G.K.Chesterton The.Man.Who.Knew.Too.Much

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was a silence save for heavy breathing; and then,
after an instant of the tottering and staggering of eight
legs, the great carven column of rock was rolled
away, and the body lying in its shirt and trousers was
fully revealed. The spectacles of Doctor Prince
seemed almost to enlarge with a restrained radiance
like great eyes; for other things were revealed also.
One was that the unfortunate Hewitt had a deep gash
across the jugular, which the triumphant doctor
instantly identified as having been made with a sharp
steel edge like a razor. The other was that
immediately under the bank lay littered three shining
scraps of steel, each nearly a foot long, one pointed
and another fitted into a gorgeously jeweled hilt or
handle. It was evidently a sort of long Oriental knife,
long enough to be called a sword, but with a curious
wavy edge; and there was a touch or two of blood on
the point.
"I should have expected more blood, hardly on the
point," observed Doctor Prince, thoughtfully, "but this
is certainly the instrument. The slash was certainly
made with a weapon shaped like this, and probably
the slashing of the pocket as well. I suppose the
brute threw in the statue, by way of giving him a
public funeral."
March did not answer; he was mesmerized by the
strange stones that glittered on the strange sword hilt;
and their possible significance was broadening upon
him like a dreadful dawn. It was a curious Asiatic
weapon. He knew what name was connected in his
memory with curious Asiatic weapons. Lord James
spoke his secret thought for him, and yet it startled
him like an irrelevance.
"Where is the Prime Minister?" Herries had cried,
suddenly, and somehow like the bark of a dog at
some discovery.
Doctor Prince turned on him his goggles and his
grim face; and it was grimmer than ever.
"I cannot find him anywhere," he said. "I looked
for him at once, as soon as I found the papers were
gone. That servant of yours, Campbell, made a most
efficient search, but there are no traces."
There was a long silence, at the end of which
Herries uttered another cry, but upon an entirely new
note.
"Well, you needn't look for him any longer," he
said, "for here he comes, along with your friend
Fisher. They look as if they'd been for a little walking
tour."
The two figures approaching up the path were indeed those of
Fisher, splashed with the mire of travel and carrying a scratch
like that of a bramble across one side of his bald forehead, and
of the great and gray-haired statesman who looked like a baby and
was interested in Eastern swords and swordmanship. But beyond
this bodily recognition, March could make neither head nor tail
of their presence or demeanor, which seemed to give a final touch
of nonsense to the whole nightmare. The more closely he watched
them, as they stood listening to the revelations of the
detective, the more puzzled he was by their attitude--Fisher
seemed grieved by the death of his uncle, but hardly shocked at
it; the older man seemed almost openly thinking about something
else, and neither had anything to suggest about a further pursuit
of the fugitive spy and murderer, in spite of the prodigious
importance of the documents he had stolen. When the detective had
gone off to busy himself with that department of the business, to
telephone and write his report, when Herries had gone back,
probably to the brandy bottle, and the Prime Minister had blandly
sauntered away toward a comfortable armchair in another part of
the garden, Horne Fisher spoke directly to Harold March.
"My friend," he said, "I want you to come with me at once; there
is no one else I can trust so much as that. The journey will take
us most of the day, and the chief business cannot be done till
nightfall. So we can talk things over thoroughly on the way. But
I want you to be with me; for I rather think it is my hour."
March and Fisher both had motor bicycles; and the first half of
their day's journey consisted in coasting eastward amid the
unconversational noise of those uncomfortable engines. But when
they came out beyond Canterbury into the flats of eastern Kent,
Fisher stopped at a pleasant little public house beside a sleepy
stream; and they sat down to cat and to drink and to speak almost
for the first time. It was a brilliant afternoon, birds were
singing in the wood behind, and the sun shone full on their ale [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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