thick legs, took no notice of them whatever. He was not black but a grayish yellow—a half-breed of the negroid type. And he spoke English perfectly.
Well, that will give you some idea of how Jacob Arum stood in the estimation of the ignorant and uneducated portion of Harthaven's five hundred inhabitants. The rector, of course, looked at Jacob Arum from an entirely different point of view. He had never been admitted into the house, and Arum, by repute a wealthy man, had not only never entered the church, but had definitely refused to subscribe sixpence to any parochial fund.
"The man is a heathen," the rector said to me, "and that's all I care about. It is very sad."
The doctor, a rather cynical young fellow, was inclined to regard Arum as a joke.
"He'll never send for a clergyman," he once said, when we were discussing Arum; "but one of these days he'll have to send for me."
Then there was an old professor who was writing a gigantic work—at least, one presumed it was gigantic, because it was known that he had already spent twenty years of his life over it—on the witchcraft of all countries and ages. He was a funny little old fellow, quite bald, and with a set of false teeth that reminded one of the chorus girls in dentifrice advertisements.
"My dear boy," he said to me in his squeaky voice," Arum's under a spell, and that black servant has some hand in it."
I can pass over the opinion of three maiden ladies who lived at Laburnum Villa, and "never, never passed by the gates of that awful house," lest they should see something that ought not to be seen. They looked upon Jacob Arum as "improper," and they "feared the worst." There was much shaking of gray heads, and murmuring of half-finished sentences, but nothing definite.
"He's spoilt the village," Miss Mary said. "We were so happy before he came, like a little colony of friends."
To tell you the honest truth; I rather envied Jacob Arum his notoriety. I had lived in the village most of my life, and my forefathers had lived there for three hundred years. A good deal of the land, and most of the cottages belonged to me. I had fought in the war, and had been wounded. My life had merely been that of any simple country gentleman. But I am sure I had never caused any excitement in Harthaven. No one talked about me. I was just taken as a matter of course. There had been a Hart of Harthaven for so many years, that I was of no more interest than the house in which I lived, of the creek that ran through the level marshland to the sea.
I had not even the satisfaction of being Arum's landlord. He had bought the house and the three acres of ground that surrounded it from the executors of an old woman who had died after being seventy-five years in the village.
I knew the house well enough, for the old woman had been a friend of my grandmother's. I had even bid for it at the auction, but, unwilling to give a fancy price, I had allowed it to be knocked down to the queer, hump-backed little fellow who had given his name as Brike. Even at that early stage in the proceedings, Jacob Arum had kept himself in the background. And the auctioneer afterward told me that the whole of the purchase money had been paid in gold and silver.
No one ever saw Arum move into his house. Brike arranged everything, and we saw a good deal of Brike while the place was being decorated; and, later on, when van-loads of valuable furniture stood outside the newly-painted gate in the old brick wall. But no one in the village could name the day, much less the hour, of Jacob Arum's arrival.
And, once inside the house, he never left it. Brike explained that his master was an invalid, but Brike was not inclined to be talkative, and answered very few, of the questions that were put to him.
For my part, I pictured Arum as a man who wished to be talked about and regarded as a man of mystery. No one had even seen him, and everything that he purchased was paid for in cash. We had not even set eyes on his signature.
Well, Jacob Arum purchased the property in January, 1919, and it was not until the October of that year that I met the man for the first time.
I well remember that night. For three weeks the weather had been very wet and windy, and then there was a sharp frost, and the wind dropped, and the marshland was hidden in a white mist that crept in upon us from the sea.
Professor Turton and young Saltby were dining with me, and we were discussing Jacob Arum over our glasses of port, when my footman entered the room, and said that "Mr. Brike" wished to see me.
"Hallo!" said Saltby. "What about that for telepathy?" And the professor laughed so heartily that he nearly choked himself with a small piece of walnut.
"Where is the fellow?" I asked the servant, when we had restored the professor to normal state.
"He's round at the back, sir," the man replied. "Where would you like to see him?"
"In the library," I replied; and then, turning to the others, I asked them to excuse me, and left the room.
The library, was a long, narrow room at the back of the house. The walls were covered with books, rarely touched except by the servant whose duty it was to dust them; for I am no greater reader, such as my father was.
There was a big fire of logs burning in the open grate, but the heat of it was not sufficient to dispel the fog that had crept in through the shuttered windows. I took up my position with my back to the fire and waited for my strange visitor. I could not imagine any reason that could possibly account for this unexpected visit.
I had often seen Brike in the village, but I must confess that when he was shown into the library, and the door closed behind him, and he stood there with his hat in his hand and a thick black overcoat that almost touched the ground, I received a new impression of the man. That end of the room was badly lighted, and the atmosphere was far from clear; so, of course, a good deal of Brike's appearance was left to the imagination.
Still, I fancy that that could hardly account for the fact that he seemed to me to be someone of much greater importance than the hunchbacked servant of a rather eccentric master. His dark face and body blended with the shadows, and the way in which he stood there, without speaking or coming forward directly the door had closed behind him, may have contributed to my impression of a very strong and distinctive personality. It was almost as though he had expected me to cross the room to greet him.
Of course, as you may well imagine, I did not move an inch; and, after a few minutes of silence, I said sharply: "Well, what is it? What do you want?"
He came forward, then, into the light, and he was no more than the quiet and deferential servant, bearing some message from his master. His face was ugly and deeply lined.
"Mr. Arum—sir," he said, in a rather soft, pleasant voice, "he asked me to come and see you. Mr. Arum would be honored and obliged if you could spare him a few minutes."
"Where is he? Not outside, surely?"
"No, sir; he is at home and not very well. I think he wants to talk to you on some matters of importance."
