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Page 58
"'"The butler is gone," said she.
"'"Gone! Gone where?"
"'"He is gone. No one has seen him. He is not in his
room. Oh, yes, he is gone, he is gone!" She fell
back against the wall with shriek after shriek of
laughter, while I, horrified at this sudden hysterical
attack, rushed to the bell to summon help. The girl
was taken to her room, still screaming and sobbing,
while I made inquiries about Brunton. There was no
doubt about it that he had disappeared. His bed had
not been slept in, he had been seen by no one since he
had retired to his room the night before, and yet it
was difficult to see how he could have left the house,
as both windows and doors were found to be fastened in
the morning. His clothes, his watch, and even his
money were in his room, but the black suit which he
usually wore was missing. His slippers, too, were
gone, but his boots were left behind. Where then
could butler Brunton have gone in the night, and what
could have become of him now?
"'Of course we searched the house from cellar to
garret, but there was no trace of him. It is, as I
have said, a labyrinth of an old house, especially the
original wing, which is now practically uninhabited;
but we ransacked every room and cellar without
discovering the least sign of the missing man. It was
incredible to me that he could have gone away leaving
all his property behind him, and yet where could he
be? I called in the local police, but without
success. Rain had fallen on the night before and we
examined the lawn and the paths all round the house,
but in vain. Matters were in this state, when a new
development quite drew our attention away from the
original mystery.
"'For two days Rachel Howells had been so ill,
sometimes delirious, sometimes hysterical, that a
nurse had been employed to sit up with her at night.
On the third night after Brunton's disappearance, the
nurse, finding her patient sleeping nicely, had
dropped into a nap in the arm-chair, when she woke in
the early morning to find the bed empty, the window
open, and no signs of the invalid. I was instantly
aroused, and, with the two footmen, started off at
once in search of the missing girl. It was not
difficult to tell the direction which she had taken,
for, starting from under her window, we could follow
her footmarks easily across the lawn to the edge of
the mere, where they vanished close to the gravel path
which leads out of the grounds. The lake there is
eight feet deep, and you can imagine our feelings when
we saw that the trail of the poor demented girl came
to an end at the edge of it.
"'Of course, we had the drags at once, and set to work
to recover the remains, but no trace of the body could
we find. On the other hand, we brought to the surface
an object of a most unexpected kind. It was a linen
bag which contained within it a mass of old rusted and
discolored metal and several dull-colored pieces of
pebble or glass. This strange find was all that we
could get from the mere, and, although we made every
possible search and inquiry yesterday, we know nothing
of the fate either of Rachel Howells or of Richard
Brunton. The county police are at their wits' end,
and I have come up to you as a last resource.'
"You can imagine, Watson, with what eagerness I
listened to this extraordinary sequence of events, and
endeavored to piece them together, and to devise some
common thread upon which they might all hang. The
butler was gone. The maid was gone. The maid had
loved the butler, but had afterwards had cause to hate
him. She was of Welsh blood, fiery and passionate.
She had been terribly excited immediately after his
disappearance. She had flung into the lake a bag
containing some curious contents. These were all
factors which had to be taken into consideration, and
yet none of them got quite to the heart of the matter.
What was the starting-point of this chain of events?
There lay the end of this tangled line.
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