CHAPTER XXVI
NAN’S DISAPPEARANCE
Somewhere on the estate a cock crowed.
Nan stirred sleepily and turned over. The cock crowed triumphantly again. Nan turned once more and saw that the morning sun was filtering in through the heavy drapes at the windows. She rubbed her eyes and stretched. She looked around. Where was she? Then she spied the ancestral portraits frowning down upon her and she remembered everything.
So she had slept after all! She remembered vaguely an urge the night before to stay awake and watch to see that nothing happened. Why, it was music that had lulled her to sleep! She remembered it now, the faint far away sound of a bagpipe playing. It had been like a dream, for with the wind around the castle and the creaking of the old floors, she had been completely unable to follow the thread of the tune. It had come, died away, and come again. In trying to follow it, she had fallen asleep at last.
Now she lay listening. There were no sounds at all to be heard in the old castle. She got up quietly, slipped into her robe and slippers, and walked softly over to the windows, careful all the while not to disturb anyone. She pulled the curtains back and stood looking down on the castle grounds, seeing them in the daylight for the first time.
The big gray stone building she was in, she could see now, was built on a pinnacle so that on all sides there were valleys below. She remembered what Dr. Beulah had said the night before about the old castles. Now she saw in imagination the leaders of clans in days gone by standing where she was, watching the approach of the enemy below.
She peopled the towers that she could see with beautiful princesses, the crumbling walls of the older unused parts of the castle with knights in armor, singing, talking, laughing, and fighting. She imagined all sorts of plots and counterplots, and now in the valleys there was grain growing and cattle grazing! How pretty it looked in the early morning sunshine! So different than it had seemed the night before!
Now she thought again of the accident on the hill. What had caused it? Could she learn more by daylight than she had been able to by night? A bird sang cheerily outside. Another flew across her line of vision. Everything seemed to be beckoning her to come out and explore. She turned from the window and dressed hastily. Perhaps she could solve last night’s mystery by going down the hill. Perhaps she could solve it and set everyone’s mind at rest!
She opened the door carefully and walked slowly down the big staircase into the Great Hall. There James Blake was asleep before the big fireplace where the embers of last night’s fire were still burning. She saw that his head was bandaged and that he looked tired and worried, even in sleep. She couldn’t know that he had dropped off only a half hour before from sheer exhaustion. He had spent the few hours remaining after his talk with Dr. Prescott and his servant in personally watching to see that nothing further happened.
Now, as he slept, she walked quietly past his back. He stirred and muttered something. She stopped. He sank back into quiet sleep and she went on and out, opening the door carefully and closing it the same.