A very faint light came from the single candle which Denis took with him along the drive; it just glimmered upon the floor of the shaft, and on the wall opposite the drive; but in the glimmer nothing moved, and nothing shone.
The steward closed his eyes and put a hand to either ear. The chip-chipping had ceased. There was no sound at all. And then, but not till then, did the criminal realize his crime.
He drew himself up with an uncontrollable shudder, and looked quickly on all sides of him. The sun was high in the deep blue heavens. The white tents in the gully shimmered in its glare. No one was about on the next claim; all were underground, or at the creek; no human eye had seen the deed.
Yet the skin tightened on the murderer's skull, a baleful dew broke out upon it, and the little eyes for once grew large with horror.
CHAPTER XXII
ATRA CURA
There are few more attractive houses near London than one that shall be nameless in these pages: enough that it lends the beauty of mellow brick and sunken tile to a hill-top already picturesquely wooded, but a dozen miles from the Marble Arch, yet in the country's very heart, on a main road where the inquisitive may still discover it for themselves. They will have to choose, it is true, between several old houses of rosy brick, all of them overrun with the rose itself, and all standing rather too near the road. The house in question is the one that has no other fault. It is the house with the plate-glass porch, the wide bay on either side, the luniform bay behind; at the back also are a noble lawn, several meadows, and a singular avenue, so narrow that the tall trees meet overhead as one. Other features are a rose garden, enclosed in the ripest of all the old red walls, and a model farm.
To this pleasant English home Mr. Merridew and his daughter returned in the month of February, after a wearisome but uneventful voyage and a week or two at the St. George's Hotel as a corrective. A distinguished physician had prescribed a month; but in ten days Nan had all the new clothes she needed, had seen all the plays she cared to see, and went in such fear of a certain topic of conversation, forced upon her by the heedless, that it was anguish to her to go about. So one of the carriages came up from Hertfordshire, and on a clear but chilly afternoon father and daughter drove home together.
It was not a hearty homecoming. John Merridew had been many years a widower, whose only other child had died in infancy. But the old red house looked warm and kindly; the servants stood weeping through their smiles; the firelit rooms were all unchanged, save in their new promise of perfect privacy; and in her home it was grasped from the first that Miss Merridew could not bear to speak about the wreck of the North Foreland and her own romantic rescue by one of the officers. Thus she had no occasion to explain that she was engaged to him; and Mr. Merridew left the announcement to Nan.
"She has nothing on her mind, has she?" inquired old Dr. Stone after an early call as physician and friend.