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For ten long minutes they stood talking, driving poor Gimblet to the desperate expedient of entering the shop and demanding a closer acquaintance with the cairngorm. It is humiliating to relate that he recoiled before it when it was placed in his hand, and nearly fled again into the road.
But they looked quite cadaverous in the early gaslight, and perhaps that accidental circumstance exaggerated the expression of their faces. 'What is the matter? asked Brother Hawkyard. 'Ay! what is the matter? asked Brother Gimblet. 'Nothing at all, I said, diffidently producing my document: 'I am only the bearer of a letter from myself. 'From yourself, George? cried Brother Hawkyard.
They were, Gimblet agreed heartily. He gathered a handful of fern and tried to keep them at bay, but they were persevering and ubiquitous. Soon the path led them away from the open moor, and into the wood of birches and young oaks which clung to the side of the hill.
Waited for accordingly he was; and in a few minutes Gimblet, rather out of breath after his run, hurried on board, and with a word of apology and thanks to the obliging skipper turned, like the other passengers, towards the shelter of the cabin. With his hand on the knob of the door he hesitated. Through the glass top he had just caught sight of a figure that seemed familiar.
Left alone, Gimblet examined the window, opening one of the small-paned casements, and measuring the space between the mullions and the central bars of iron. Satisfied as to the impossibility of any ordinary-sized person passing through those apertures, he took one more look round, and then with a swift movement drew each of the heavy curtains across the bay.
Here, thought Gimblet, was a nature which might pursue its object with cold and calculating tenacity, and then at the last moment let the prize slip through its fingers at some sudden call upon the emotions.
"I wish I had some idea where the list I want is, though," she added. "There's that detective, too," pursued Mark. "That fellow Gimblet. I'm rather fed up with him. Not that he seems any use at his work, though he's supposed to be rather first-class at it, I believe." "Gimblet! Is that who it is? Mrs. Clutsam told me a London detective was here, but I didn't know who it was.
"Will you come there first, or shall we go straight to the castle. It is about a mile through the woods." "Let us walk straight up," said Gimblet. "You can tell me as we go. I have, as you say, been a long while getting here, but it is fortunate that the day is fine. I hope it has not rained during the last thirty-six hours?" "I don't know," said the girl. "No; I believe it has been fine.
Scotland Yard officials were never too proud to call upon him for help, and many a difficulty he had helped them out of, though he refused an offer of a regular post in the Criminal Investigation Department, preferring to be at liberty to choose what cases he would take up. Above all things he loved the strange and inexplicable. Gimblet had not always been a detective.
"And now," said Gimblet, "may I visit the scene of the crime?" Mark took him first to his uncle's bedroom; a room austere in its simplicity, with bare white-washed walls and uncarpeted floor. No one could have hidden a sheet of paper in that room, thought the detective, as he gazed round it, after he had looked, with a feeling akin to guilt, on the features of the dead peer.
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