The Greek turned a face of sudden malignity on him. “Fool,” he said, “will you always run from your enemies?” He stood up as he spoke and began to move the few chairs noiselessly back against the wall.
In the shop, Mornington was plying Manasseh with conversation. “We felt so curious about the Graal,” he said, “and, to tell you the truth, so curious about what you’d done to Barbara Rackstraw, that we simply had to come and ask you about it. The Duke’s done nothing but rave about it ever since. Unrecognized genius, you know—Mrs. Eddy, Sir Herbert Barker. You took the Graal, so you must have done something. Manasseh is an honourable man.” He stopped suddenly and sniffed. “I’m sure you’ve got Gregory here,” he said. “It smells like a dung-heap. You don’t mind me going in?”
Manasseh apparently had jumped in his way. There was a slight scuffle, then Kenneth said pleasantly: “Hold him, Ridings. Bring him along too and let’s look round.”
The Greek stooped down, took hold of the carpet, wrenched it from the occasional nail that held it down, and flung it to one side of the room. The floor beneath was marked with what looked like chalk in two broad parallel lines running from about two-thirds of the depth of the room to the two posts of the communicating door. At the end of the room these two lines were joined by a complicated diagram, which Gregory seemed to recognize, for he caught his breath and said: “Will it hold him?”
The Greek threw a cushion on the floor between the diagram and the table on which the Graal stood, and sank down on it. “This is our protection,” he said. “Call to Manasseh that he does not enter, for this is the way of death. I have charged these barriers with power, and they shall wither whoever comes between them. Open the door, stand aside, and be still.”
Gregory went to the door and drew it open by reaching to the top till the handle came within reach; he seized it and pulled it back till the whole entrance lay open between the equal lines. The Greek peered forward into the little dark shop, and saw’ dimly Kenneth’s figure opposite him at the same time that Kenneth saw the Graal.
“My dear Ridings, he’s been admiring it,” Mornington said. “The workmanship, probably. It was Ephesus, I fancy, that the dear delightful Gregory told us it came from. There’s a gentleman here sitting on the floor who may be the carrier. Hobson, you know, and John what-you-may-call-him in that very disastrous Christmas thing of Dickens’s. Or perhaps they’ve been having their favourite food. The Graal, I remember, in a charming way always provided you with that. What is yours, doctor? Something Eastern, no doubt. Rice? What a horrible thing to waste the Graal on!”
He had come to the doorway as he spoke, and drew a revolver from his pocket. “The Duke’s really,” he went on. “One of those little domestic utensils you can pick up for almost nothing at a sale. Have you got him, Ridings? There seems to be a pavement-artist somewhere in this establishment; the most original little sketches adorn the floor.”
“Take care,” the Duke’s voice cried. “There is hell near us now.”
“I think it very likely,” Kenneth said, “but you can’t expect me to think much of hell if Gregory is one of its kings.” He took two or three swift steps into the room, flung a quick glance behind him lest he should be attacked from the wall he passed, and, even as he did so, staggered and put his hand to his heart. The Duke heard him gasp, and, still clutching Manasseh, pushed forward, to see what was happening. Kenneth had reeled to one of the white lines and was stumbling blindly, now forward, now backward, drawing deep choking breaths. The Greek had thrust his face out, and as the Duke saw it in the full light he gave a little gasp of dismay. For the face that he saw looked at him from a great distance and yet was itself that distance. It was white and staring and sick with a horrible sickness; he shut his eyes before this evil. All the gorgeous colours and pomps of sin of which he had been so often warned had disappeared; the war between good and evil existed no longer, for the thing beneath the Graal was not fighting but vomiting. Once he realized that his eyes were closed he forced himself to open them, saw Kenneth almost fall across the space between the lines, and called to him. Then he flung Manasseh from him to the floor, cried out on God and the Mother of God, and sprang forward; but as he reached the doorway he felt his strength oozing from him. Hollows opened within him; he clutched at the doorpost, and, as he touched it, seemed to feel this also drag him sideways and downward. He crashed to the floor while Kenneth, gathering all his life’s energy together, forced himself two steps nearer his aim, moaned as even that energy failed, dropped to his knees, and at last, choking and twisting, fell dead on the diagram before the Greek.
Manasseh had got to his feet, but he remained leaning against the door of the shop as Gregory against the wall of the inner room. The Duke, unable to move, lay prostrate across the threshold. So, as they watched, they saw the body of the dead man shiver and lift itself a little, as if moved by a strong wind. Gradually there appeared, rising from it, a kind of dark cloud, which floated upwards and outwards on all sides, and was at last so thick that the form itself could no longer be discerned. Manasseh watched with eyes of triumph. But Gregory was curiously shaken, for he, less instructed in the high ways of magic, recoiled, not from the destruction of his enemy, but from the elements which accompanied it. He shrank from the face of the sorcerer; like the Duke, he found himself in a state for which he had not been prepared and at which he trembled in horror. A sickness crept within him; was this the end of victory and lordship and the Sabbath, and this the consummation of the promises and of desire? The sudden action had precipitated him down a thousand spirals of the slow descent, and he hung above the everlasting void. He sought to keep his eyes fixed on the symbol of triumph, the dark cloud that streamed upward from floor to ceiling in front of him, but they were drawn back still to the face which dominated it and him.
Slowly, as they watched, the pillar of cloud began to sink, withdrawing into itself. The colour of it seemed to change also, from a dense black to a smoky and then to an ordinary grey. Quicker and quicker it fell, hovered for a few minutes, and at last collapsed entirely. There remained, in the place where the body had been, nothing but a spreading heap of dust.
The Duke, defeated in mind and body, and with too young a soul to dare the tempest, made yet some effort to assert the cause in which he believed. He raised himself on one hand as he lay and cried out in the great Latin he loved—loved rather perhaps as literature than as religion, but still as a strength more ancient and more enduring than himself. “Profiscere, anima Christiana,” he stammered, “de hoc mundo, in nomine Patris.…”
“Be silent, you!” Manasseh snarled, and, with one of those grotesque movements which attend on all crises, took from the counter a small bottle as the nearest missile and flung it. It smashed on the floor, and the Greek’s eyes moved toward it and came to rest on the Duke. He stood up with an effort, and motioned to Gregory to draw the carpet again over the magnetized passage of death. When this was done, the three gathered round the Duke, who half rose to his feet and was overthrown again by the touch of the Greek’s hand.
“Will you not destroy him also?” Manasseh asked, half greedily, half timidly.
The Greek slowly shook his head. “I am very weary,” he said, “and the strength is gone from the figure. If that other had not despised us, I do not know whether I should have won. And, since he is here, unless you will kill him yourself, you should use him for what you desire to do.”
“How can we use him?” Gregory asked, meditatively prodding the Duke with his foot, his momentary fear gone.
“Let him write and tell this priest whom you hate that he and the Graal are here—and that which was the other—and that he must come quickly to free them.”
“But will he write?” Gregory asked.
“Certainly he will write,” the Greek said, “or one of us will write with his hand.”
“Do you write then,” Manasseh said, “for you are the greatest among us.”
“I will do it if you wish,” the Gre
ek said. “Lift him partly up, and give me pencil and paper.”
As Gregory tore a page from his pocket-book, Manasseh dragged and pushed at the Duke till he sat at last leaning against the door. The Greek knelt down beside him, put one arm round his shoulders, and laid the right hand over his. To the Duke it seemed as if an enormous cloud of darkness had descended upon him, in the midst of which some unknown strength moved him at its will. In the conflict of his inner being with this tyranny the control of his body was lost; the battle was not in that outer region, but in a more central place. Ignorant and helpless, his hand wrote as the Greek’s controlling mind bade, though the handwriting was his own.
“Come, if you can by any means,” the letter ran, “for That and we are here. The bearer of this will tell you as much as he will, but believe him if he says that without you there is an end to all.—Ridings.”
The Greek released the Duke and rose. Gregory took the note, read it, and shook his head. “I do not think he will be deceived,” he said doubtfully.
“But what can he——” Manasseh began, but the Greek silenced him with a gesture and said, “He will do what he must do. There is more than we and he which moves about us now. I think he will come, for I think that the battle is joined, and till that which is with us or that which is with them is loosened it cannot end. Take care of your ways to-morrow.”
“And who is to be the bearer?” Gregory asked.
“That you shall be,” the Greek said.
“But how much shall I tell him?” Gregory asked again uncertainly.
The Greek turned upon him. “Fool,” he said, “I tell you you cannot choose. You will do and say what is meant for you, and so will he. And to-morrow there shall be an end.”
Chapter Sixteen
THE SEARCH FOR THE HOUSE
Tea, tobacco, meditation, and sleep brought the inspector no nearer a solution of his problem. On the assumption that J. M. Pattison was the murdered man, there had still appeared no reason why Gregory Persimmons should have murdered him. It was true that so far he knew nothing of their relations. If Pattison had been blackmailing Persimmons now—but then why the scribblings in the Bible? Some ancient vengeance, he rather desperately wondered, some unreasoning hate? But he could not get away from a feeling that, even so, it was the wrong way round. Small nonentities did sometimes murder squires, bankers, or peers, but it was not normal that a squire should murder a small nonentity. Besides, religious mania seemed to come into it somewhere. But whether Mr. Persimmons or the deceased was affected by it, or both of them, the inspector could not decide. And why the devil? Why, in God’s name, the devil? The inspector’s view of the devil was roughly that the devil was something in which children believed, but which was generally known not to exist, certainly not as taking any active part in the affairs of the world; these, generally speaking, were run by three parties—the police, criminals, and the ordinary public. The inspector tended to see these last two classes as one; all specialists tend so to consider humanity as divided into themselves and the mass to be affected. Doctors see it in the two sections of themselves and patients potential or actual; clerics in themselves and disciples; poets in themselves and readers (or non-readers; but that is the mere wickedness of mankind); explorers in themselves and stay-at-homes; and so on. The inspector, however, was driven by the definitions of law to admit that the public was not as a whole and altogether criminal, and he inevitably tended to consider it more likely that Mr. Pattison should be guilty than that Mr. Persimmons should be. Only someone had strangled Mr. Pattison, and Mr. Pattison’s own expectation seemed to point direct to Mr. Persimmons.
Colquhoun went over in his mind the incidents which had led him to this point—his failure to connect anyone directly with the crime, his irritation with Stephen Persimmons and Lionel Rackstraw, his anger with Sir Giles, his discovery of Gregory’s connection with Stephen and Sir Giles, his not very hopeful descent on Fardles. His conflict with Ludding had relieved, but not enlightened him. He came to the events of the morning and the way in which the young stranger had recognized him. Of course, more people knew Tom Fool … no doubt, but he had a feeling that he knew the face. He thought of it vaguely, as Mrs. Lucksparrow and Ludding had done, as a foreigner’s. The Duke had thought of it in connection with the high friendships of his Oxford days; Kenneth as related to his intelligence of the Church and its order; Sir Giles had seen it with equal curiosity and fear—but this was almost purely intellectual, and did not suggest the revival of some past vivid experience. Gregory and the Archdeacon had answered to it more passionately, as somehow symbolical of a mode of real existence; as Barbara had recognized in it at once the safety and peace which had succoured her in the house of the infernal things. Nor, had Gregory remembered it—but the crisis of Kenneth’s death had put it out of his mind—was it without significance that the Greek had seemed to feel a power moving under and through the activities of his opponents.
But these things were not known to Colquhoun, who, nevertheless, found himself trying to recollect who the stranger was. He had met foreigners enough in his life, and he was driven at last to believe that it must have been on a visit of the Infanta of Spain some time before that their meeting had taken place; he had interviewed enough members of the Spanish police then for more than one face to have been seen and since forgotten, till chance rediscovered it. Chance also had directed the conversation with Mr. Batesby to fear and his past experiences, and so to the appeal of the late James Montgomery Pattison. At least, chance and the stranger between them, for it had been he who had asked the occasional helming question. He tried to consider whether this stranger could have had anything to do with the murder, but found himself foiled; when his mind brought the assumed Spaniard into relation with any other being one of them faded and was gone. It was chance, of course; and chance had done him a good turn—up to a point, anyhow.
He took his troubles to the Assistant Commissioner the next morning, who listened to his report carefully, and seemed disposed to make further inquiries. “On Monday,” he said, “Colonel Conyers mentioned Gregory Persimmons to me as having taken part with him in a curious little chase after a chalice which had been more or less stolen by the Duke of the North Ridings and the Archdeacon of Fardles. This Persimmons assured us he wouldn’t prosecute, and that made it very difficult for us to move. But I went to tea with the Duchess on Tuesday and had a chat with the Duke.”
“And did he admit that he’d stolen it?” the astonished inspector asked.
“Well, he seemed to think it really belonged to the Archdeacon,” the Assistant Commissioner answered, “but he was rather stiff about it, told me he had reason to believe that the most serious attempts were being made to obtain possession of it, and even talked of magic.”
“Talked of what?” the inspector asked, more bewildered than before.
“Magic,” the chief said. “The Arabian Nights, inspector, and people being turned into puppy-dogs. All rubbish, of course, but he must have had something in his mind—and connected with Persimmons apparently. I had Professor Ribblestone-Ridley tell me what’s known about Ephesian chalices, but it didn’t help much. There seem to be four or five fairly celebrated chalices that come from round there, but they’re all in the possession of American millionaires, except one which was at Kieff. I did wonder whether it was that—a lot of these Russian valuables are drifting over here. But I still don’t see why the Duke should have bolted with it, or why Persimmons should have refused to get it back. Unless Persimmons had stolen it. Could the deceased Pattison have been mixed up in some unsavoury business of getting it over?”
“Bolsheviks, sir?” the inspector asked, with a grin.
“I know, I know,” the Assistant Commissioner said. “Still, ‘wolf,’ you know … there are Bolshevik affairs of the kind.”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Colquhoun allowed. “But, then, did Pattison mean the Bolsheviks by the devil?”
His chief shook his head. “Religion plays the deuc
e with a man’s sanity,” he said regretfully. “Your clergyman told you he thought he was saved, and in that state there’s nothing people won’t say or do.”
“It might be one of the American chalices,” the inspector submitted.
“It might,” the other said. “But we should have been warned of the theft from New York, probably. It might also be the Holy Graal, which Ribblestone-Ridley says, according to some traditions, came from Ephesus.”
“The Holy Graal,” the inspector said doubtfully. “Hadn’t that something to do with the Pope?”
“It’s supposed to be the cup Christ used at the Last Supper—so I suppose you might say so,” the Assistant Commissioner answered almost as doubtfully. “However, as that Cup, if it ever existed, isn’t likely to exist now, we needn’t really worry about that. No, Colquhoun, I lean to Kieff. I wonder whether the Duke would tell me anything.” He looked at the inspector. “Would you like to go and ask him?” he finished.
“Well, sir, I’d rather you did,” Colquhoun said. “I like to have some hold on people when what I’m asking them is as vague as all that—it seems to help things on.”
The Assistant Commissioner looked at the telephone. “I wonder,” he said. “We don’t know much, do we? A chalice and a Bible and a clergyman. What an infernally religious case this is getting! And an Archdeacon on the outskirts.
“Perhaps Persimmons has killed the Archdeacon by now,” he added hopefully as he took off the receiver.
The Duke, it appeared, when he got through to the butler, was not in London. He had been up for two nights, but had returned to the country on Wednesday—yesterday—morning. He had been accompanied (this when it was understood who was inquiring) by the Archdeacon of Fardles and a Mr. Mornington. They had both returned with the Duke. Should Mr. Thwaites be called to the telephone? Mr. Thwaites was—no, not his Grace’s secretary; no, nor his Grace’s valet; a sort of general utility man to his Grace, in the best sense, of course.