The Vanished MessengerOppenheim, E. Phillips (Edward Phillips)
General
The Vanished Messenger
Oppenheim, E. Phillips (Edward Phillips)
Detective and mystery stories; Fiction
“Naturally,” he admitted. “Let us stay and have lunch and try again.”
She shook her head with a little sigh of regret.
“You see, the car is waiting,” she pointed out. “We are expected home. I
shan’t be a minute putting my clubs away.”
They sped swiftly along the level road towards St. David’s Hall. Far
in the distance they saw it, built upon that strange hill, with the
sunlight flashing in its windows. He looked at it long and curiously.
“I think,” he said, “that yours is the most extraordinarily situated
house I have ever seen. Fancy a gigantic mound like that in the midst of
an absolutely flat marsh.”
She nodded.
“There is no other house quite like it in England,” she said. “I suppose
it is really a wonderful place. Have you looked at the pictures?”
“Not carefully,” he told her.
“You must before you leave,” she insisted. “Mr. Fentolin is a great
judge, and so was his father.”
Their road curved a little to the sea, and at its last bend they were
close to the pebbly ridge on which the Tower was built. He touched the
electric bell and stopped the car.
“Do let us walk along and have a look at my queer possession once more,”
he begged. “Luncheon, you told me, is not till half-past one, and it is
a quarter to now.”
She hesitated for a moment and then assented. They left the car and
walked along the little track, bordered with white posts, which led on
to the ridge. To their right was the village, separated from them only
by one level stretch of meadowland; in the background, the hall. They
turned along the raised dike just inside the pebbly beach, and she
showed her companion the narrow waterway up to the village. At its
entrance was a tall iron upright, with a ladder attached and a great
lamp at the top.
“That is to show them the way in at night, isn’t it?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Yes,” she told him. “Mr. Fentolin had it placed there. And yet,” she
went on, “curiously enough, since it was erected, there have been more
wrecks than ever.”
“It doesn’t seem a dangerous beach,” he remarked.
She pointed to a spot about fifty yards from the Tower. It was the
spot to which the woman whom he had met on the day of his arrival had
pointed.
“You can’t see them,” she said; “they are always out of sight, even
when the tide is at the lowest--but there are some hideous sunken rocks
there. ‘The Daggers,’ they call them. One or two fishing boats have been
lost on them, trying to make the village. When Mr. Fentolin put up the
lamp, every one thought that it would be quite safe to try and get in
at night. This winter, though, there have been three wrecks which no
one could understand. It must be something in the currents, or a sort of
optical illusion, because in the last shipwreck one man was saved,
and he swore that at the time they struck the rock, they were headed
straight for the light.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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