dennett snorted. “He’s a millionaire, that’s what he is! Ain’t you read about him in the Fabric Trust investigations?”
“Oh, that Blair! Yes, I believe I have.”
Kent yawned. It was a well-conceived bit of strategy, and met with deserved success. Regarding that yawn as a challenge to his vocational powers, the Elder set about eliminating the inhuman indifference of which it was the expression. Floods of information poured from his eager mouth. He traced the history of the Blairs in and out of concentric circles of scandal; financial, political, social—and mostly untrue. Those in which the greatest proportion of truth inhered dealt with the escapades of Wilfrid Blair, the only son and heir of the household, who had burned up all the paternal money he could lay hands on, writing his name in red fire across the night life of London, Paris, and New York. Tiring of this, he had come home and married a girl of nineteen, beautiful and innocent, whose parents, the Elder piously opined, had sold her to the devil, per Mr. Blair, agent. The girl, whose maiden name was Marjorie Dorrance—Kent’s fingers went to his ear at this—had left Blair after a year of marriage, though there was no legal process, and he had returned to his haunts of the gutter, until retribution overtook him, in the form of tuberculosis. His father had brought him to their place on Sundayman’s Creek, and there he was kept in semi-seclusion, visited from time to time by his young wife, who helped to care for him.
“That’s the story they tell,” commented the Elder; “but some folks has got suspicions.”
“It’s a prevalent complaint,” murmured Kent, “and highly contagious.”
Dennett stared. “My own suspicions,” he proceeded firmly, “is that the young feller hasn’t got no more consumption than you have. I think old Blair has got him here to keep him out of the papers.”
“Publicity is not to Mr. Blair’s taste, then?”
“‘Not’s’ no word for it,” declared the human Bureau of Information, delighted at this evidence of dawning interest on the part of his hearer. “He’s crazy against it. They says he pays Town Titbits a thousand dollars a year to let young Blair’s name alone. I don’t believe the old man would hardly stop short of murder to keep his name out of print. He’s kind o’ loony on the subject.”
“You’ve been to his country place?”
“Only wunst. Mostly they have one o’ them scientific plumber fellers from Boston.” The Elder’s tone was as essence of gall and wormwood. “Wunst I had a job there, though, an’ I seen young Blair moonin’ around the grounds with a man nurse.”
“Quite a place, I hear,” suggested Kent.
“Sailor Milt Smith is the feller that can tell you about the place as it used to be. Here he comes, up the street.”
He thrust his head out of the door and called. Sailor Smith, sturdy and white, entered and greeted Kent courteously.
“Mr. Dennett was saying,” remarked Kent, “that you know something of the history of Hedgerow House, as I believe they call it.”
“They call it!” repeated the old sailor. “Who calls it? If you mean the Blair place, that’s Hogg’s Haven, that is! You can’t wipe out that name while there’s a man living as knew the place at its worst. Old Captain Hogg built it and lived in it and died in it. And if there’s a fryin’-pan in hell, the devil is fryin’ bacon out of old Hogg to-day for the things he done in that house.”
“How long since did he die?”
“Oh, twenty year back.”
“And the house was sold soon after?”
“Stood vacant for ten years. Then this rich feller, Blair, bought it. I don’t know him; but he bought a weevilly biscuit, there. A bad house, it is—rotten bad!”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Men’s bones in the brick and women’s blood in the mortar.”
“Was the old boy a cannibal?” asked Kent, amused by the sea veteran’s heroics.
“Just as bad: slave-trader.”
“Have you ever been in the house?”
“Many’s the time, when it was Hogg’s Haven. Only once, since. They do tell that the curse has come down with the house and is heavy on the new owner’s son.”
“So I’ve heard.”
The old white head wagged bodingly. “The curse of the blood,” he said. “It’s on all that race.”
“But that wouldn’t affect the Blairs.”
“Not Aleck Blair. But the boy.”
“How so?”
“Didn’t you know there was the same strain in young Wilfrid Blair, as there was in old Captain Hogg?”
“Hogg’s oldest sister was the grandmother of this young feller’s mother, wasn’t she?” put in Elder Dennett.
“That’s right. Wilfrid Blair’s great grandmother.”
“And a bad ’un, too, I guess,” continued the Elder relishingly.
“Don’t you say it!” cried the old seaman. “The curse of the blood was on her. Strange she was, and beautiful, so my mother used to tell me; but not bad. She came in at Lonesome Cove, too.”
“Drowned at sea?” asked Kent.
“They never knew. One day she was gone; the next night her body came in. They said in the countryside that she had the gift of second sight, and foretold her own death.”
“Hum-m,” mused Kent. “And now the Blairs have changed the name of the place. No wonder.”
“There’s one thing they haven’t changed, the private buryin’-plot.”
“Family?”
“Hogg’s there, all right, an’ never a parson in the countryside dared to speak to God about his soul, when they laid him there. His nephew, too, that was as black-hearted as himself. But the rest of the graves has got no headstones.”
“Slaves?”
“Them as he kept for his own service an’ killed in his tantrums. Nobody knows how many. You can see the bend of the creek where they lie, from the road, and the old willows that lean over ’em.”
“Cheerful sort of person the late Mr. Hogg seems to have been. Any relics of his trade in the house?”
“Relics? You may say so! His old pistols, and compasses, guns, nautical instruments, and the leaded whalebone whip that they used to say he slept with. They’ve got ’em hung on the walls now for ornyments. Ornyments! If they’d seen ’em as I’ve seen ’em, they’d sink the dummed things in a hundred fathom o’ clean sea.”
“Sailor Smith was cabin-boy on one of the old Hogg fleet one voyage,” explained Elder Dennett.
“God forgive me for it!” said the old man. “There they hang; and with ’em the chains and—”
“Isn’t that lamp finished yet?” demanded Kent, turning sharply upon Elder Dennett.
Having paid for it—with something extra for his curtness—he led the seaman out of the place.
“You were going to say ‘and handcuffs’, weren’t you?” he inquired.
“Why, yes. What of that?” asked the veteran, puzzled. Suddenly he brought his hand down with a slap on his thigh. “Where was my wits?” he cried. “Them irons on the dead woman’s wrist—I knew I’d seen their like before! Slave manacles! They must ’a’ come from Hogg’s Haven!”
“Very likely. But that suspicion had better be kept quiet, at present.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” agreed the other. “More devilment from the old Haven? A bad house—a rotten bad house!”
“Yet I’ve a pressing desire to take a look at it,” said Chester Kent musingly. “Going back to Annalaka, Mr. Smith? I’ll walk with you as far as the road to Mr. Sedgwick’s.”
Freed of the veteran’s company at the turn of the road, Kent sat down and took his ear in hand, to think.
“Miss Dorrance,” he mused, “Marjorie Dorrance. What simpler twist for a nickname than to transform that into Marjorie Daw? Poor Sedgwick!”
At the Nook he found the object of his commiseration mournfully striving to piece together, as in a mosaic, the shattered remnants of his work. Sedgwick brightened at his friend’s approach.
“For heaven’s sake, come out and do me a couple of sets of tennis!” he besought. “I’m no sport for you, I know, particularly as my nerves are jumpy; but I need the work.”
“Sorry, my boy,” said Kent, “but I’ve got to make a more or less polite call.”
“Didn’t know you had friends in this part of the world,” said Sedgwick in surprise.
“Oh, friends!” said Kent rather disparagingly. “Say acquaintances. People named Blair. Ever know ’em?”
“Used to know a Wilfrid Blair in Paris,” said the artist indifferently.
“What kind of a person was he?”
“An agreeable enough little beast; but a rounder of the worst sort. I won’t go so far as to say that he shocked my moral sense in those days; but he certainly offended my sense of decency. He came back to America, and I lost track of him. Is he the man you’re going to see?”
“No such luck,” said Chester Kent. “I never expect to see Mr. Wilfrid Blair. Probably I shan’t even be invited to his funeral.”
“Oh! Is he dead?”
“His death is officially expected any day.”
Sedgwick examined his friend’s expression with suspicion. “Officially? Then he’s very ill.”
“No, he isn’t ill at all.”
“Don’t you think you overdo this business of mystification sometimes, Kent?”
“Merely a well-meant effort,” smiled the other, “to divert your mind from your own troubles—before they get any worse.”
With which cheering farewell Kent stepped out and into his waiting car.