The Sleuth of St. James's Square by Melville Davisson Post (black authors fiction txt) 📕

There was a snapping fire in the chimney. I was cold through and I was glad to stand close beside it on the stone hearth. My greatcoat had kept out the rain, but it had not kept out the chill of the West Highland night. I shivered before the fire, my hands held out to the flame.

It was a long, low room. There was an ancient guncase on one side, but the racks were empty except for a service pistol hanging by its trigger-guard from the hook. There were some shelves of books on the other side. But the conspicuous thing in the room was an image of Buddha in a glass box on the mantelpiece.

It was about four inches high, cast in silver and, I thought, of immense age.

I had to wait for my uncle to come in. But I had enough to think about. Every event connected with this visit seemed to touch on some mystery. There was his strange letter to me in reply to my note that I was in England and coming up to Scotland. Surely no man ever wrote a queerer letter to a nephew coming on a visit to him.

It dwelt on the length of the journey and the remoteness of the place. I was to be discouraged in every sentence. I was to carry his affectionate regards to the family in America and say that he was in health.

It stood out plainly that I was not wanted.

This was strange in itself, but it was not the strangest thing about this letter. The strangest thing was a word written in a shaky cramped hand on the back of the sheet: the letters huddled together: “Come!”

I would have believed my uncle justified in his note. It was a long journey. I had great difficulty to find anyone to take me out from the railway station. There were idle men enough, but they shook their heads when I named the house. Finally, for a double wage, I got an old gillie with a cart to bring me as far on the way as the highroad ran. But he would not turn into the unkept road that led over the moor to the house. I could neither bribe nor persuade him. There was no alternative but to set out through the mist with my bag on my shoulder.

Night was coming on. The moor was a vast wilderness of gorse. The house loomed at the foot of it and beyond the loch that made a sort of estuary for the open sea. Nor was this the only thing. I got the impression as I tramped along that I was not alone on the moor. I don't know out of what evidences the impression was built up. I felt that someone was in the gorse beyond the road.

The house was closed up like a sleeping eye when I got before it. It was a big, old, rambling stone house with a tangle of vines half torn away by the winds: I hammered on the door and finally an aged man-servant holding a candle high above his head let me in.

This was the manner of my coming to Saint Conan's Landing.

I had some supper of cold meat brought in by this aged servant. He was a shrunken derelict of a human figure. He was disturbed at my arrival and ill at ease. But I thought there was relief and welcome in his expression. The master would be in directly; he would light a fire in the drawing-room and prepare a bedchamber for me.

One would hardly find outside of England such faithful creatures clinging to the fortunes of descending men. He was at the end of life and in some fearful perplexity, but one felt there was something stanch and sound in him.

I had no doubt that there, under my eye, was the hand that had added the cramped word to my uncle's letter.

I stood now before the fire in the long, low room. The flames and a tall candle at either end of the mantelpiece lit it up. I was looking at the Buddha in the glass box. I could not imagine a thing more out of note. Surely of all corners of the world this wild moor of the West Highlands was the least suited to an Oriental cult. The elements seemed under no control of Nature. The land was windswept, and the sea came crying into the loch.

I suppose it was the mood of my queer experiences that set me at this speculation.

One would expect to find some evidences of India in my uncle's house. He had been a long time in Asia, on the fringes of the English service. Toward the end he had been the Resident at the court of an obscure Rajah in one of the Northwest Provinces. It was on the edge of the Empire where it touches the little-known Mongolian states south of the Gobi.

The Home Office was only intermittently in touch with him. But something, never explained, finally drew its attention and he was put out of India. No one knew anything about it; “permitted to retire,” was the text of the brief official notice.

And he had retired to the most remote place he could find in the British islands. There was no other house on that corner of the coast. The man was as alone as he would have been in the Gobi.

If he had planned to be alone one would have believed he had succeeded in that intention. And yet from the moment I got down from the gillie's cart I seemed drawn under a persisting surveillance. I felt now that some one was looking at me. I turned quickly. There was a door at the end of the room opening onto a bit of garden facing the sea. A man stood, now, just inside this door, his hand on the latch. His head and shoulders were stooped as though he had