The Mystery of the Skeleton Key. Bernard Capes
cut from the house to the lower estate being regarded, perhaps, as inadequate compensation for its solitariness, its dankness, and the glooms of the packed foliage through which it penetrates. Opposite the wicket, across the road, an ordinary bar-gate gives upon a corresponding track, driven through the thick of a dense coppice, which, at a depth of some two hundred feet, ends in the open fields. It is useful to bear in mind these local features, in view of the event which came presently to give them a tragic notoriety.
At Winton a wagonette met the two gentlemen, and they were landed at Wildshott soon after four o’clock. Bickerdike was interested to discover that they were the only guests. He was not surprised for himself, since he and Hugo Kennett were on terms of unceremonial intimacy. He did wonder a little what qualities he and the Baron could be thought to possess in common that they should have been chosen together for so exclusive an invitation. But no doubt it was pure accident; and in any case there was his friend to explain. He was a bit down in the mouth, was Hugo—for any reason, or no reason, or the devil of a reason; never mind what—and old Viv was always a tower of strength to him in his moods—hence old Viv’s citation to come and ‘buck’ his friend, and incidentally to enjoy a few days’ shooting, which accounted for one half of the coincidence. Old Viv accepted his part philosophically; it was not the first time he had been called upon to play it with this up and down young officer, whose temporal senior he was by some six years, and whose elder, in all questions of sapience and self-sufficiency, he might have been by fifty. He did not ask what was the matter, but he said ‘all right’, as if all right were all reassurance, and gave a little nod to settle the matter. He had a well-looking, rather judicial face, clean shaven, a prim mouth, a somewhat naked head for a man of thirty, and he wore eyeglasses on a neatly turned nose, with a considerable prominence of the organ of eventuality above it. The complacent bachelor was writ plain in his every line. And then he inquired regarding the Baron.
‘O! I know very little about him,’ was young Kennett’s answer. ‘I believe the governor picked him up in Paris originally, but how or where I can’t say. He’s a marvel at chess; and you remember that’s the old man’s obsession. They’re at it eternally while he’s down here.’
‘This isn’t his first visit then?’
‘No, I believe not; but it’s the first time I’ve seen him. I’m quoting Audrey for the chess. Why, what’s the matter? Is anything wrong with him?’
‘There you go, you rabbit! Who said anything was wrong with him? I’ve met him before, that’s all.’
‘Have you? Where?’
‘Why, in Paris. You remember the Montesquieu, and my French Baron?’
‘I remember there was a Baron. I don’t think you ever told me his name.’
‘Well, it was Le Sage, and this is the man.’
‘Is it? That’s rather queer.’
‘What is?’
‘The coincidence of your meeting again like this.’
‘O, as to that, coincidence, you know, is only queer till you have traced back its clues and found it inevitable.’
‘Well, that’s true. You can trace it in his case to the governor’s being down with the gout again, and confined to the house, and wanting something and somebody to distract him.’
‘There you are, you see. He thought of chess, and thought of this Le Sage, and wrote up to him on the chance. Your father probably knows more about his movements than we do. So we’re both accounted for. No, what is queer to me is the man’s confounded habit of secrecy. Why didn’t he say, when I met him in Paris, that the friend I was waiting for was known to him? Why didn’t he admit yesterday, admit until we actually met on the platform today, that we were bound for the same place? I hate a stupidly reticent man.’
Kennett laughed, and then frowned, and turned away to chalk his cue. The two men were in the billiard-room, playing a hundred up before dinner.
‘Well,’ he said, stooping to a losing hazard, ‘I hope a fellow may be a good fellow, and yet not tell all that’s in him.’
‘Of course he may,’ answered Bickerdike. ‘Le Sage, I’m sure, is a very good fellow, a very decent old boy, and rare company when he chooses—I can answer for that. But there’s a difference between telling all that’s in one and not telling anything.’
‘Well, perhaps he thinks,’ said the other impatiently, ‘that if he once opened the sluice he’d drain the dammed river. Do let him alone and attend to the game.’
Bickerdike responded, unruffled. He had found his friend in a curiously touchy state—irritable, and nervous, and moody. He had known him to be so before, though never, perhaps, so conspicuously. Hugo was temperamentally high-strung, and always subject to alternations of excitement and despondence; but he had not yet exhibited so unbalanced a temper as he seemed inclined to display on this occasion. He was wild, reckless, dejected, but seldom normal, appearing possessed by a spirit which in turns exalted or depressed him. What was wrong with the boy? His friend, covertly pondering the handsome young figure, found sufficient solution in the commonplace. He was in one of his nervous phases, that was all. They would afflict men subject to them at any odd time, and without apparent provocation. It was one of the mysteries of our organic being—a question of misfit somewhere between spirit and matter. No one looking at the young soldier would have thought him anything but a typical example of his kind—constitutionally flawless, mentally insensitive. He belonged to a crack regiment, and was popular in it; was tall, shapely-built, attractive, with a rather girlish complexion and umber-gold hair—a ladies’ man, a pattern military man, everything nice. And yet that demon of nerve worked in him to his perfection’s undoing. Perhaps it was the prick of conscience, like a shifting grit in one’s shoe, now here, now there, now gone—for the boy had quite fine impulses for a spoilt boy, a spoilt child of Fortune—and spoilt, like Byron by his mother, in the ruinous way. His father, the General, alternately indulgent and tyrannical, was the worst of parents for him; he had lost his mother long ago; his one sister, flippant, independent—undervalued, it may be, and conscious of it—offered no adequate substitute for that departed influence. And so the good in Hugo was to his own credit, and stood perhaps for more than it might have in another man.
His father, Sir Calvin—he had got his K.C.B., by the way, after Tel-el-Kebir in ’82, in reward for some signal feat of arms, and at the expense of his trigger-finger—was as proud as sin of his comely lad, and blind to all faults in him which did not turn upon opposition to himself. He designed great connexions for the young man, and humoured his own selfishness in the prospect. He was a martinet of fifty-five, with a fine surface polish and a heart of teak beneath it, a patrician of the Claudian breed, irascible, much subject to gout for his past misdeeds, and an ardent devotee of the game of chess, at which he could hold his own with some of the professed masters. It was that devotion which had brought him fortuitously acquainted with the French Baron—a sort of technical friendship, it might be called—and which had procured the latter an occasional invitation of late to Wildshott. Le Sage came for chess, but he proved very welcome for himself. There was a sort of soothing tolerance about him, the well-informed urbanity of a polished man of the world, which was as good as a lenitive to the splenetic invalid. But nobody, unless it were Sir Calvin himself, appeared to know anything concerning him; whether he were rich or indigent; what, if dependent on his wits, he did for a living; what was the meaning or value of his title in an Englishman, if English he were; whether, in short, he were a shady Baron of the chevalier d’ industrie order, or a reputable Baron, with only some eccentricities to mark him out from the common. One of these, not necessarily questionable, was his sly incommunicativeness; another was his fondness for half-crowns. He invariably, whether with Sir Calvin or others, made that stake, no more and no less, a condition of his playing at all, and for the most part he carried it off. Vivian Bickerdike soon learned all that there was to be told about him, and he was puzzled and interested—‘intrigued’, as they would say in the horrible modern phrase. But being a young man of caution, in addition to great native curiosity, he kept his wits active, and his suspicions, if he had any, close.