Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 23
Colin opened the door, and the two girls passed out. As he returned to his seat, Colin again hesitated over the problem of taking Northfleet into his confidence. This tale of the “false alarm” had made it clear to him that his surmises had not been far out. The harelipped stranger had really been prowling round Heather Lodge that night. Arthur Arrow’s precautions had not been quite so superfluous as Hazel imagined. Still, he wavered in his mind over Northfleet, for Northfleet was also a dark horse as far as Colin was concerned. Perhaps the best thing to do was to feel his ground a little more before coining to plain talk. He thought he saw his way to one step further, but that could be delayed until later in the evening. In the meanwhile there were one or two things he wanted to find out.
“You hadn’t heard about this secret passage before?” he inquired with apparent casualness, helping himself to a fresh cigarette.
Northfleet shook his head.
“No. This is the first time I’ve been inside Wester Voe. I don’t know Craigmore personally. Some friends of mine tackled him and got me permission to stay on Ruffa for a while. And when you don’t know a man it seems rather cheeky to pry into his house. The Dinnets would have shown me over, and probably told me about this passage, but I didn’t encourage the idea, you understand.”
Colin sympathised with this point of view. He hated people who took an ell when you gave them an inch. And he was rather relieved by what Northfleet had said. Evidently he would come to Wester Voe when he got a special invitation, but he wasn’t the sort who would take liberties and imagine that he had the run of the premises merely because he had been asked there once.
“That lot at Heather Lodge don’t seem to be very good mixers,” he said tentatively.
Northfleet did not rise to the bait.
“I’ve never spoken to any of them,” he explained, with apparent frankness. “Miss Arrow I came across casually on the island. One was bound to meet her going about, just as you did; But the rest I’ve only seen in the distance.”
Colin ruminated over the implications of this. “One point cleared up, anyhow,” he reflected. “Jean’s all off the mark. He didn’t come here on the girl’s account. So it’s my notion or nothing. Better go cautiously.”
“Interested in this secret passage?” he asked, in order to lead the talk into another channel. “I’ll let you see the opening of it, if you’d care to look at it.”
“Where does it come out at the other end?” Northfleet inquired. “I’m not sure I’d care about a thing of that sort. I don’t suffer from Arrow’s persecution-mania”—he smiled at the words—“but I’d rather not run the risk of some fellow creeping into my abode without permission.”
“Craigmore evidently felt the same,” Colin explained. “Bricked up t’other end of it. So the Dinnets say. Quite right, too.”
“Oh, then it goes a fair length?”
“No notion about that, myself. Never been into it. Come out into the hall and I’ll let you see the start of it.”
He led Northfleet out of the dining-room and showed him the panelling behind which the passage started.
“Nothing to show, is there?” he demanded, stepping aside to let Northfleet examine the woodwork. “Nobody’d suspect anything amiss there. Good bit of work. Now, look. You press down that bit, and then you shove this projection sideways, and whoop she goes!”
The door opened under his hand as he spoke, and Northfleet peered into the dark recess.
“H’m! Most ingenious. Let’s see it again, will you?”
Colin closed the door and repeated the opening process.
“Mind if I try it myself?” Northfleet asked, and taking consent for granted, he tested the mechanism once or twice. “The catch at the back is in plain sight, of course,” he commented, opening the door to verify this. “Well, I wonder where it ends up. I’d rather like to go down there sometime. That sort of mysterious glory-hole always had an attraction for me.”
“I’ll go down with you, some time, if you like,” Colin suggested. “Interesting to know where it leads to, before you come to the bricked up bit. It’s an old affair. Wester Voe’s built on the site of an extinct castle, the Dinnets say. and most likely this thing dates from the castle period.”
“It may go a good distance, then,” Northfleet surmised. “Labour was cheap in the old days.”
He snapped the door back into place as the two girls appeared coming up the steps from the garden.
They settled down to bridge in the drawing-room and the time passed swiftly.
Hazel was the first to realise how late it was growing.
“After we finish this rubber I must really go,” she intimated firmly at last.
“Afraid the Bogey Man’ll catch you?” Colin asked feebly.
“Not quite. But it’s getting late and I’ve a walk in the dark.”
“There ought to be a moon, if that’s the trouble.”
The rubber ended more speedily than they had anticipated, but Jean was loath to let Hazel go.
“Stay for just a little longer. It’s really not late yet. Colin, Miss Arrow and I have lots to talk about which you’re too young to hear.”
“Tact. Trent brand. New model,” Colin explained. “She thinks a whiskey and soda would brighten us up. If you’ll come into the lounge——”
He stood aside to allow Northfleet to leave the room. Jean quite unwittingly had played into his hands, and he meant to try an experiment. A glance at his watch had assured him that the time was ripe for it.
After pouring out whiskey and soda, Colin drew Northfleet’s attention to the wireless.
“Ever do anything with the short