I suppose you know," he added, in a low voice to the lawyer, "whether he made a will?"
"He left everything to his daughter unconditionally," replied Ashe. "But nothing can be done with it. There's no proof whatever that he's dead." "No legal proof?" remarked Paynter dryly.
A wrinkle of irritation had appeared in the big bald brow of Doctor Brown; and he made an impatient movement.
"Of course he's dead," he said. "What's the sense of all this legal fuss? We were watching this side of the wood, weren't we?
A man couldn't have flown off those high cliffs over the sea; he could only have fallen off. What else can he be but dead?"
"I speak as a lawyer," returned Ashe, raising his eyebrows.
"We can't presume his death, or have an inquest or anything till we find the poor fellow's body, or some remains that may reasonably be presumed to be his body."
"I see," observed Paynter quietly. "You speak as a lawyer; but I don't think it's very hard to guess what you think as a man."
"I own I'd rather be a man than a lawyer," said the doctor, rather roughly. "I'd no notion the law was such an ass.
What's the good of keeping the poor girl out of her property, and the estate all going to pieces? Well, I must be off, or my patients will be going to pieces too."
And with a curt salutation he pursued his path down to the village.
"That man does his duty, if anybody does," remarked Paynter. "We must pardon his--shall I say manners or manner?"
"Oh, I bear him no malice," replied Ashe good-humoredly, "But I'm glad he's gone, because--well, because I don't want him to know how jolly right he is." And he leaned back in his chair and stared up at the roof of green leaves.
"You are sure," said Paynter, looking at the table, "that Squire Vane is dead?"
"More than that," said Ashe, still staring at the leaves.
"I'm sure of how he died."
"Ah!" said the American, with an intake of breath, and they remained for a moment, one gazing at the tree and the other at the table.
"Sure is perhaps too strong a word," continued Ashe. "But my conviction will want some shaking. I don't envy the counsel for the defense."
"The counsel for the defense," repeated Paynter, and looked up quickly at his companion. He was struck again by the man's Napoleon'ic chin and jaw, as he had been when they first talked of the legend of St. Securis.
"Then," he began, "you don't think the trees--"
"The trees be damned!" snorted the lawyer. "The tree had two legs on that evening. What our friend the poet," he added, with a sneer, "would call a walking tree. Apropos of our friend the poet, you seemed surprised that night to find he was not walking poetically by the sea all the time, and I fear I affected to share your ignorance.
I was not so sure then as I am now."
"Sure of what?" demanded the other.
"To begin with," said Ashe, "I'm sure our friend the poet followed Vane into the wood that night, for I saw him coming out again."
Paynter leaned forward, suddenly pale with excitement, and struck the wooden table so that it rattled.
"Mr. Ashe, you're wrong," he cried. "You're a wonderful man and you're wrong. You've probably got tons of true convincing evidence, and you're wrong. I know this poet;I know him as a poet; and that's just what you don't. I know you think he gave you crooked answers, and seemed to be all smiles and black looks at once; but you don't understand the type.
I know now why you don't understand the Irish. Sometimes you think it's soft, and sometimes sly, and sometimes murderous, and sometimes uncivilized; and all the time it's only civilized; quivering with the sensitive irony of understanding all that you don't understand."
"Well," said Ashe shortly, "we'll see who's right."
"We will," cried Cyprian, and rose suddenly from the table.
All the drooping of the aesthete had dropped from him; his Yankee accent rose high, like a horn of defiance, and there was nothing about him but the New World.
"I guess I will look into this myself," he said, stretching his long limbs like an athlete. "I search that little wood of yours to-morrow.
It's a bit late, or I'd do it now."
"The wood has been searched," said the lawyer, rising also.
"Yes," drawled the American. "It's been searched by servants, policemen, local policeman, and quite a lot of people; and do you know I have a notion that nobody round here is likely to have searched it at all."
"And what are you going to do with it?" asked Ashe.
"What I bet they haven't done," replied Cyprian. "I'm going to climb a tree."
And with a quaint air of renewed cheerfulness he took himself away at a rapid walk to his inn.
He appeared at daybreak next morning outside the Vane Arms with all the air of one setting out on his travels in distant lands.
He had a field glass slung over his shoulder, and a very large sheath knife buckled by a belt round his waist, and carried with the cool bravado of the bowie knife of a cowboy.
But in spite of this backwoodsman's simplicity, or perhaps rather because of it, he eyed with rising relish the picturesque plan and sky line of the antiquated village, and especially the wooden square of the old inn sign that hung over his head; a shield, of which the charges seemed to him a mere medley of blue dolphins, gold crosses, and scarlet birds. The colors and cubic corners of that painted board pleased him like a play or a puppet show.
He stood staring and straddling for some moments on the cobbles of the little market place; then he gave a short laugh and began to mount the steep streets toward the high park and garden beyond.
From the high lawn, above the tree and table, he could see on one side the land stretch away past the house into a great rolling plain, which under the clear edges of the dawn seemed dotted with picturesque details. The woods here and there on the plain looked like green hedgehogs, as grotesque as the incongruous beasts found unaccountably walking in the blank spaces of mediaeval maps.
The land, cut up into colored fields, recalled the heraldry of the signboard; this also was at once ancient and gay.
