When they touched firm ground again they were surrounded by their friends, most of whom seemed to doubt whether the search of the cave had been properly carried out.
“I tell you,” declaimed the exasperated Michael, “I got right into the damned hole! It’s so small that I nearly broke my nose against the back wall as I heaved myself inside. It would have been a tight fit for me and a squirrel together. He’s not there, whether you like it or not. . . . I can’t help your troubles, Tommy; you can go and look for yourself, if you like the job of lying on your tummy on a raft that’s awash. I shan’t interfere with your simple pleasures.”
“But . . .”
“We’ve lost him. Is that plain enough? There’s nothing to be done but go home again with our tails between our legs. I’m going now.”
He accompanied his friends to the top of the cliff again; but when he reached the terrace a fresh thought struck him, and he loitered behind while the others, soaked and disconsolate, made their way down into the pine-wood. When the last of them had disappeared, Michael retraced his steps to the edge of the cliff.
“He reached here all right,” he assured himself. “And he didn’t break back through the cordon.”
He stooped down, picked up the rope, and refastened it round one of the pillars of the balustrade.
“Everyone knows there are secret passages about Ravensthorpe,” he mused. “Perhaps this beggar has got on to one of them. And quite possibly the end of the passage is in that cave down there. That would explain the rope. I’ll slide down and have another look round.”
He got into the cave-mouth without difficulty and used up the remainder of his matches in a close examination of the interior of the cavity; but even the closest scrutiny failed to reveal anything to his eyes.
“Nothing there but plain rock, so far as I can see,” he had to admit to himself as the last match burned out. “That’s a blank end in more senses than one.”
Without much difficulty he swarmed up the rope again, untied it from the balustrade, and coiled it over his arm.
“A nice little clue for Sir Clinton Driffield to puzzle over,” he assured himself. “Sherlock Holmes would have been on to it at once; found where it was sold in no time; discovered who bought it before five minutes had passed; and paralysed Watson with the whole story that same evening over a pipeful of shag. We shall see.”
He threw a last glance round the empty terrace and then moved off into the spinney. As he passed into the shadow of the trees he saw, a few yards to one side, the outline of the Fairy House dappled in the moonshine which filtered through the leaves overhead. Half-unconsciously, Michael halted and looked at the little building.
“They could never have overlooked that in the hunt, surely. Well, no harm in having a peep to make certain.”
He dropped his coil of rope, stepped across to the house, and, stooping down, flung open the door. Inside, he caught a flash of some white fabric.
“It’s the beggar after all! Here! Come out of that!”
He gripped the inmate roughly and hauled him by main force out of his retreat.
“Pierrot costume, right enough!” he said to himself as he extracted the man little by little from his refuge. Then, having got his victim into the open:
“Now we’ll turn you over and have a look at your face . . . Good God! Maurice!”
For as he turned the man on his back, it was the face of Maurice Chacewater that met his eyes. But it was not a normal Maurice whom he saw. The features were contorted by some excessive emotion the like of which Michael had never seen.
“Let me alone, damn you,” Maurice gasped, and turned over once more on his face, resting his brow on his arm as though to shut out the spectacle of Michael’s astonishment.
“Are you ill?” Michael inquired, solicitously.
“For God’s sake leave me alone. Don’t stand there gaping. Clear out, I tell you.”
Michael looked at him in amazement.
“I’m going to have a cheerful kind of brother-in-law before all’s done, it seems,” he thought to himself.
“Can I do anything for you, Maurice?
“Oh, go to hell!”
Michael turned away.
“It’s fairly clear he doesn’t like my company,” he reflected, as he stepped across and picked up his coil of rope from the ground. “But I’ve known politer ways of showing it, I must say.”
With a final glance at the prostrate figure of Maurice, he walked on and took the road back to Ravensthorpe. But as he went a vision of Maurice’s face kept passing before his mind’s eye.
“There’s something damned far wrong with that beggar, whether it’s an evil conscience or cramp in the tummy. It might be either of them, by the look of him. He didn’t seem to want any assistance from me. That looks more like the evil conscience theory.”
He dismissed this with a laugh; but gradually he grew troubled.
“There he was, in white—same as the burglar. He’s in a bit of a bate at being discovered, that’s clear enough. He didn’t half like it, to judge by his chat.”
A discomforting hypothesis began to frame itself in his mind despite his efforts to stifle it.
