CHAPTER II
The House with Red Blinds

Uvo Delavoye had developed a theory to match his name for the Estate. The baleful spirit of the notorious Lord Mulcaster still brooded over Witching Hill, and the innocent occupiers of the Queen Anne houses were one and all liable to the malign influence. Such was the modest proposition, put as fairly as can be expected of one who resisted it from the first; for both by temperament and training I was perhaps unusually proof against this kind of thing. But then I always held that Delavoye himself did not begin by believing in his own idea, that he never thought of it before our subterranean adventure, and would have forgotten all about it but for the house with red blinds.

That vermilion house with the brave blinds of quite another red! I can still see them bleaching in the glare of those few August days.

It was so hot that the prematurely bronze leaves of the horse-chestnuts, behind the odd numbers in Mulcaster Park, were as crisp as tinfoil, while a tawny stubble defied the garden rollers of those tenants who had not been driven to the real country or the seaside. Half our inhabited houses were either locked up empty, or in the hands of servants who spent their time gossiping at the gate. And I personally was not surprised when the red blinds stayed down in their turn.

The Abercromby Royles were a young couple who might be expected to mobilise at short notice, in spite of the wife's poor health, for they had no other ties. The mere fact of their departure on Bank Holiday, when the rest of the Estate were on the river, meant no more to me than a sudden whim on the lady's part; but then I never liked the looks of her or her very yellow hair, least of all in a bath chair drawn by her indulgent husband after business hours. Mr. Royle was a little solicitor, who himself flouted tradition with a flower in his coat and a straw hat worn slightly on one side; but with him I had made friends over an escape of gas which he treated as a joke rather than a grievance. He seemed to me just the sort of man to humour his sort of wife, even to the extent of packing off the servants on board wages, as they were said to have done before leaving themselves. Certainly I never thought of a sinister explanation until Uvo Delavoye put one into my head, and then I had no patience with him.

"It's this heat," I declared; "it's hot enough to uproot anybody."

"I wonder," said he, "how many other places they've found too hot for them!"

"But why should you wonder any such rot, when you say yourself that you've never even nodded to Abercromby Royle?"

"Because I've had my eye on him all the same, Gillon, as obvious material for the evil genius of the place."

"I see! I forgot you were spoiling for a second case."

"Case or no case," replied Uvo, "house-holds don't usually disperse at a moment's notice, and their cook told our butcher that it was only sprung on them this morning. I have it from our own old treasure, if you want to know, so you may take it or leave it at that for what it's worth. But if I had your job, Gilly, and my boss was away, I don't know that I should feel altogether happy about my Michaelmas rent."

Nor was I quite so happy as I had been. I was spending the evening at my friend's, but I cut it rather shorter than I had intended; and on my way to the unlet house in which I lodged, I could not help stopping outside the one with the drawn red blinds. They looked natural enough at this time of night; but all the windows were shut as well; there was no sign of life about the house. And then, as I went my way, I caught a sound which I had just heard as I approached, but not while standing outside the gate. It was the sound of furtive hammering – a few taps and then a pause – but I retraced my steps too quietly to prolong the pause a second time. It was some devil's tattoo on the very door of the empty house, and as I reached up my hand to reply with the knocker, the door flew open and the devil was Abercromby Royle himself.

He looked one, too, by the light of the lamp opposite, but only for a moment. What impressed me most about our interview, even at the time, was the clemency of my reception by an obviously startled man. He interrupted my apologies to commend my zeal; as for explanations, it was for him to explain to me, if I would be good enough to step inside. I did so with a strange sense of impersonal fear or foreboding, due partly to the stuffy darkness of the hall, partly to a quiver of the kindly hand upon my shoulder. The dining-room, however, was all lit up, and like an oven. Whisky was on the side-board, and I had to join Mr. Royle in the glass that loosened his tongue.

It was quite true about the servants; they had gone first, and he was the last to leave the ship. The metaphor did not strike me as unfortunate until it was passed off with a hollow laugh. Mr. Royle no longer disguised his nervous worry; he seemed particularly troubled about his wife, who appeared to have followed the servants into the country, and whom he could not possibly join. He mentioned that he had taken her up to town and seen her off; then, that he was going up again himself by the last train that night; finally – after a pause and between ourselves – that he was sailing immediately for America. When I heard this I thought of Delavoye; but Royle seemed so glad when he had told me, and soon in such a stew about his train, that I felt certain there could be nothing really wrong. It was a sudden call, and a great upset to him; he made no secret of either fact or any of his plans. He had left his baggage that morning at the club where he was going to sleep. He even told me what had brought him back, and that led to an equally voluntary explanation of the hammering I had heard in the road.

"Would you believe it? I'd forgotten all about our letters!" exclaimed Abercromby Royle as we were about to leave the house together. "Having the rest of the day on my hands, I thought I might as well come back myself to give the necessary instructions. But it's no use simply filling up the usual form; half your correspondence still finds its way into your empty house; so I was just tacking this lid of an old cigar box across the slot. I'll finish it, if you don't mind, and then we can go so far together."

But we went together all the way, and I saw him off in a train laden with Bank Holiday water-folk. I thought he scanned them somewhat closely on the platform, and that some of my remarks fell on deaf ears. Among other things, I said I would gladly have kept the empty house aired, had he cared to trust me with his key. It was an office that I had undertaken for more than one of our absentee tenants. But the lawyer's only answer was a grip of the hand as the train began to move. And it seemed to me a haunted face that dissolved into the night, despite the drooping flower in the flannel coat and the hat worn a little on one side.

It would be difficult to define the impression left upon my mind by the whole of this equivocal episode; enough that, for more than one obvious reason, I said not a word about it to Uvo Delavoye. Once or twice I was tempted by his own remarks about Abercromby Royle, but on each occasion I set my teeth and defended the absent man as though we were both equally in the dark. It seemed a duty, after blundering into his affairs as I had done. But that very week brought forth developments which made a necessary end of all such scruples.

I was interviewing one of our foremen in a house that had to be ready by half-quarter-day, when Delavoye came in with a gleaming eye to tell me I was wanted.

"It's about our friend Royle," he added, trying not to crow. "I was perfectly right. They're on his tracks already!"

"Who are?" I demanded, when we were out of earshot of the men.

"Well, only one fellow so far, but he's breathing blood-hounds and Scotland Yard! It's Coysh, the trick-bicycle inventor; you must know the lunatic by name; but let me tell you that he sounds unpleasantly sane about your limb of the law. A worse case – "

"Where is he?" I interrupted hotly. "And what the devil does he want with me?"

"Thinks you can help him put salt on the bird that's flown, as sort of clerk to the whole aviary! I found him pounding at your office door. He'd been down to Royle's and found it all shut up, of course – like his office in town, he says! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Gilly! It's a clear case, I'm afraid, but you'd better have it from the fountain-head. I said I thought I could unearth you, and he's waiting outside for you now."

I looked through a window with a scroll of whitewash on the pane. In the road a thick-set man was fanning his big head with a wide soft hat, which I could not but notice that he wore with a morning coat and brown boots. The now eminent engineer is not much more conventional than the hot-headed patentee who in those days had still to find himself (and had lately been looking in the wrong place, with a howling Press at his heels). But even then the quality of the man outshone the eccentricities of the super-crank. And I had a taste of it that August morning; a foretaste, when I looked into the road and saw worry and distress where I expected only righteous indignation.

I went down and asked him in, and his face lit up like a stormy sunbeam. But the most level-headed man in England could not have come to the point in fewer words or a more temperate tone.

"I'm glad your friend has told you what I've come about. I'm a plain speaker, Mr. Gillon, and I shall be plainer with you than I've been with him, because he tells me you know Abercromby Royle. In that case you won't start a scandal – because to know the fellow is to like him – and I only hope it may prove in your power to prevent one."

"I'll do anything I can, Mr. Coysh," I went so far as to say. But I was already taken by surprise. And so, I could see, was Uvo Delavoye.

"I'll hold you to that," said Coysh frankly. "When did you see him last, Mr. Gillon?"

"Do you mean Mr. Royle?" I stammered, turning away from Delavoye. If only he had not been there!

"Of course I do; and let me tell you, Mr. Gillon, this is a serious matter for the man, you know. You won't improve his chances by keeping anything back. When did you see him last?"

"Monday night," I mumbled.

But Delavoye heard.

"Monday night?" he interjected densely. "Why, it was on Monday he went away!"

"Exactly – by the last train."

"But we heard they'd gone hours before!"

"We heard wrong, so far as Royle was concerned. I came across him after I left you, and I saw him off myself."

Coysh had a sharp eye on both of us, and Delavoye's astonishment was not lost upon him. But it was at me that he looked last and longest.

"And you keep this to yourself from Monday night till now?"

"What's about it?" I demanded, falling into my own vernacular in my embarrassment.

"It only looks rather as though you were behind the scenes," replied Coysh simply. And his honesty called to mine.

"Well, so I was, to a certain extent," I cried; "but I got there by accident, I blundered in where I wasn't wanted, and yet the fellow treated me like a gentleman! That's why I never gave it away. But," I added with more guile, "there was really nothing to give away." And with that I improvised a garbled version of my last little visit to the house with red blinds, which I did not say I had discovered in utter darkness, any more than I described the sound which had attracted my attention, or the state of the householder's nerves.

"Very good," said Coysh, making notes on an envelope. "And then you saw him off by the last train: did he say where he was going at that time of night?"

"To sleep at some club, I understood."

"And next morning?"

But I was sorry I had gone so far.

"Mr. Coysh," I said, "I'm here to let the houses on this Estate, and to look after odd jobs for the people who take them. It's not my business to keep an eye on the tenants themselves, still less to report their movements, and I must respectfully decline to say another word about Mr. Abercromby Royle."

The engineer put away his envelope with a shrug.

"Oh, very well; then you force me to go into details which I on my side would vastly prefer to keep to myself; but if you are sincere you will treat them as even more confidential than your own relations with Mr. Royle. You say you are hardly friends. I shall believe it if you stick to your present attitude when you've heard my story. Royle and I, however, have been only too friendly in the past, and I should not forget it even now – if I could find him."

He made a meaning pause, of which I did not avail myself, though Delavoye encouraged me with an eager eye.

"He was not only my solicitor," continued Coysh; "he has acted as my agent in a good many matters which neither lawyers nor patent agents will generally undertake. You've heard of my Mainspring bicycle, of course? It was in his hands, and would have paid him well when it comes off, which is only a question of time." His broad face lit with irrelevant enthusiasm and glowed upon us each in turn. "When you think that by the very act of pedalling on the level we might be winding up – but there! It's going to revolutionise the most popular pastime of the day, and make my fortune incidentally; but meanwhile I've one or two pot-boilers that bring me in a living wage in royalties. One's an appliance they use in every gold-mine in South Africa. It was taken up by the biggest people in Johannesburg, and of course I've done very well out of it, this last year or two; but ever since Christmas my little bit has been getting more and more overdue. Royle had the whole thing in hand. I spoke to him about it more than once. At last I told him that if he couldn't cope with our paymasters out there, I'd have a go at them myself; but what I really feared was that he was keeping the remittances back, never for a moment that he was tampering with each one as it came. That, however, is what has been going on all this year. I have the certified accounts to prove it, and Royle must have bolted just when he knew the mail would reach me where I've been abroad. I don't wonder, either; he's been faking every statement for the last six months!"

"But not before?" cried Delavoye, as though it mattered.

Coysh turned to him with puzzled eyes.

"No; that's the funny part of it," said he. "You'd think a man who went so wrong – hundreds, in these few months – could never have been quite straight. But not a bit of it. I've got the accounts; they were as right as rain till this last spring."

"I knew it!" exclaimed Delavoye in wild excitement.

"May I ask what you knew?"

Coysh was staring, as well he might.

"Only that the whole mischief must have happened since these people came here to live!"

"Do you suggest that they've been living beyond their means?"

"I shouldn't be surprised," said Delavoye, as readily as though nothing else had been in his mind.

"Well, and I should say you were right," rejoined the engineer, "if it wasn't for the funniest part of all. When a straight man goes off the rails, there's generally some tremendous cause; but one of the surprises of this case, as my banker has managed to ascertain, is that Abercromby Royle is in a position to repay every penny. He has more than enough to do it, lying idle in his bank; so there was no apparent motive for the crime, and I for my part am prepared to treat it as a sudden aberration."

"Exactly!" cried Delavoye, as though he were the missing man's oldest friend and more eager than either of us to find excuses for him.

"Otherwise," continued Coysh, "I wouldn't have taken you gentlemen into my confidence. But the plain fact is that I'm prepared to condone the felony at my own risk in return for immediate and complete restitution." He turned his attention entirely to me. "Now, Royle can't make good unless you help him by helping me to find him. I won't be hard on him if you do, I promise you! Not a dozen men in England shall ever know. But if I have to hunt for him it'll be with detectives and a warrant, and the fat'll be in the fire for all the world to smell!"