“Go on,” he muttered.
“They cried to him; but he withdrew, and would give no answer. And they entreated long, till my heart sobbed for them. ‘Let them in, Dennis,’ I prayed. But he said, ‘They must bid higher.’ Then they threw this thing, and it cracked through the lattice; and he crept softly and took it up and read and cast it down again. ‘Make no sound,’ he whispered to me; ‘and they will think we are gone.’ But I went secretly and picked up the stone; and all night long the shadows moaned about the house.”
She screamed again, with a note of fury startled out of terror, for her master had pounced upon her and wrung the treasure from her grasp. She fought with him, clawing and spitting like a cat; but he beat her off, as he would have any wild animal, and rushed out to the light.
Here, in a moment’s gain of time, he looked and read what was roughly scrawled in pencil upon the smooth surface of the stone.
“Half the profits,” were the words—“if you lead us to the Lake of Wine.”
He had space to no more than decipher this when the wild creature was upon him again.
“Stand off!” he cried furiously, backing from her, with a white face. “Stand off! I must have a word with your brother.”
He heard her swift step behind him as he raced up the drive. He might have been conscious of a certain lack of dignity in the situation, had his passion allowed his reason a moment to itself.
It did not. It leapt—a white consuming blaze that seemed to roar the louder with the wind of his going.
For here, at last, he held in his very hand a damning proof of the guilt he had so long suspected. In the fierce triumph of its possession, he forgot caution, policy—everything but the lust to crush under a savage heel the reptile he had warmed and cherished at his hearth. No doubt that little rebellious emotion we wot of was reacting upon itself with a double hate of its own weakness. He writhed to think that he had ever admitted it to his counsels; but his revenge should be proportionate.