The Secret of the Tower/Chapter 6

of 1918 was a merry feast, and nowhere merrier than at Old Place. There was a house-party and, for dinner on the day itself, a local contingent as well: Miss Wall, the Irechesters, Mr. Penrose, and Doctor Mary. Mr. Beaumaroy also had been invited by Mrs. Naylor; she considered him an interesting man and felt pity for the obvious ennui of his situation; but he had not felt able to leave his old friend. Doctor Mary’s Paying Guest was of the house-party, not merely a dinner guest. She was asked over to spend three days and went, accompanied by Jeanne, who by this time was crying much less; crying was no longer the cue; her mistress, and not merely stern Doctor Mary, had plainly shown her that. Gertie Naylor had invited Cynthia to help her in entertaining the subalterns, though Gertie was really quite equal to that task herself; there were only three of them, and if a pretty girl is not equal to three subalterns, well, what are we coming to in England? And, as it turned out, Miss Gertie had to deal with them all, sometimes collectively, sometimes one by one, practically unassisted. Cynthia was otherwise engaged. Gertie complained neither of the cause nor of its consequence.

The drink, or drugs, hypothesis was exploded, and Miss Wall’s speculations set at rest, with a quite comforting solatium of romantic and unhappy interest, “a nice tit-bit for the old cat,” as Mr. Naylor unkindly put it. Cynthia had told her story; she wanted a richer sympathy than Doctor Mary’s common-sense afforded; out of this need the revelation came to Gertie in innocent confidence, and, with the narrator’s tacit approval, ran through the family and its intimate friends. If Cynthia had been as calculating as she was guileless, she could not have done better for herself. Mrs. Naylor’s motherliness, old Naylor’s courtliness, Gertie’s breathless concern and avid appetite for the fullest detail, everybody’s desire to console and cheer, all these were at her service, all enlisted in the effort to make her forget, and live and laugh again. Her heart responded; she found herself becoming happy at a rate which made her positively ashamed. No wonder tactful Jeanne discovered that the cue was changed!

Fastidious old Naylor regarded his wife with the affection of habit and with a little disdain for the ordinariness of her virtues—not to say of the mind which they adorned. His daughter was to him a precious toy, on which he tried jokes, played tricks, and lavished gifts, for the joy of seeing the prettiness of her reactions to his treatment. It never occurred to him to think that his toy might be broken; fond as he was, his feeling for her lacked the apprehensiveness of the deepest love. But he idolized his son, and in this case neither without fear nor without understanding. For four years now he had feared for him bitterly: for his body, for his life. At every waking hour his inner cry had been even as David’s, “Would God I had died for thee, my son, my son!” For at every moment of those four years it might be that his son was even then dead. That terror, endured under a cool and almost off-hand demeanor, was past; but he feared for his son still. Of all who went to the war as Crusaders, none had the temperament more ardently than Alec. As he went, so, obviously, he had come back, not disillusioned, nay, with all his illusions, or delusions, about this wicked world and its possibilities, about the people who dwell in it and their lamentable limitations, stronger in his mind than ever. How could he get through life without being too sorely hurt and wounded, without being cut to the very quick by his inevitable discoveries? Old Naylor did not see how it was to be done, or even hoped for; but the right kind of wife was unquestionably the best chance.

He had cast a speculative eye on Cynthia Walford, Irechester had caught him at it, but, as he observed her more, she did not altogether satisfy him. Alec needed someone more stable, stronger, someone in a sense protective; somebody more like Mary Arkroyd; that idea passed through his thoughts; if only Mary would take the trouble to dress herself, remember that she was, or might be made, an attractive young woman; and, yes, throw her mortar and pestle out of the window without, however, discarding with them the sturdy, sane, balanced qualities of mind which enabled her to handle them with such admirable competence. But he soon had to put this idea from him. His son’s own impulse was to give, not to seek, protection and support.

Of Cynthia’s woeful experience Alec had spoken to his father once only: “It makes me mad to think the fellow who did that wore a British uniform!”

How unreasonable! Since by all the laws of average, when millions of men are wearing a uniform, there must be some rogues in it. But it was Alec’s way to hold himself responsible for the whole of His Majesty’s Forces. Their honor was his; for their misdeeds he must in his own person make reparation. “That fellow Beaumaroy may have lost his conscience, but my boy seems to have acquired five million,” the old man grumbled to himself—a grumble full of pride.

The father might analyze; with Alec it was all impulse, the impulse to soothe, to obliterate, to atone. The girl had been sorely hurt; with the acuteness of sympathy he divined that she felt herself in a way soiled and stained by contact with unworthiness and by a too easy acceptance of it. All that must be swept out of her heart, out of her memory, if it could be.

Doctor Mary saw what was happening, and with a little pang to which she would not have liked to own. She had set love affairs, and all the notions connected therewith, behind her; but she had idealized Alec Naylor a little; and she thought Cynthia, in homely phrase, “hardly good enough.” Was it not rather perverse that the very fact of having been a little goose should help her to win so rare a swan?

“You’re taking my patient out of my hands, Captain Alec!” she said to him jokingly. “And you’re devoting great attention to the case.”

He flushed. “She seems to like to talk to me,” he answered simply. “She seems to me to have rather a remarkable mind, Doctor Mary.” (She was “Doctor Mary” to all the Old Place party now, in affection, with a touch of chaff.)

O sancta simplicitas! Mary longed to say that Cynthia was a very ordinary child. Like to talk to him, indeed! Of course she did; and to use her girl’s weapons on him; and to wonder, in an almost awestruck delight, at their effect on this dazzling hero. Well, the guilelessness of heroes!

So mused Mary, on the unprofessional side of her mind, as she watched, that Christmastide, Captain Alec’s delicate, sensitively indirect, and delayed approach toward the ripe fruit that hung so ready to his hand. “Part of his chivalry to assume she can’t think of him yet!” Mary was half-impatient, half-reluctantly admiring; not an uncommon mixture of feeling for the extreme forms of virtue to produce. In the net result, however, her marked image of Alec lost something of its heroic proportions.

But professionally (the distinction must not be pushed too far, she was not built in watertight compartments) Tower Cottage remained obstinately in the center of her thoughts; and, connected with it, there arose a puzzle over Dr. Irechester’s demeanor. She had taken advantage of Beaumaroy’s permission, though rather doubtful whether she was doing right, for she was still inexperienced in niceties of etiquette, and sent on the letter, with a frank note explaining her own feelings and the reason which had caused her to pay her visit to Mr. Saffron. But though Irechester was quite friendly when they met at Old Place before dinner, and talked freely to her during a rather prolonged period of waiting (Captain Alec and Cynthia, Gertie and two subalterns were very late, having apparently forgotten dinner in more refined delights), he made no reference to the letters, nor to Tower Cottage or its inmates. Mary herself was too shy to break the ice, but wondered at his silence, and the more because the matter evidently had not gone out of his mind. For after dinner, when the port had gone round once and the proper healths been honored, he said across the table to Mr. Penrose:

“We were talking the other day of the Tower, on the heath, you know, by old Saffron’s cottage, and none of us knew its history. You know all about Inkston from time out o’ mind. Have you got any story about it?”

Mr. Penrose practiced as a solicitor in London, but lived in a little old house near the Irechesters’ in the village street, and devoted his leisure to the antiquities and topography of the neighborhood; his lore was plentiful and curious, if not important. He was a small, neat old fellow, with white whiskers of the antique cut, a thin voice, and a dry cackling laugh.

“There was a story about it, and one quite fit for Christmas evening, if you’re in the mood to hear it.”

The thin voice was penetrating. At the promise of a story silence fell on the company, and Mr. Penrose told his tale, vouching as his authority an erstwhile “oldest inhabitant,” now gathered to his fathers; for the tale dated back some eighty years, to the date of the ancient’s early manhood.

A seafaring man had suddenly appeared, out of space, as it were, at Inkston, and taken the cottage. He carried with him a strong smell of rum and tobacco, and gave it to be understood that his name was Captain Duggle. He was no beauty, and his behavior was worse than his looks. To that quiet village, in those quiet strait-laced times, he was a horror and a portent. He not only drank prodigiously—that, being in character and also a source of local profit, might have passed with mild censure—but he swore and blasphemed horribly, spurning the parson, mocking at Revelation, even at the Deity Himself. The Devil was his friend, he said. A most terrible fellow, this Captain Duggle. Inkston’s hair stood on end, and no wonder!

“No doubt they shivered with delight over it all,” commented Mr. Naylor.

Captain Duggle lived all by himself—well, what God-fearing Christian, male or female, would be found to live with him—came and went mysteriously and capriciously, always full of money, and at least equally full of drink! What he did with himself nobody knew, but evil legends gathered about him. Terrified wayfarers, passing the cottage by night, took oath that they had heard more than one voice!

“This is proper Christmas!” a subaltern interjected into Gertie’s ear.

Mr. Penrose, with an air of gratification, continued his narrative.

“The story goes on to tell,” he said, “of a final interview with the village clergyman, in which that reverend man, as in duty bound, solemnly told Captain Duggle that however much he might curse, and blaspheme, and drink, and, er, do all the other things that the Captain did (obviously here Mr. Penrose felt hampered by the presence of ladies), yet Death, Judgment, and Churchyard wait for him at last. Whereupon the Captain, emitting an inconceivably terrific imprecation, which no one ever dared to repeat and which consequently is lost to tradition, declared that the first he’d never feared, the second was parson’s gabble, and as to the third, never should his dead toes be nearer any church than for the last forty years his living feet had been! If so be as he wasn’t drowned at sea, he’d make a grave for himself!”

Mr. Penrose paused, sipped port wine, and resumed.

“And so, no doubt, he did, building the Tower for that purpose. By bribes and threats he got two men to work for him. One was the uncle of my informant. But though he built that Tower, and inside it dug his grave, he never lay there, being, as things turned out, carried off by the Devil. Oh, yes, there was no doubt! He went home one night, a Saturday, very drunk, as usual. On the Sunday night a belated wayfarer, possibly also drunk, heard wild shrieks and saw a strange red glow through the window of the Tower, now, by the way, boarded up. And no doubt he’d have smelt brimstone if the wind hadn’t set the wrong way! Anyhow Captain Duggle was never seen again by mortal eyes, at Inkston, at all events. After a time the landlord of the cottage screwed up his courage to resume possession; the Captain had only a lease of it, though he built the Tower at his own charges, and, I believe, without any permission, the landlord being much too frightened to interfere with him. He found everything in a sad mess in the house, while in the Tower itself every blessed stick had been burnt up. So the story looks pretty plausible.”

“And the grave?” This question came eagerly from at least three of the company.

“In front of the fireplace there was a big oblong hole—six feet by three, by four—planks at the bottom, the sides roughly lined with brick. Captain Duggle’s grave; but he wasn’t in it!”

“But what really became of him, Mr. Penrose?” cried Cynthia.

“The Rising Generation is very skeptical,” said old Naylor. “You, of course, Penrose, believe the story?”

“I do,” said Mr. Penrose composedly. “I believe that a devil carried him off, and that its name was delirium tremens. We can guess, can’t we, Irechester, why he smashed or burnt everything, and fled in mad terror into the darkness? Where to? Was he drowned at sea, or did he take his life, or did he rot to death in some filthy hole? Nobody knows. But the grave he dug is there in the Tower, unless it’s been filled up since old Saffron has lived there.”

“Why in the world wasn’t it filled up before?” asked Alec Naylor with a laugh. “People lived in the cottage, didn’t they?”

“I’ve visited the cottage often,” Irechester interposed, “when various people had it, but I never saw any signs of the Tower being used.”

“It never was, I’m sure; and as for the grave, well, Alec, in country parts, to this day, you’d be thought a bold man if you filled up a grave that your neighbor had dug for himself, and such a neighbor as Captain Duggle! He might take it into his head some night to visit it, and if he found it filled up there’d be trouble, nasty trouble!” His laugh cackled out rather uncomfortably. Gertie shivered, and one of the subalterns gulped down his port.

“Old Saffron’s a man of education, I believe. No doubt he pays no heed to such nonsense, and has had the thing covered up,” said Naylor.

“As to that I don’t know. Perhaps you do, Irechester? He’s your patient, isn’t he?”

Dr. Irechester sat four places from Mary. Before he replied to the question he cast a glance at her, smiling rather mockingly. “I’ve attended him on one or two occasions, but I’ve never seen the inside of the Tower. So I don’t know either.”

“Oh, but I’m curious! I shall ask Mr. Beaumaroy,” cried Cynthia.

The ironical character of Irechester’s smile grew more pronounced, and his voice was at its driest: “Certainly you can ask Beaumaroy, Miss Walford. As far as asking goes, there’s no difficulty.”

A pause followed this pointed remark, on which nobody seemed disposed to comment. Mrs. Naylor ended the session by rising from her chair.

But Mary Arkroyd was disquieted, worried as to how she stood with Irechester, vaguely but insistently worried over the whole Tower Cottage business. Well, the first point she could soon settle, or try to settle, anyhow.

With the directness which marked her action when once her mind was made up, she waylaid Irechester as he came into the drawing-room; her resolute approach sufficed to detach Naylor from him; he found himself for the moment isolated from everybody except Mary.

“You got my letter, Dr. Irechester? I—I rather expected an answer.”

“Your conduct was so obviously and punctiliously correct,” he replied suavely, “that I thought my answer could wait till I met you here to-day, as I knew that I was to have the pleasure of doing.” He looked her full in the eyes. “You were placed, my dear colleague, in a position in which you had no alternative.”

“I thought so, Dr. Irechester, but”

“Oh yes, clearly! I’m far from making any complaint.” He gave her a courteous little bow, but it was one which plainly closed the subject. Indeed he passed by her and joined a group that had gathered on the hearthrug, leaving her alone.

So she stood for a minute, oppressed by a growing uneasiness. Irechester said nothing, but surely meant something of import? He mocked her, but not idly or out of wantonness. He seemed almost to warn her. What could there be to warn her about? He had laid an odd emphasis on the word “placed”; he had repeated it. Who had “placed” her there? Mr. Saffron? Or

Alec Naylor broke in on her uneasy meditation. “It’s a clinking night, Doctor Mary,” he observed. “Do you mind if I walk Miss Walford home, instead of her going with you in your car, you know? It’s only a couple of miles and”

“Do you think your leg can stand it?”

He laughed. “I’ll cut the thing off, if it dares to make any objection!”