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Page 117
XV. Satire of the Sea
"What was the mystery about St. Alban?" I asked.
The Baronet did not at once reply. He looked out over the
English country through the ancient oak-trees, above the sweep of
meadow across the dark, creeping river, to the white shaft rising
beyond the wooded hills into the sky.
The war was over. I was a guest of Sir Henry Marquis for a
week-end at his country-house. The man fascinated me. He seemed
a sort of bottomless Stygian vat of mysteries. He had been the
secret hand of England for many years in India. Then he was made
a Baronet and put at the head of England's Secret Service at
Scotland Yard.
A servant brought out the tea and we were alone on the grass
terrace before the great oak-trees. He remained for some moments
in reflection, then he replied:
"Do you mean the mystery of his death?"
"Was there any other mystery?" I said.
He looked at me narrowly across the table.
"There was hardly any mystery about his death," he said. "The
man shot himself with an old dueling pistol that hung above the
mantel in his library. The family, when they found him, put the
pistol back on the nail and fitted the affair with the stock
properties of a mysterious assassin.
"The explanation was at once accepted. The man's life, in the
public mind, called for an end like that. St. Alban after his
career, should by every canon of the tragic muse, go that way."
He made a careless gesture with his fingers.
"I saw the disturbed dust on the wall where the pistol had been
moved, the bits of split cap under the hammer, and the powder
marks on the muzzle.
"But I let the thing go. It seemed in keeping with the destiny
of the man. And it completed the sardonic picture. It was all
fated, as the Gaelic people say . . . . I saw no reason to
disturb it."
"Then there was some other mystery?" I ventured.
He nodded his big head slowly.
"There is an ancient belief," he said, "that the hunted thing
always turns on us. Well, if there was ever a man in this world
on whom the hunted thing awfully turned, it was St. Alban."
He put out his hand.
"Look at the shaft yonder," he said, "lifted to his memory,
towering over the whole of this English country, and cut on its
base with his services to England and the brave words he said on
that fatal morning on the Channel boat. Every schoolboy knows
the words:
"`Don't threaten, fire if you like!'
"First-class words for the English people to remember. No
bravado, just the thing any decent chap would say. But the words
are persistent. They remain in the memory. And it was a
thrilling scene they fitted into. One must never forge that: The
little hospital transport lying in the Channel in a choppy sea
that ran streaks of foam; the grim turret and the long whaleback
of a U-boat in the foam scruff; and the sun lying on the scrubbed
deck of the jumping transport.
"Everybody was crowded about. St. Alban was in the center of the
human pack, in a pace or two of clear deck, his injured arm in a
sling; his split sleeve open around it; his shoulders thrown
back; his head lifted; and before him, the Hun commander with his
big automatic pistol.
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