Chapter 9 No.9

That night when, very late, Mr. Harding and Malling returned to the red doll's house and let themselves into it with a latch-key, they found lying upon the table in the little hall a brown envelop.

"A telegram!" said the rector.

He took it into his hand and read the name on the envelop.

"It's for me. Malling, do you know whom this telegram is from?"

"How can I, or you, for that matter?"

"It is from Henry Chichester, and it is to recall me to London."

"It may be so."

"It is so. Open it for me."

Malling took the telegram from him and tore it open, while he sat heavily down by the table.

"Please return if possible difficulties in the parish Benyon ill need your presence Chichester."

Malling looked down at the rector.

"You see!" Mr. Harding said slowly.

"What do you mean to do?"

Mr. Harding got up from his chair with an effort like that of a weary man.

"I wonder where the railway-guide is?" he said. "Excuse me for a moment,

Mr. Malling."

He went away into the drawing-room, and returned with the railway-guide open in his hand.

"Malling," he said, using the greater familiarity he had for a moment discarded, "I am about to do a rude thing, but I ask you, I beg of you, to acquit me of any rude intention toward yourself. I have been looking up the Sunday trains. I find I can catch a good one at Faversham to-morrow morning. There is a motor I can hire in the town to get there. It stands just by the post-office, where the road branches." He paused, looking into Malling's face as if in search of some sign of vexation or irony. "With a large parish on my hands," he went on, "I have a great responsibility. And if Benyon, my second curate, is ill, they will be short-handed."

"I see."

"What distresses me greatly-greatly-is leaving you, my guest, at such short notice. I cannot say how I regret it."

He stopped. Purposely, to test him, Malling said nothing, but waited with an expressionless face.

"I cannot say. But how can I do otherwise? My duty to the parish must come before all things."

"I see," said Malling again.

Looking greatly disturbed, Mr. Harding continued:

"I will ask you to do me a very great favor. Although I am obliged to go, I hope you will stay, I entreat you to stay till Monday. The professor is here. You will not be companionless. The servants will do everything to make you comfortable. As to food, wine-everything is provided for. Will you stay? I shall feel more at ease in going if I know my departure has not shortened your visit."

"It is very good of you," Malling replied. "I'll accept your kind offer.

To tell the truth, I'm in no hurry to leave the Tankerton air."

"Thank you," said the rector, almost with fervor. "Thank you."

So, the next morning, Mr. Harding went away in the hired motor, and

Malling found himself alone in the red doll's house.

He was not sorry. The rector's revelation on the previous night had well repaid him for his journey; then the air of Tankerton really rejoiced him; and he would have speech of the professor.

"I shall lay it before Stepton," he had said to Mr. Harding the previous night, after they had parted from the professor.

And he had spoken with authority. Mr. Harding's confidence, his self-abasement, and his almost despairing appeal, had surely given Malling certain rights. He intended to use them to the full. The rector's abrupt relapse into reserve, his pitiful return to subterfuge, after the receipt of that hypnotizing telegram, had not, in Malling's view, abrogated those rights.

When the motor disappeared, he strolled across the grass with a towel and had a dip in the brown sea, going in off the long shoal that the Whitstable and Tankerton folk call "the Street." Then he set out to find the professor.

His interview with Stepton on the previous night in the presence of Mr. Harding had been rather brief. Stepton had been preoccupied and monosyllabic. Agnes had been right as to his reason for honoring the coast of Kent with his company, but wrong as to the haunted house's location. It was not in Birchington, but lay inland, within easy reach of Tankerton. When he met Malling and Harding, the professor was going to his hotel, where a motor was waiting to convey him to the house, in which he intended to pass the night. His mind was fixed tenaciously upon the matter in hand. Malling had realized at once that it was not the moment to disturb him by the introduction of any other affair, however interesting. But his suggestion of a meeting the next morning was thus welcomed:

"Right! I shall be at home at churchtime-as you're not preaching."

The second half of the sentence was directed to Mr. Harding, who said nothing.

"And you might give me a cup of tea in the afternoon," the professor had added, looking at the rector rather narrowly before shambling off to his hotel to get the plaid shawl which he often wore at night.

"With the greatest pleasure. Minors is the name of the house," had been

Mr. Harding's reply.

Whereupon the professor had vanished, muttering to himself:

"Minors! And why not Majors, if you come to that? Perhaps too suggestive of heart-breaking military men. Minors is safer in a respectable seaside place."

The professor had been up all night, but looked much as usual, and was eating a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs in the cheerful coffee-room when Malling arrived. He scarcely ever ate at orthodox hours, and had frequently been caught lunching at restaurants in London between four and five in the afternoon.

"Where's the rector? At church?" was his greeting.

"The rector has gone back to London," replied Malling, sitting down by the table.

"What about my cup of tea, then?" snapped Stepton.

"I will be your host. I'm here till to-morrow. Any interesting manifestations?"

"A rat or two and a hysterical kitchen-maid seem to be the responsible agents in the building up of the reputation of the house I kept awake in last night."

"I believe I have a more interesting problem for you."

The professor stretched out a sinewy hand.

"Cambridge marmalade! Most encouraging!" he muttered. "Have the reverend gentlemen of St. Joseph's been at it again-successfully?"

"I want you to judge."

And thereupon Malling laid the case faithfully before the professor, describing not only the dinner in Hornton Street and his interview with Lady Sophia, but also the two sermons he had heard at St. Joseph's, and the rector's lamentable outburst of the previous night. This last, having a remarkably retentive memory, he reproduced in the main in Mr. Harding's own words, omitting only the rector's reference to his moral lapses. During the whole time he was speaking Stepton was closely engaged with the Cambridge marmalade, and showed no symptoms of attention to anything else. When he ceased, Stepton remarked:

"Really, clergymen are far more to be depended upon for valuable manifestations than a rat or two and a hysterical kitchen-maid. Come to my room, Malling."

The professor had a bedroom facing the sea. He led Malling to it, shut the door, gave Malling a cane chair, sat down himself, in a peculiar, crab-like posture, upon the bed, and said:

"Now give me as minute a psychological study of the former and actual

Henry Chichester as you can."

Malling complied with this request as lucidly and tersely as he could, wasting no words.

"Any unusual change in his outward man since you knew him two years ago?" asked the professor, when he had finished.

Malling mentioned the question as to the curate's eyes and mouth which had risen in his mind, and added:

"But the character of the man is so changed that it may have suggestioned me into feeling as if there were physical change in him, too."

"More than would be inevitable in any man in a couple of years. And now as to his digestive organs."

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Malling.

The apparent vagaries of his companion very seldom surprised him, but this time he was completely taken aback.

"Are they what they were? Assuming, on your part, a knowledge of what they were."

"I don't know either in what condition they are now, or in what condition they were once."

"Ah! Now I must draw up a report about last night. I'll come for that cup of tea to Minors-might almost as well have been Majors, even granting the military flavor-about five."

Malling took his departure.

At a quarter to five he heard the click of the garden gate, and looking out at the latticed window of the hall, he saw the professor walking sidewise up the path, with a shawl round his shoulders. He went to let him in, and took him into the tiny drawing-room.

"An odd shell for Harding!" observed the professor. "More suitable to a bantam than to a Cochin-China!"

"It doesn't belong to him."

"Nor he to it. Very wise and right of him to go back to Onslow Gardens."

A maid brought in the tea, and the professor, spread strangely forth in a small, chintz-covered arm-chair, enjoyed it while he talked about oysters and oyster-beds. He was deeply interested in the oysters of Whitstable, and held forth almost romantically on their birth and upbringing, the fattening, the packing, the selling, and the eating of them-"with lemon, not vinegar, mind! To eat vinegar with a Whitstable native is as vicious as to offer a libation of catchup at the altar of a meadow mushroom just picked up out of the dew."

Malling did not attempt to turn his mind from edibles. The professor had to be let alone. When tea was finished and cleared away, he observed:

"And now, Malling, what is your view? Do you look upon it as a case of transferred personality? I rather gathered from your general tone that you were mentally drifting in that direction."

"But are there such cases? Of double transfer, I mean?"

"Personally I have never verified one. When you spoke of the reverend gentlemen for the first time, I said, 'Study the link!' There will be development in the link if-all the rest of it."

"There has been development, as I told you. The link is on his side now."

"That's remarkable, undoubtedly. Has it ever struck you that Harding was almost too successful a clergyman to be a genuinely holy man?"

"What do you mean?"

"There's a modesty in holiness that is hardly adapted to catch smart women."

"You used to go to hear Harding preach."

"And d'you know why I liked his sermons?"

"Why?"

"Because he understood doubt so well. That amused me. But the man who has such a comprehensive understanding of skepticism, is very seldom a true believer. One thing, though, Harding certainly does believe in, judging by a sermon I once heard him preach."

"And that is?"

"Manicheism. Chichester, you say, was a saint?"

"He was, if a man can be a saint who has a certain amiable weakness of character."

"And now? You think he would be a difficult customer to tackle now?"

"Harding finds him so."

"And Harding was an overwhelming chap, cocksure of himself. Chichester must be difficult. Shall I tackle him?"

"I wish you would. But how? Do you wish me to introduce him to you?"

"Let me see."

The professor dropped his head and remained silent for a minute or two.

"Tell me something," he at length remarked, lifting his head and assuming his most terrier-like aspect. "Do you think Harding a whited sepulcher?"

"Possibly."

"And do you think his saintly curate has found it out?"

"Do you think that would supply a natural explanation of the mystery?"

"Should you prefer to search for it in that malefic region which is the abiding-place of nervous dyspepsia?"

"How could-"

"Acute nervous dyspepsia, complicated by a series of sittings under the rose, might eat away the most brazen self-confidence. That's as certain as that I wear whiskers and you don't. Shall we do an addition sum? Shall we add Chichester's discovery of secret lapses in his worshiped rector's life, to the nervous dyspepsia and the sittings? Shall we do that?"

"And Lady Sophia?"

"There's a sunflower type of woman. The rising sun can't escape her inevitable worship."

"The change in Harding may be a natural one. But there is something portentous in the change in Chichester," said Malling. "You know I'm a rather cool hand, and certainly not inclined to easy credulity. But there's something about Chichester which-well, Professor, I'll make a confession to you that isn't a pleasant one for any man to make. There's something about Chichester which shakes my nerves."

"And you haven't got nervous dyspepsia?"

"Should I be even a meliorist-as I am-if I had?"

"I must know Chichester. It's a pity I didn't know him formerly."

"I don't believe that matters," said Malling, with intense conviction. "There is that in him which must strike you and affect you, whether you knew him as he was or not."

"So long as I don't turn tail and run from him, all's well. I will tackle Chichester. In the interests of science I will face this curate. But how shall I approach him? As in golf, the approach is much, if not everything."

He sat thinking for some minutes, with his eyebrows twitching. Then he said:

"The question is, Should the approach be casual or direct? Shall I describe a curve, or come to him as the crow comes when making for a given point-or is said to come, for I've never investigated that matter? What do you say?"

"It's very difficult to say. On the day I dined in Hornton Street,

Chichester certainly wanted to tell me something. He asked me to dine,

I am almost sure, in order that he might tell it to me."

"About the sittings with Harding, no doubt."

"That, perhaps, and something more."

"But he told you nothing."

"Directly."

"Do you think he would be more or less likely to unbosom himself now than he was then?"

"Less likely."

"You might give me his address."

Malling did so. The professor wrote the address down on a slip of paper, pinned the slip carefully to the yellow lining of his jacket, and then got up to go.

But Malling detained him.

"Professor," he said, speaking with an unusual hesitation, "you know why

I told you all this."

"In the interests of science?"

"No, in the interest of that miserable man, Marcus Harding. I want you to break the link that binds him to Henry Chichester-if there is one. I want you to effect his release."

"I'm afraid you've come to the wrong man," returned Stepton, dryly. "My object in entering into this matter is merely to increase my knowledge, not to destroy my chance of increasing it."

"But surely-"

"We shall never get forward if we move in the midst of a fog of pity and sentiment."

Malling said no more; but as he watched the professor shambling to the garden gate, he felt as if he had betrayed Marcus Harding.