The Dweller on the Threshold Part 23

"_Please return if possible difficulties in the parish Benyon ill need your presence Chichester._"

Malling looked down at the rector.

"You see!" Mr. Harding said slowly.

"What do you mean to do?"

Mr. Harding got up from his chair with an effort like that of a weary man.

"I wonder where the railway-guide is?" he said. "Excuse me for a moment, Mr. Malling."

He went away into the drawing-room, and returned with the railway-guide open in his hand.

"Malling," he said, using the greater familiarity he had for a moment discarded, "I am about to do a rude thing, but I ask you, I beg of you, to acquit me of any rude intention toward yourself. I have been looking up the Sunday trains. I find I can catch a good one at Faversham to-morrow morning. There is a motor I can hire in the town to get there.

It stands just by the post-office, where the road branches." He paused, looking into Malling's face as if in search of some sign of vexation or irony. "With a large parish on my hands," he went on, "I have a great responsibility. And if Benyon, my second curate, is ill, they will be short-handed."

"I see."

"What distresses me greatly--greatly--is leaving you, my guest, at such short notice. I cannot say how I regret it."

He stopped. Purposely, to test him, Malling said nothing, but waited with an expressionless face.

"I cannot say. But how can I do otherwise? My duty to the parish must come before all things."

"I see," said Malling again.

Looking greatly disturbed, Mr. Harding continued:

"I will ask you to do me a very great favor. Although I am obliged to go, I hope you will stay, I entreat you to stay till Monday. The professor is here. You will not be companionless. The servants will do everything to make you comfortable. As to food, wine--everything is provided for. Will you stay? I shall feel more at ease in going if I know my departure has not shortened your visit."

"It is very good of you," Malling replied. "I'll accept your kind offer.

To tell the truth, I'm in no hurry to leave the Tankerton air."

"Thank you," said the rector, almost with fervor. "Thank you."

So, the next morning, Mr. Harding went away in the hired motor, and Malling found himself alone in the red doll's house.

He was not sorry. The rector's revelation on the previous night had well repaid him for his journey; then the air of Tankerton really rejoiced him; and he would have speech of the professor.

"I shall lay it before Stepton," he had said to Mr. Harding the previous night, after they had parted from the professor.

And he had spoken with authority. Mr. Harding's confidence, his self-abas.e.m.e.nt, and his almost despairing appeal, had surely given Malling certain rights. He intended to use them to the full. The rector's abrupt relapse into reserve, his pitiful return to subterfuge, after the receipt of that hypnotizing telegram, had not, in Malling's view, abrogated those rights.

When the motor disappeared, he strolled across the gra.s.s with a towel and had a dip in the brown sea, going in off the long shoal that the Whitstable and Tankerton folk call "the Street." Then he set out to find the professor.

His interview with Stepton on the previous night in the presence of Mr. Harding had been rather brief. Stepton had been preoccupied and monosyllabic. Agnes had been right as to his reason for honoring the coast of Kent with his company, but wrong as to the haunted house's location. It was not in Birchington, but lay inland, within easy reach of Tankerton. When he met Malling and Harding, the professor was going to his hotel, where a motor was waiting to convey him to the house, in which he intended to pa.s.s the night. His mind was fixed tenaciously upon the matter in hand. Malling had realized at once that it was not the moment to disturb him by the introduction of any other affair, however interesting. But his suggestion of a meeting the next morning was thus welcomed:

"Right! I shall be at home at churchtime--as you're not preaching."

The second half of the sentence was directed to Mr. Harding, who said nothing.

"And you might give me a cup of tea in the afternoon," the professor had added, looking at the rector rather narrowly before shambling off to his hotel to get the plaid shawl which he often wore at night.

"With the greatest pleasure. Minors is the name of the house," had been Mr. Harding's reply.

Whereupon the professor had vanished, muttering to himself:

"Minors! And why not Majors, if you come to that? Perhaps too suggestive of heart-breaking military men. Minors is safer in a respectable seaside place."

The professor had been up all night, but looked much as usual, and was eating a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs in the cheerful coffee-room when Malling arrived. He scarcely ever ate at orthodox hours, and had frequently been caught lunching at restaurants in London between four and five in the afternoon.

"Where's the rector? At church?" was his greeting.

"The rector has gone back to London," replied Malling, sitting down by the table.

"What about my cup of tea, then?" snapped Stepton.

"I will be your host. I'm here till to-morrow. Any interesting manifestations?"

"A rat or two and a hysterical kitchen-maid seem to be the responsible agents in the building up of the reputation of the house I kept awake in last night."

"I believe I have a more interesting problem for you."

The professor stretched out a sinewy hand.

"Cambridge marmalade! Most encouraging!" he muttered. "Have the reverend gentlemen of St. Joseph's been at it again--successfully?"

"I want you to judge."

And thereupon Malling laid the case faithfully before the professor, describing not only the dinner in Hornton Street and his interview with Lady Sophia, but also the two sermons he had heard at St. Joseph's, and the rector's lamentable outburst of the previous night. This last, having a remarkably retentive memory, he reproduced in the main in Mr. Harding's own words, omitting only the rector's reference to his moral lapses.

During the whole time he was speaking Stepton was closely engaged with the Cambridge marmalade, and showed no symptoms of attention to anything else. When he ceased, Stepton remarked:

"Really, clergymen are far more to be depended upon for valuable manifestations than a rat or two and a hysterical kitchen-maid. Come to my room, Malling."

The professor had a bedroom facing the sea. He led Malling to it, shut the door, gave Malling a cane chair, sat down himself, in a peculiar, crab-like posture, upon the bed, and said:

"Now give me as minute a psychological study of the former and actual Henry Chichester as you can."

Malling complied with this request as lucidly and tersely as he could, wasting no words.

"Any unusual change in his outward man since you knew him two years ago?"

asked the professor, when he had finished.

Malling mentioned the question as to the curate's eyes and mouth which had risen in his mind, and added:

"But the character of the man is so changed that it may have suggestioned me into feeling as if there were physical change in him, too."

"More than would be inevitable in any man in a couple of years. And now as to his digestive organs."