The Man Who Knew Too Much

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He awoke suddenly and sat up in bed with his ears filled, as with
thunder, with the throbbing echoes of a rending cry. He remained
rigid for a moment, and then sprang out of bed, throwing on the
loose gown of sacking he had worn all day. He went first to the
window, which was open, but covered with a thick curtain, so that
his room was still completely dark; but when he tossed the curtain
aside and put his head out, he saw that a gray and silver daybreak
had already appeared behind the black woods that surrounded the
little lake, and that was all that he did see. Though the sound had
certainly come in through the open window from this direction, the
whole scene was still and empty under the morning light as under the
moonlight. Then the long, rather lackadaisical hand he had laid on a
window sill gripped it tighter, as if to master a tremor, and his
peering blue eyes grew bleak with fear. It may seem that his emotion
was exaggerated and needless, considering the effort of common sense
by which he had conquered his nervousness about the noise on the
previous night. But that had been a very different sort of noise. It
might have been made by half a hundred things, from the chopping of
wood to the breaking of bottles. There was only one thing in nature
from which could come the sound that echoed through the dark house
at daybreak. It was the awful articulate voice of man; and it was
something worse, for he knew what man.

He knew also that it had been a shout for help. It seemed to him
that he had heard the very word; but the word, short as it was, had
been swallowed up, as if the man had been stifled or snatched away
even as he spoke. Only the mocking reverberations of it remained
even in his memory, but he had no doubt of the original voice. He
had no doubt that the great bull's voice of Francis Bray, Baron
Bulmer, had been heard for the last time between the darkness and
the lifting dawn.

How long he stood there he never knew, but he was startled into life
by the first living thing that he saw stirring in that half-frozen
landscape. Along the path beside the lake, and immediately under his
window, a figure was walking slowly and softly, but with great
composure--a stately figure in robes of a splendid scarlet; it was
the Italian prince, still in his cardinal's costume. Most of the
company had indeed lived in their costumes for the last day or two,
and Fisher himself had assumed his frock of sacking as a convenient
dressing gown; but there seemed, nevertheless, something unusually
finished and formal, in the way of an early bird, about this
magnificent red cockatoo. It was as if the early bird had been up
all night.

"What is the matter?" he called, sharply, leaning out of the window,
and the Italian turned up his great yellow face like a mask of
brass.

"We had better discuss it downstairs," said Prince Borodino.

Fisher ran downstairs, and encountered the great, red-robed figure
entering the doorway and blocking the entrance with his bulk.

"Did you hear that cry?" demanded Fisher.

"I heard a noise and I came out," answered the diplomatist, and his
face was too dark in the shadow for its expression to be read.

"It was Bulmer's voice," insisted Fisher. "I'll swear it was
Bulmer's voice."

"Did you know him well?" asked the other.

The question seemed irrelevant, though it was not illogical, and
Fisher could only answer in a random fashion that he knew Lord
Bulmer only slightly.

"Nobody seems to have known him well," continued the Italian, in
level tones. "Nobody except that man Brain. Brain is rather older
than Bulmer, but I fancy they shared a good many secrets."

Fisher moved abruptly, as if waking from a momentary trance, and
said, in a new and more vigorous voice, "But look here, hadn't we
better get outside and see if anything has happened."

"The ice seems to be thawing," said the other, almost with
indifference.

When they emerged from the house, dark stains and stars in the gray
field of ice did indeed indicate that the frost was breaking up, as
their host had prophesied the day before, and the very memory of
yesterday brought back the mystery of to-day.

"He knew there would be a thaw," observed the prince. "He went out
skating quite early on purpose. Did he call out because he landed in
the water, do you think?"

Fisher looked puzzled. "Bulmer was the last man to bellow like that
because he got his boots wet. And that's all he could do here; the
water would hardly come up to the calf of a man of his size. You can
see the flat weeds on the floor of the lake, as if it were through a
thin pane of glass. No, if Bulmer had only broken the ice he
wouldn't have said much at the moment, though possibly a good deal
afterward. We should have found him stamping and damning up and down
this path, and calling for clean boots."

"Let us hope we shall find him as happily employed," remarked the
diplomatist. "In that case the voice must have come out of the
wood."

"I'll swear it didn't come out of the house," said Fisher; and the
two disappeared together into the twilight of wintry trees.

The plantation stood dark against the fiery colors of sunrise, a
black fringe having that feathery appearance which makes trees when
they are bare the very reverse of rugged. Hours and hours afterward,
when the same dense, but delicate, margin was dark against the
greenish colors opposite the sunset, the search thus begun at
sunrise had not come to an end. By successive stages, and to slowly
gathering groups of the company, it became apparent that the most
extraordinary of all gaps had appeared in the party; the guests
could find no trace of their host anywhere. The servants reported
that his bed had been slept in and his skates and his fancy costume
were gone, as if he had risen early for the purpose he had himself
avowed. But from the top of the house to the bottom, from the walls
round the park to the pond in the center, there was no trace of Lord
Bulmer, dead or alive. Horne Fisher realized that a chilling
premonition had already prevented him from expecting to find the man
alive. But his bald brow was wrinkled over an entirely new and
unnatural problem, in not finding the man at all.

He considered the possibility of Bulmer having gone off of his own
accord, for some reason; but after fully weighing it he finally
dismissed it. It was inconsistent with the unmistakable voice heard
at daybreak, and with many other practical obstacles. There was only
one gateway in the ancient and lofty wall round the small park; the
lodge keeper kept it locked till late in the morning, and the lodge
keeper had seen no one pass. Fisher was fairly sure that he had
before him a mathematical problem in an inclosed space. His instinct
had been from the first so attuned to the tragedy that it would have
been almost a relief to him to find the corpse. He would have been
grieved, but not horrified, to come on the nobleman's body dangling
from one of his own trees as from a gibbet, or floating in his own
pool like a pallid weed. What horrified him was to find nothing.

He soon become conscious that he was not alone even in his most
individual and isolated experiments. He often found a figure
following him like his shadow, in silent and almost secret clearings
in the plantation or outlying nooks and corners of the old wall. The
dark-mustached mouth was as mute as the deep eyes were mobile,
darting incessantly hither and thither, but it was clear that Brain
of the Indian police had taken up the trail like an old hunter after
a tiger. Seeing that he was the only personal friend of the vanished
man, this seemed natural enough, and Fisher resolved to deal frankly
with him.

"This silence is rather a social strain," he said. "May I break the
ice by talking about the weather?--which, by the way, has already
broken the ice. I know that breaking the ice might be a rather
melancholy metaphor in this case."

"I don't think so," replied Brain, shortly. "I don't fancy the ice
had much to do with it. I don't see how it could."

"What would you propose doing?" asked Fisher.

"Well, we've sent for the authorities, of course, but I hope to find
something out before they come," replied the Anglo-Indian. "I can't
say I have much hope from police methods in this country. Too much
red tape, habeas corpus and that sort of thing. What we want is to
see that nobody bolts; the nearest we could get to it would be to
collect the company and count them, so to speak. Nobody's left
lately, except that lawyer who was poking about for antiquities."

"Oh, he's out of it; he left last night," answered the other. "Eight
hours after Bulmer's chauffeur saw his lawyer off by the train I
heard Bulmer's own voice as plain as I hear yours now."

"I suppose you don't believe in spirits?" said the man from India.
After a pause he added: "There's somebody else I should like to
find, before we go after a fellow with an alibi in the Inner Temple.
What's become of that fellow in green--the architect dressed up as
a forester? I haven't seem him about."

Mr. Brain managed to secure his assembly of all the distracted
company before the arrival of the police. But when he first began
to comment once more on the young architect's delay in putting in
an appearance, he found himself in the presence of a minor mystery,
and a psychological development of an entirely unexpected kind.

Juliet Bray had confronted the catastrophe of her brother's
disappearance with a somber stoicism in which there was, perhaps,
more paralysis than pain; but when the other question came to the
surface she was both agitated and angry.

"We don't want to jump to any conclusions about anybody," Brain was
saying in his staccato style. "But we should like to know a little
more about Mr. Crane. Nobody seems to know much about him, or where
he comes from. And it seems a sort of coincidence that yesterday he
actually crossed swords with poor Bulmer, and could have stuck him,
too, since he showed himself the better swordsman. Of course, that
may be an accident and couldn't possibly be called a case against
anybody; but then we haven't the means to make a real case against
anybody. Till the police come we are only a pack of very amateur
sleuthhounds."

"And I think you're a pack of snobs," said Juliet. "Because Mr.
Crane is a genius who's made his own way, you try to suggest he's a
murderer without daring to say so. Because he wore a toy sword and
happened to know how to use it, you want us to believe he used it
like a bloodthirsty maniac for no reason in the world. And because
he could have hit my brother and didn't, you deduce that he did.
That's the sort of way you argue. And as for his having disappeared,
you're wrong in that as you are in everything else, for here he
comes."

And, indeed, the green figure of the fictitious Robin Hood slowly
detached itself from the gray background of the trees, and came
toward them as she spoke.

He approached the group slowly, but with composure; but he was
decidedly pale, and the eyes of Brain and Fisher had already taken
in one detail of the green-clad figure more clearly than all the
rest. The horn still swung from his baldrick, but the sword was
gone.

Rather to the surprise of the company, Brain did not follow up the
question thus suggested; but, while retaining an air of leading the
inquiry, had also an appearance of changing the subject.

"Now we're all assembled," he observed, quietly, "there is a
question I want to ask to begin with. Did anybody here actually see
Lord Bulmer this morning?"

Leonard Crane turned his pale face round the circle of faces till he
came to Juliet's; then he compressed his lips a little and said:

"Yes, I saw him."

"Was he alive and well?" asked Brain, quickly. "How was he
dressed?"

"He appeared exceedingly well," replied Crane, with a curious
intonation. "He was dressed as he was yesterday, in that purple
costume copied from the portrait of his ancestor in the sixteenth
century. He had his skates in his hand."

"And his sword at his side, I suppose," added the questioner. "Where
is your own sword, Mr. Crane?"

"I threw it away."

In the singular silence that ensued, the train of thought in many
minds became involuntarily a series of colored pictures.

They had grown used to their fanciful garments looking more gay and
gorgeous against the dark gray and streaky silver of the forest, so
that the moving figures glowed like stained-glass saints walking.
The effect had been more fitting because so many of them had idly
parodied pontifical or monastic dress. But the most arresting
attitude that remained in their memories had been anything but
merely monastic; that of the moment when the figure in bright green
and the other in vivid violet had for a moment made a silver cross
of their crossing swords. Even when it was a jest it had been
something of a drama; and it was a strange and sinister thought that
in the gray daybreak the same figures in the same posture might have
been repeated as a tragedy.

"Did you quarrel with him?" asked Brain, suddenly.

"Yes," replied the immovable man in green. "Or he quarreled with
me."

"Why did he quarrel with you?" asked the investigator; and Leonard
Crane made no reply.

Horne Fisher, curiously enough, had only given half his attention to
this crucial cross-examination. His heavy-lidded eyes had languidly
followed the figure of Prince Borodino, who at this stage had
strolled away toward the fringe of the wood; and, after a pause, as
of meditation, had disappeared into the darkness of the trees.

He was recalled from his irrelevance by the voice of Juliet Bray,
which rang out with an altogether new note of decision:

"If that is the difficulty, it had best be cleared up. I am engaged
to Mr. Crane, and when we told my brother he did not approve of it;
that is all."

Neither Brain nor Fisher exhibited any surprise, but the former
added, quietly:

"Except, I suppose, that he and your brother went off into the wood
to discuss it, where Mr. Crane mislaid his sword, not to mention his
companion."

"And may I ask," inquired Crane, with a certain flicker of mockery
passing over his pallid features, "what I am supposed to have done
with either of them? Let us adopt the cheerful thesis that I am a
murderer; it has yet to be shown that I am a magician. If I ran your
unfortunate friend through the body, what did I do with the body?
Did I have it carried away by seven flying dragons, or was it merely
a trifling matter of turning it into a milk-white hind?"

"It is no occasion for sneering," said the Anglo-Indian judge, with
abrupt authority. "It doesn't make it look better for you that you
can joke about the loss."

Fisher's dreamy, and even dreary, eye was still on the edge of the
wood behind, and he became conscious of masses of dark red, like a
stormy sunset cloud, glowing through the gray network of the thin
trees, and the prince in his cardinal's robes reemerged on to the
pathway. Brain had had half a notion that the prince might have gone
to look for the lost rapier. But when he reappeared he was carrying
in his hand, not a sword, but an ax.

The incongruity between the masquerade and the mystery had created a
curious psychological atmosphere. At first they had all felt
horribly ashamed at being caught in the foolish disguises of a
festival, by an event that had only too much the character of a
funeral. Many of them would have already gone back and dressed in
clothes that were more funereal or at least more formal. But somehow
at the moment this seemed like a second masquerade, more artificial
and frivolous than the first. And as they reconciled themselves to
their ridiculous trappings, a curious sensation had come over some
of them, notably over the more sensitive, like Crane and Fisher and
Juliet, but in some degree over everybody except the practical Mr.
Brain. It was almost as if they were the ghosts of their own
ancestors haunting that dark wood and dismal lake, and playing some
old part that they only half remembered. The movements of those
colored figures seemed to mean something that had been settled long
before, like a silent heraldry. Acts, attitudes, external objects,
were accepted as an allegory even without the key; and they knew
when a crisis had come, when they did not know what it was. And
somehow they knew subconsciously that the whole tale had taken a new
and terrible turn, when they saw the prince stand in the gap of the
gaunt trees, in his robes of angry crimson and with his lowering
face of bronze, bearing in his hand a new shape of death. They could
not have named a reason, but the two swords seemed indeed to have
become toy swords and the whole tale of them broken and tossed away
like a toy. Borodino looked like the Old World headsman, clad in
terrible red, and carrying the ax for the execution of the criminal.
And the criminal was not Crane.

Mr. Brain of the Indian police was glaring at the new object, and it
was a moment or two before he spoke, harshly and almost hoarsely.

"What are you doing with that?" he asked. "Seems to be a woodman's
chopper."

"A natural association of ideas," observed Horne Fisher. "If you
meet a cat in a wood you think it's a wildcat, though it may have
just strolled from the drawing-room sofa. As a matter of fact, I
happen to know that is not the woodman's chopper. It's the kitchen
chopper, or meat ax, or something like that, that somebody has
thrown away in the wood. I saw it in the kitchen myself when I was
getting the potato sacks with which I reconstructed a mediaeval
hermit."

"All the same, it is not without interest," remarked the prince,
holding out the instrument to Fisher, who took it and examined it
carefully. "A butcher's cleaver that has done butcher's work."

"It was certainly the instrument of the crime," assented Fisher, in
a low voice.

Brain was staring at the dull blue gleam of the ax head with fierce
and fascinated eyes. "I don't understand you," he said. "There is
no--there are no marks on it."

"It has shed no blood," answered Fisher, "but for all that it has
committed a crime. This is as near as the criminal came to the crime
when he committed it."

"What do you mean?"

"He was not there when he did it," explained Fisher. "It's a poor
sort of murderer who can't murder people when he isn't there."

"You seem to be talking merely for the sake of mystification," said
Brain. "If you have any practical advice to give you might as well
make it intelligible."

"The only practical advice I can suggest," said Fisher,
thoughtfully, "is a little research into local topography and
nomenclature. They say there used to be a Mr. Prior, who had a farm
in this neighborhood. I think some details about the domestic life
of the late Mr. Prior would throw a light on this terrible
business."

"And you have nothing more immediate than your topography to offer,"
said Brain, with a sneer, "to help me avenge my friend?"

"Well," said Fisher, "I should find out the truth about the Hole in
the Wall."

* * *


That night, at the close of a stormy twilight and under a strong
west wind that followed the breaking of the frost, Leonard Crane was
wending his way in a wild rotatory walk round and round the high,
continuous wall that inclosed the little wood. He was driven by a
desperate idea of solving for himself the riddle that had clouded
his reputation and already even threatened his liberty. The police
authorities, now in charge of the inquiry, had not arrested him, but
he knew well enough that if he tried to move far afield he would be
instantly arrested. Horne Fisher's fragmentary hints, though he had
refused to expand them as yet, had stirred the artistic temperament
of the architect to a sort of wild analysis, and he was resolved to
read the hieroglyph upside down and every way until it made sense.
If it was something connected with a hole in the wall he would find
the hole in the wall; but, as a matter of fact, he was unable to
find the faintest crack in the wall. His professional knowledge told
him that the masonry was all of one workmanship and one date, and,
except for the regular entrance, which threw no light on the
mystery, he found nothing suggesting any sort of hiding place or
means of escape. Walking a narrow path between the winding wall and
the wild eastward bend and sweep of the gray and feathery trees,
seeing shifting gleams of a lost sunset winking almost like
lightning as the clouds of tempest scudded across the sky and
mingling with the first faint blue light from a slowly strengthened
moon behind him, he began to feel his head going round as his heels
were going round and round the blind recurrent barrier. He had
thoughts on the border of thought; fancies about a fourth dimension
which was itself a hole to hide anything, of seeing everything from
a new angle out of a new window in the senses; or of some mystical
light and transparency, like the new rays of chemistry, in which he
could see Bulmer's body, horrible and glaring, floating in a lurid
halo over the woods and the wall. He was haunted also with the hint,
which somehow seemed to be equally horrifying, that it all had
something to do with Mr. Prior. There seemed even to be something
creepy in the fact that he was always respectfully referred to as
Mr. Prior, and that it was in the domestic life of the dead farmer
that he had been bidden to seek the seed of these dreadful things.
As a matter of fact, he had found that no local inquiries had
revealed anything at all about the Prior family.

The moonlight had broadened and brightened, the wind had driven off
the clouds and itself died fitfully away, when he came round again
to the artificial lake in front of the house. For some reason it
looked a very artificial lake; indeed, the whole scene was like a
classical landscape with a touch of Watteau; the Palladian facade of
the house pale in the moon, and the same silver touching the very
pagan and naked marble nymph in the middle of the pond. Rather to
his surprise, he found another figure there beside the statue,
sitting almost equally motionless; and the same silver pencil traced
the wrinkled brow and patient face of Horne Fisher, still dressed as
a hermit and apparently practicing something of the solitude of a
hermit. Nevertheless, he looked up at Leonard Crane and smiled,
almost as if he had expected him.

"Look here," said Crane, planting himself in front of him, "can you
tell me anything about this business?"

"I shall soon have to tell everybody everything about it," replied
Fisher, "but I've no objection to telling you something first. But,
to begin with, will you tell me something? What really happened when
you met Bulmer this morning? You did throw away your sword, but you
didn't kill him."

"I didn't kill him because I threw away my sword," said the other.
"I did it on purpose--or I'm not sure what might have happened."

After a pause he went on, quietly: "The late Lord Bulmer was a very
breezy gentleman, extremely breezy. He was very genial with his
inferiors, and would have his lawyer and his architect staying in
his house for all sorts of holidays and amusements. But there was
another side to him, which they found out when they tried to be his
equals. When I told him that his sister and I were engaged,
something happened which I simply can't and won't describe. It
seemed to me like some monstrous upheaval of madness. But I suppose
the truth is painfully simple. There is such a thing as the
coarseness of a gentleman. And it is the most horrible thing in
humanity."

"I know," said Fisher. "The Renaissance nobles of the Tudor time
were like that."

"It is odd that you should say that," Crane went on. "For while we
were talking there came on me a curious feeling that we were
repeating some scene of the past, and that I was really some outlaw,
found in the woods like Robin Hood, and that he had really stepped
in all his plumes and purple out of the picture frame of the
ancestral portrait. Anyhow, he was the man in possession, and he
neither feared God nor regarded man. I defied him, of course, and
walked away. I might really have killed him if I had not walked
away."

"Yes," said Fisher, nodding, "his ancestor was in possession and he
was in possession, and this is the end of the story. It all fits
in."

"Fits in with what?" cried his companion, with sudden impatience. "I
can't make head or tail of it. You tell me to look for the secret in
the hole in the wall, but I can't find any hole in the wall."

"There isn't any," said Fisher. "That's the secret." After
reflecting a moment, he added: "Unless you call it a hole in the
wall of the world. Look here; I'll tell you if you like, but I'm
afraid it involves an introduction. You've got to understand one of
the tricks of the modern mind, a tendency that most people obey
without noticing it. In the village or suburb outside there's an inn
with the sign of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose I went about
telling everybody that this was only a corruption of King George and
the Dragoon. Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry,
from a vague feeling that it's probable because it's prosaic. It
turns something romantic and legendary into something recent and
ordinary. And that somehow makes it sound rational, though it is
unsupported by reason. Of course some people would have the sense to
remember having seen St. George in old Italian pictures and French
romances, but a good many wouldn't think about it at all. They would
just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern
intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept
anything without authority. That's exactly what has happened here.