fearful to her than anything which her minister could tell her of flames and tortures.”
“I do not wish to hear of this,” said Beatrice.
“But it is necessary that you should, or you will not act. Do not think that I am speaking for the sake of Mrs. Lygon, or any of you save one person, and that is Arthur Lygon, whom I will save from misery if I can. Remember that, even when I reveal to you that I, Edward Allingham Berry, master of a secret that I had kept for years, menaced my wife with its disclosure, unless she, in her turn, gave up to me the secret of those letters—”
“And she gave it?” asked Mrs. Hawkesley, almost trembling.
“Ask its price,” said the old man.
“That does not—that is not for me to know, but tell me of the letters.”
“No, I will first tell you how you may be sure that I bring you the truth about them.”
He leaned forward, and in a low voice, but without looking at her, uttered a few words.
Beatrice’s face and brow crimsoned, and she turned from him.
“You are writing to your husband,” he said. “You need say nothing of that which I have just said to you, but tell him that the truth has been bought at a great price, and bid him bring those letters to England. I think that you will do so—I think that he will obey. If not, your sister’s misery be upon the heads of both of you. It is not likely that we shall ever meet any more in this world, Mrs. Hawkesley, nor is it fit that we should. But if you do your duty in this matter as I have done mine, the old man forgives you for having forced him to say what he has said in this room. That is for little Clara,” he added, throwing an envelope on the table. “Farewell, Mrs. Hawkesley. It rests with you to save your sister!”
CHAPTER LXXIX.
Ernest Adair, unconscious that he was watched, crossed the sill of the window that looked upon the garden of the house, formerly Mr. Urquhart’s, and stood in the little room at the back of the apartment in which the engineer kept his models and other lumber. It will be remembered as the chamber in which Mrs. Lygon had been secreted by Bertha and by Henderson, and into which Urquhart had forced his way, unaware that an unbidden guest was concealed behind it. The door, which had yielded to the strength of Robert Urquhart, had never been repaired, and the state of its locks and bolts gave evidence to the terrible strength that had wrenched it open. It was thrown back upon its hinges, and this was an advantage to Adair, for the room into which he had entered was somewhat gloomy with the shade of the approaching evening, and some helpful light streamed across the dusty lumber-chamber.
For the rest, the apartment looked as melancholy as a room which has been occupied by women, and forsaken by them, ever looks. A man’s relics, his book, his wasted paper, his discarded pen, and the prosaic litter of his abandoned cave, inspire little sentiment; but the scrap of woman’s work, the trace of woman’s idle business, the forgotten ribbon, the dropped embroidery, speak of gracious and playful companionship, of the light laugh and the merry glance, and speak of them as of things that have wronged us by departing. And some of these signs had been left in the chamber into which Ernest strode, across the window-sill. He had a glance for them, but not much sympathy.
“I am strangely nervous,” he said, “and yet I have been careful enough as to drinking and all that. The slight exertion of forcing that shutter and lifting the window has made my hand tremble. Is it an omen? I doubt whether I could write a neat despatch. I must take more exercise—this sort of thing will not do.”
While he spoke he drew away a table that stood near the door of a closet on one side of the room. The door itself, with its panel to match the wood-work, would almost have escaped notice, except that it had given a little, and a dingy-looking crack marked its upper line. It had no handle, but a piece of faded tape, sent through a hole where a lock had once been, answered the purpose, or rather had answered it for the last time, for Adair, pulling vigorously at the frail string, broke it off short.
“Omen number two,” said Adair, smiling at his own folly. “My hand is in a tremble, and the door refuses to open to me. But we defy auguries.”
He wrenched this door open with a piece of iron that had flown from the other when Urquhart broke into the room.
The closet, or cupboard as it had once been, presented a display of rubbish which had been cast in to be out of the way, rather than for preservation. A box or two, bundles of old papers, dusty folios, and some other engineers’ room relics, were the principal articles disclosed as the door came reluctantly open.
From the lower part of the closet Adair pulled away the litter that concealed the floor, and then stepped back to allow the dust to subside. Then he threw down a tolerably clean piece of newspaper which he found at hand, and was about to kneel upon it before the closet.
“Stop, though,” he said, “that infernal French ink comes off.”
As he spoke, he took up the piece of paper, and his eye accidentally fell upon the date, which happened to be on the fragment.
“Why,” he said, with an oath, “that is a paper of this last week!”
He looked at it again, as if expecting to find that it was a year old. But no, the date was there before his eyes, and the paper, torn and dirty, was not a week old.
“How the devil could that have come?” said Adair. “Omen number three,” passed across his mind, but the business just then was too heavy for scoffing, and it was with a hot flush that he fell upon his knees, and lifted up a sort of flap that lay at the bottom of the closet, a small trap-door that opened into a cavity of some little depth. As he pushed open this trap, and was about to plunge his arm into the cavity below, he heard a footstep on the garden gravel, and the next instant the shutter which he had opened on making his way into the house was closed.
It was not by the wind. A strong hand drove it close home, and struck it to make all sure.
