In the cliff just behind him was one of the clefts or cracks into which it was everywhere cloven. Advancing from this into the sunshine, as if from a narrow door, was Squire Vane, with a broad smile on his face.
The wind was tearing from the top of the high cliff out to sea, passing over their heads, and they had the sensation that everything was passing over their heads and out of their control.
Paynter felt as if his head had been blown off like a hat.
But none of this gale of unreason seemed to stir a hair on the white head of the Squire, whose bearing, though self-important and bordering on a swagger, seemed if anything more comfortable than in the old days.
His red face was, however, burnt like a sailor's, and his light clothes had a foreign look.
"Well, gentlemen," he said genially, "so this is the end of the legend of the peacock trees. Sorry to spoil that delightful traveler's tale, Mr. Paynter, but the joke couldn't be kept up forever. Sorry to put a stop to your best poem, Mr. Treherne, but I thought all this poetry had been going a little too far.
So Doctor Brown and I fixed up a little surprise for you.
And I must say, without vanity, that you look a little surprised."
"What on earth," asked Ashe at last, "is the meaning of all this?"
The Squire laughed pleasantly, and even a little apologetically, "I'm afraid I'm fond of practical jokes," he said, "and this I suppose is my last grand practical joke. But I want you to understand that the joke is really practical. I flatter myself it will be of very practical use to the cause of progress and common sense, and the killing of such superstitions everywhere.
The best part of it, I admit, was the doctor's idea and not mine.
All I meant to do was to pass a night in the trees, and then turn up as fresh as paint to tell you what fools you were.
But Doctor Brown here followed me into the wood, and we had a little talk which rather changed my plans. He told me that a disappearance for a few hours like that would never knock the nonsense on the head; most people would never even hear of it, and those who did would say that one night proved nothing.
He showed me a much better way, which had been tried in several cases where bogus miracles had been shown up.
The thing to do was to get the thing really believed everywhere as a miracle, and then shown up everywhere as a sham miracle.
I can't put all the arguments as well as he did, but that was the notion, I think."
The doctor nodded, gazing silently at the sand; and the Squire resumed with undiminished relish.
"We agreed that I should drop through the hole into the cave, and make my way through the tunnels, where I often used to play as a boy, to the railway station a few miles from here, and there take a train for London. It was necessary for the joke, of course, that I should disappear without being traced; so I made my way to a port, and put in a very pleasant month or two round my old haunts in Cyprus and the Mediterranean. There's no more to say of that part of the business, except that I arranged to be back by a particular time; and here I am.
But I've heard enough of what's gone on round here to be satisfied that I've done the trick. Everybody in Cornwall and most people in South England have heard of the Vanishing Squire; and thousands of noodles have been nodding their heads over crystals and tarot cards at this marvelous proof of an unseen world.
I reckon the Reappearing Squire will scatter their cards and smash their crystals, so that such rubbish won't appear again in the twentieth century. I'll make the peacock trees the laughing stock of all Europe and America."
"Well," said the lawyer, who was the first to rearrange his wits, "I'm sure we're all only too delighted to see you again, Squire; and I quite understand your explanation and your own very natural motives in the matter. But I'm afraid I haven't got the hang of everything yet. Granted that you wanted to vanish, was it necessary to put bogus bones in the cave, so as nearly to put a halter round the neck of Doctor Brown? And who put it there?
The statement would appear perfectly maniacal; but so far as I can make head or tail out of anything, Doctor Brown seems to have put it there himself."
The doctor lifted his head for the first time.
"Yes; I put the bones there," he said. "I believe I am the first son of Adam who ever manufactured all the evidence of a murder charge against himself."
It was the Squire's turn to look astonished. The old gentleman looked rather wildly from one to the other.
"Bones! Murder charge!" he ejaculated. "What the devil is all this?
Whose bones?"
"Your bones, in a manner of speaking," delicately conceded the doctor.
"I had to make sure you had really died, and not disappeared by magic."
The Squire in his turn seemed more hopelessly puzzled than the whole crowd of his friends had been over his own escapade. "Why not?" he demanded.
"I thought it was the whole point to make it look like magic.
Why did you want me to die so much?"
Doctor Brown had lifted his head; and he now very slowly lifted his hand.
He pointed with outstretched arm at the headland overhanging the foreshore, just above the entrance to the cave. It was the exact part of the beach where Paynter had first landed, on that spring morning when he had looked up in his first fresh wonder at the peacock trees.
But the trees were gone.
The fact itself was no surprise to them; the clearance had naturally been one of the first of the sweeping changes of the Treherne regime.
But though they knew it well, they had wholly forgotten it; and its significance returned on them suddenly like a sign in heaven.
"That is the reason," said the doctor. "I have worked for that for fourteen years."
They no longer looked at the bare promontory on which the feathery trees had once been so familiar a sight; for they had something else to look at. Anyone seeing the Squire now would have shifted his opinion about where to find the lunatic in that crowd.
