Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 21

over to silence the hound, perhaps, or else an entry which evaded the beast; a burglar’s visit to the house; an alarm; a flight into the heather. The penultimate picture showed him a hare-lipped man stumbling through the night with that grisly monster on his heels, flying blindly to avoid his pursuer; then a sharp dip on the hillside, a fall, a crash on the rock, and a wounded man crawling for safety towards the lights of Wester Voe, while the hound, perhaps bemused by the drug, failed to follow up the trail. The next picture needed only memory, for he himself had been an actor. But what had happened after he left the man? That seemed more mysterious than ever, in spite of Colin’s efforts to account for the vanishing of the stranger.

“Wonder if I shouldn’t try to talk it over with Northfleet?” he speculated. “Something damned queer going on here, that’s plain. J don’t like it. And Northfleet’s always another man on hand, if anything does turn up.”

Then the recollection of Northfleet’s ornithological camouflage crossed his mind and made him hesitate.

“He’s another dark horse in the business. Between the lot of them, I don’t know where I stand. Better go cautious, perhaps. See how things develop.”

CHAPTER VI

THE CHARACTER OF ARTUR ARROW

JEAN sipped her coffee contentedly, assured that her little dinner-party had proved a complete success. It was the first time she had played hostess; for in her own home there were elder sisters who had taken the upper end of the table when her mother was absent.

Beforehand, she had been just a little doubtful of Colin’s attitude, for quite obviously he had not wholly welcomed the incursion of strangers so soon after their arrival at Wester Voe. In the event, however, her forebodings had proved baseless. Her own vivacity, Hazel’s gift of naturalness and appreciation of Colin’s little jokes, Northfleet’s rather more cynical turn of humour: all had contributed to keep the conversation not only alive but nimble. The two guests seemed to have acquired almost immediately the status of old friends with whom there is no need to stand upon formality. Colin, completely reassured, had even taken the initiative in making plans for tennis.

“Please switch on the lights, Colin,” Jean requested.

“That’s one thing I envy you,” Hazel declared, as Colin rose to comply. “I never realised what a convenience electric light really is until I came up here and had to do without it. Lamps give one a nice soft light in the evenings, but they have their drawbacks. They make a room so frightfully hot in weather like this.”

An association of ideas carried Colin to a fresh subject.

“Must be a bit of a job getting your coal up to Heather Lodge,” he surmised. “Not like toting it straight up from the pier to this place.”

“There’s a simple way round that difficulty,” Hazel pointed out. “Do without coal. We don’t use any.”

“Then how do you manage about cooking?” Jean demanded, rather aghast at the idea of tinned meats in perpetuity.

“Oh, there’s no bother about that,” Hazel assured her. “You see, my uncle nut in a benzene-gas plant. Is that what they call it?” she interjected, turning to Northfleet. “He needed it for his work—to run Bunsen burners and a furnace in the laboratory; and it feeds a stove in the kitchen as well. I’m not accustomed to it myself; but Beeston—that’s my uncle’s assistant—gets splendid results from it. Beeston ought to have been a chef, really. He simply loves cooking, so I’ve let him take over that side of things entirely. I can cook if I’m put to it, but I can’t take the sort of fatherly interest in a roast that Beeston does. So the arrangement suits both of us; and we get far better meals that way, I’m sure.”

“Take up a lot of his time, one’d think,” Colin suggested. “Doesn’t Mr. Arrow object?”

“Oh, no. Beeston seems to have plenty of time on his hands. He and my uncle work in spurts. They’re very busy for a while, and then they seem to have very little to do for a bit. I expect they’ve got to wait at some stages in the process, whatever it is.”

“Aren’t yon nervous, living in a house with all this risky work going on?” Jean inquired.

Hazel lifted her arched eyebrows slightly.

“Risky? I don’t know about it being risky. My uncle never said anything of the sort to me.”

“The man at your gate told us,” Jean explained. “He warned us off the premises. He certainly said that Mr. Arrow was in the middle of a dangerous bit of work and that we oughtn’t to linger about the place.”

Hazel laughed, but to Colin’s ear there seemed to be just a trace of embarrassment mingled with her amusement.

“Oh, you came across the Bogey Man?” she asked. “I ought to have warned you about him yesterday, but I forgot you’d be passing Heather Lodge. I’m awfully sorry. You must have got a bit of a shock, coming on him suddenly, with all his war-paint on. Which of them was it?”

“It was a small, red-haired man,” Jean particularised.

“That’s Natorp. Zelensky’s the other one—a big, heavily-built man with a moustache.”

“Saw him too, out with your wolf-hound,” Colin volunteered.

“Oh, you saw the wolf-hound too?”

Hazel seemed to ponder for a moment or two. Then, taking some definite decision, she went on, though in a rather hesitating tone :

“I hate to pull the family skeleton out of its cupboard and rattle its bones at you like this; but my uncle, Mr. Arthur Arrow, has brought it on himself, with all this absurd business, and I expect Natorp must have looked a queer creature to find in a place like this.”

Colin, intently interested, caught a peculiarity in her tone when she mentioned her uncle’s name. There was almost a touch of amused contempt in the way she drawled out the syllables, as though she had made some obscure joke which did not altogether