The Terror: A Mystery Page 8

  CHAPTER VIII

  _What Mr. Merritt Found_

  Mr. Merritt began to pick up his health and spirits a good deal. For thefirst morning or two of his stay at the doctor's he contented himselfwith a very comfortable deck chair close to the house, where he satunder the shade of an old mulberry tree beside his wife and watched thebright sunshine on the green lawns, on the creamy crests of the waves,on the headlands of that glorious coast, purple even from afar with theimperial glow of the heather, on the white farmhouses gleaming in thesunlight, high over the sea, far from any turmoil, from any troubling ofmen.

  The sun was hot, but the wind breathed all the while gently,incessantly, from the east, and Merritt, who had come to this quietplace, not only from dismay, but from the stifling and oily airs of thesmoky Midland town, said that that east wind, pure and clear and likewell water from the rock, was new life to him. He ate a capital dinner,at the end of his first day at Porth and took rosy views. As to whatthey had been talking about the night before, he said to Lewis, no doubtthere must be trouble of some sort, and perhaps bad trouble; still,Kitchener would soon put it all right.

  So things went on very well. Merritt began to stroll about the garden,which was full of the comfortable spaces, groves, and surprises thatonly country gardens know. To the right of one of the terraces he foundan arbor or summer-house covered with white roses, and he was as pleasedas if he had discovered the Pole. He spent a whole day there, smokingand lounging and reading a rubbishy sensational story, and declared thatthe Devonshire roses had taken many years off his age. Then on theother side of the garden there was a filbert grove that he had neverexplored on any of his former visits; and again there was a find. Deepin the shadow of the filberts was a bubbling well, issuing from rocks,and all manner of green, dewy ferns growing about it and above it, andan angelica springing beside it. Merritt knelt on his knees, andhollowed his hand and drank the well water. He said (over his port) thatnight that if all water were like the water of the filbert well theworld would turn to teetotalism. It takes a townsman to relish themanifold and exquisite joys of the country.

  It was not till he began to venture abroad that Merritt found thatsomething was lacking of the old rich peace that used to dwell inMeirion. He had a favorite walk which he never neglected, year afteryear. This walk led along the cliffs towards Meiros, and then one couldturn inland and return to Porth by deep winding lanes that went overthe Allt. So Merritt set out early one morning and got as far as asentry-box at the foot of the path that led up to the cliff. There was asentry pacing up and down in front of the box, and he called on Merrittto produce his pass, or to turn back to the main road. Merritt was agood deal put out, and asked the doctor about this strict guard. And thedoctor was surprised.

  "I didn't know they had put their bar up there," he said. "I supposeit's wise. We are certainly in the far West here; still, the Germansmight slip round and raid us and do a lot of damage just because Meirionis the last place we should expect them to go for."

  "But there are no fortifications, surely, on the cliff?"

  "Oh, no; I never heard of anything of the kind there."

  "Well, what's the point of forbidding the public to go on the cliff,then? I can quite understand putting a sentry on the top to keep alook-out for the enemy. What I don't understand is a sentry at thebottom who can't keep a look-out for anything, as he can't see the sea.And why warn the public off the cliffs? I couldn't facilitate a Germanlanding by standing on Pengareg, even if I wanted to."

  "It is curious," the doctor agreed. "Some military reasons, I suppose."

  He let the matter drop, perhaps because the matter did not affect him.People who live in the country all the year round, country doctorscertainly, are little given to desultory walking in search of thepicturesque.

  Lewis had no suspicion that sentries whose object was equally obscurewere being dotted all over the country. There was a sentry, for example,by the quarry at Llanfihangel, where the dead woman and the dead sheephad been found some weeks before. The path by the quarry was used a gooddeal, and its closing would have inconvenienced the people of theneighborhood very considerably. But the sentry had his box by the sideof the track and had his orders to keep everybody strictly to the path,as if the quarry were a secret fort.

  It was not known till a month or two ago that one of these sentries washimself a victim of the terror. The men on duty at this place were givencertain very strict orders, which from the nature of the case, must haveseemed to them unreasonable. For old soldiers, orders are orders; buthere was a young bank clerk, scarcely in training for a couple ofmonths, who had not begun to appreciate the necessity of hard, literalobedience to an order which seemed to him meaningless. He found himselfon a remote and lonely hillside, he had not the faintest notion that hisevery movement was watched; and he disobeyed a certain instruction thathad been given him. The post was found deserted by the relief; thesentry's dead body was found at the bottom of the quarry.

  This by the way; but Mr. Merritt discovered again and again that thingshappened to hamper his walks and his wanderings. Two or three miles fromPorth there is a great marsh made by the Afon river before it falls intothe sea, and here Merritt had been accustomed to botanize mildly. He hadlearned pretty accurately the causeways of solid ground that leadthrough the sea of swamp and ooze and soft yielding soil, and he set outone hot afternoon determined to make a thorough exploration of themarsh, and this time to find that rare Bog Bean, that he felt sure, mustgrow somewhere in its wide extent.

  He got into the by-road that skirts the marsh, and to the gate which hehad always used for entrance.

  There was the scene as he had known it always, the rich growth of reedsand flags and rushes, the mild black cattle grazing on the "islands" offirm turf, the scented procession of the meadowsweet, the royal gloryof the loosestrife, flaming pennons, crimson and golden, of the giantdock.

  But they were bringing out a dead man's body through the gate.

  A laboring man was holding open the gate on the marsh. Merritt,horrified, spoke to him and asked who it was, and how it had happened.

  "They do say he was a visitor at Porth. Somehow he has been drowned inthe marsh, whatever."

  "But it's perfectly safe. I've been all over it a dozen times."

  "Well, indeed, we did always think so. If you did slip by accident,like, and fall into the water, it was not so deep; it was easy enough toclimb out again. And this gentleman was quite young, to look at him,poor man; and he has come to Meirion for his pleasure and holiday andfound his death in it!"

  "Did he do it on purpose? Is it suicide?"

  "They say he had no reasons to do that."

  Here the sergeant of police in charge of the party interposed, accordingto orders, which he himself did not understand.

  "A terrible thing, sir, to be sure, and a sad pity; and I am sure thisis not the sort of sight you have come to see down in Meirion thisbeautiful summer. So don't you think, sir, that it would be morepleasant like, if you would leave us to this sad business of ours? Ihave heard many gentlemen staying in Porth say that there is nothing tobeat the view from the hill over there, not in the whole of Wales."

  Every one is polite in Meirion, but somehow Merritt understood that, inEnglish, this speech meant "move on."

  * * * * *

  Merritt moved back to Porth--he was not in the humor for any idle,pleasurable strolling after so dreadful a meeting with death. He madesome inquiries in the town about the dead man, but nothing seemed knownof him. It was said that he had been on his honeymoon, that he had beenstaying at the Porth Castle Hotel; but the people of the hotel declaredthat they had never heard of such a person. Merritt got the local paperat the end of the week; there was not a word in it of any fatal accidentin the marsh. He met the sergeant of police in the street. That officertouched his helmet with the utmost politeness and a "hope you areenjoying yourself, sir; indeed you do look a lot better already"; but asto the poor man who was found drowned o
r stifled in the marsh, he knewnothing.

  The next day Merritt made up his mind to go to the marsh to see whetherhe could find anything to account for so strange a death. What he foundwas a man with an armlet standing by the gate. The armlet had theletters "C.W." on it, which are understood to mean Coast Watcher. TheWatcher "said he had strict instructions to keep everybody away from themarsh. Why? He didn't know, but some said that the river was changingits course since the new railway embankment was built, and the marsh hadbecome dangerous to people who didn't know it thoroughly.

  "Indeed, sir," he added, "it is part of my orders not to set foot on theother side of that gate myself, not for one scrag-end of a minute."

  Merritt glanced over the gate incredulously. The marsh looked as it hadalways looked; there was plenty of sound, hard ground to walk on; hecould see the track that he used to follow as firm as ever. He did notbelieve in the story of the changing course of the river, and Lewis saidhe had never heard of anything of the kind. But Merritt had put thequestion in the middle of general conversation; he had not led up to itfrom any discussion of the death in the marsh, and so the doctor wastaken unawares. If he had known of the connection in Merritt's mindbetween the alleged changing of the Afon's course and the tragicalevent in the marsh, no doubt he would have confirmed the officialexplanation. He was, above all things, anxious to prevent his sister andher husband from finding out that the invisible hand of terror thatruled at Midlingham was ruling also in Meirion.

  Lewis himself had little doubt that the man who was found dead in themarsh had been struck down by the secret agency, whatever it was, thathad already accomplished so much of evil; but it was a chief part of theterror that no one knew for certain that this or that particular eventwas to be ascribed to it. People do occasionally fall over cliffsthrough their own carelessness, and as the case of Garcia, the Spanishsailor, showed, cottagers and their wives and children are now and thenthe victims of savage and purposeless violence. Lewis had never wanderedabout the marsh himself; but Remnant had pottered round it and about it,and declared that the man who met his death there--his name was neverknown, in Porth at all events--must either have committed suicide bydeliberately lying prone in the ooze and stifling himself, or else musthave been held down in it. There were no details available, so it wasclear that the authorities had classified this death with the others;still, the man might have committed suicide, or he might have had asudden seizure and fallen in the slimy water face-downwards. And so on:it was possible to believe that case A _or_ B _or_ C was in the categoryof ordinary accidents or ordinary crimes. But it was not possible tobelieve that A _and_ B _and_ C were all in that category. And thus itwas to the end, and thus it is now. We know that the terror reigned, andhow it reigned, but there were many dreadful events ascribed to its ruleabout which there must always be room for doubt.

  For example, there was the case of the _Mary Ann_, the rowing-boat whichcame to grief in so strange a manner, almost under Merritt's eyes. Inmy opinion he was quite wrong in associating the sorry fate of the boatand her occupants with a system of signaling by flashlights which hedetected or thought that he detected, on the afternoon in which the_Mary Ann_ was capsized. I believe his signaling theory to be allnonsense, in spite of the naturalized German governess who was lodgingwith her employers in the suspected house. But, on the other hand, thereis no doubt in my own mind that the boat was overturned and those in itdrowned by the work of the terror.