It is, if I may say so, honeymoonshine. I will never deny the saying that it makes the world go round, if it makes people's heads go round too. But there are other sentiments, madam, and other duties.
I need not tell you your father was a good man, and that what has befallen him would be pitiable, even as the fate of the wicked.
This is a horrible thing, and it is chiefly among horrors that we must keep our common sense. There are reasons for everything, and when my old friend lies butchered do not come to me with even the most beautiful fairy tales about a saint and his enchanted grove."
"Well, and you!" she cried, and rose radiantly and swiftly.
"With what kind of fairy tales do you come to me?
In what enchanted groves are YOU walking? You come and tell me that Mr. Paynter found a well where the water danced and then disappeared; but of course miracles are all moonshine!
You tell me you yourself fished bones from under the same water, and every bone was as dry as a biscuit; but for Heaven's sake let us say nothing that makes anybody's head go round!
Really, Mr. Ashe, you must try to preserve your common sense!"
She was smiling, but with blazing eyes; and Ashe got to his feet with an involuntary laugh of surrender.
"Well, we must-be going," he said. "May I say that a tribute is really due to your new transcendental training?
If I may say so, I always knew you had brains; and you've been learning to use them."
The two ******* detectives went back to the wood for the moment, that Ashe might consider the removal of the unhappy Squire's remains.
As he pointed out, it was now legally possible to have an inquest, and, even at that early stage of investigations, he was in favor of having it at once.
"I shall be the coroner," he said, "and I think it will be a case of 'some person or persons unknown.' Don't be surprised; it is often done to give the guilty a false security.
This is not the first time the police have found it convenient to have the inquest first and the inquiry afterward."
But Paynter had paid little attention to the point; for his great gift of enthusiasm, long wasted on arts and affectations, was lifted to inspiration by the romance of real life into which he had just walked.
He was really a great critic; he had a genius for admiration, and his admiration varied fittingly with everything he admired.
"A splendid girl and a splendid story," he cried. "I feel as if I were in love again myself, not so much with her as with Eve or Helen of Troy, or some such tower of beauty in the morning of the world.
Don't you love all heroic things, that gravity and great candor, and the way she took one step from a sort of throne to stand in a wilderness with a vagabond? Oh, believe me, it is she who is the poet; she has the higher reason, and honor and valor are at rest in her soul."
"In short, she is uncommonly pretty," replied Ashe, with some cynicism.
"I knew a murderess rather well who was very much like her, and had just that colored hair."
"You talk as if a murderer could be caught red-haired instead of red-handed," retorted Paynter. "Why, at this very minute, you could be caught red-haired yourself. Are you a murderer, by any chance?"
Ashe looked up quickly, and then smiled.
"I'm afraid I'm a connoisseur in murderers, as you are in poets," he answered, "and I assure you they are of all colors in hair as well as temperament. I suppose it's inhumane, but mine is a monstrously interesting trade, even in a little place like this.
As for that girl, of course I've known her all her life, and--But-- but that is just the question. Have I known her all her life?
Have I known her at all? Was she even there to be known?
You admire her for telling the truth; and so she did, by God, when she said that some people wake up late, who have never lived before.
Do we know what they might do--we, who have only seen them asleep?"
"Great heavens!" cried Paynter. "You don't dare suggest that she--"
"No, I don't," said the lawyer, with composure, "but there are other reasons. . . . I don't suggest anything fully, till we've had our interview with this poet of yours.
I think I know where to find him."
They found him, in fact, before they expected him, sitting on the bench outside the Vane Arms, drinking a mug of cider and waiting for the return of his American friend; so it was not difficult to open conversation with him.
Nor did he in any way avoid the subject of the tragedy; and the lawyer, seating himself also on the long bench that fronted the little market place, was soon putting the last developments as lucidly as he had put them to Barbara.
"Well," said Treherne at last, leaning back and frowning at the signboard, with the colored birds and dolphins, just about his head;"suppose somebody did kill the Squire. He'd killed a good many people with his hygiene and his enlightened landlordism."
Paynter was considerably uneasy at this alarming opening; but the poet went on quite coolly, with his hands in his pockets and his feet thrust out into the street.
"When a man has the power of a Sultan in Turkey, and uses it with the ideas of a spinster in Tooting, I often wonder that nobody puts a knife in him. I wish there were more sympathy for murderers, somehow.
I'm very sorry the poor old fellow's gone myself; but you gentlemen always seem to forget there are any other people in the world.
He's all right; he was a good fellow, and his soul, I fancy, has gone to the happiest paradise of all."
The anxious American could read nothing of the effect of this in the dark Napoleonic face of the lawyer, who merely said:
"What do you mean?"
"The fool's paradise," said Treherne, and drained his pot of cider.
The lawyer rose. He did not look at Treherne, or speak to him; but looked and spoke straight across him to the American, who found the utterance not a little unexpected.
