“None whatever?” echoed Mr. Tuke, closely scrutinizing the servant’s face, and interpreting the tortured answer from the motion of his lips.
“Your reply,” he went on, biting as acid, “is convincing, of course. Why should you know? I don’t myself, and I am as much interested in the matter as you, maybe. I only asked, because I seek the clue to a mystery that vents itself in strange visits, and secret interviews, and unaccountable sounds at night. Then, too, there is a footprint on the flower-bed under the hall-window this morning; but what of that when I have a caretaker so zealous and so scrupulous? Only, I take some amusement out of puzzles; but I am impatient, and very apt, at the last, to cut a knot that bothers me with a bullet. You can go.”
He had to repeat his permission before the servant seemed to understand and to gather the nerve to retreat. But, the moment he was vanished, the baronet clapped his hand on the table, with an oath.
“The fellow is in the league against me, whatever it is!” he cried in inward fierceness; and his soul rejoiced that at last it had some tangible justification for its innate antipathy to the man.
It was patent that this Lake of Wine was the clue to the riddle and the pass-word of the conspirators. But with the last how deeply was the caretaker involved; and to what extent was he to be depended on in the performance of his nightly services? Probably his officiousness in that respect was employed as a blind. Not probably was his habitual nervousness assumed. In greatest likelihood he was in weak process of corruption—one hand held to his duty, the other to his interest; and, if this were so, no doubt was as to which way his constitutional depravity would eventually decide him to incline.
Then would it be wise to here and now give him short shrift of notice, and so rid the house of an incubus and an embarrassment? Scarcely; for so should he—Robert Tuke—not only advertise himself in apprehension of his surroundings, whereby his enemies might be tempted to a bolder policy; but he should drive from his camp an informer, whose uses, so long as he assumed himself undetected, must all be for his intended victim.
No; the fellow must stay for the present, and be treated with a show of consideration, too; else would mistrust awakened in him greatly complicate the situation.
It was a maddening hotch-potch of confusion; the more so as all this fabric of suspicion, being builded on conjecture, might at any moment resolve itself into thin air.
CHAPTER XII.
Mr. Tuke was arrayed resplendent, cap-à-pie. His personal baggage had reached him from London, and he felt human, in the sense of the beast of civilization, once more. If his household was as yet unenlarged and his halls filled with little but echoes, he had at least a retiring chamber worthy of the most exquisite refinements of a Georgian toilet.