Tregarvon rose, smiling grimly. “I shall have you for my hostage. If you are about to have me ambushed, I shall make you share my risk. Do we go at once?”
Hartridge limped to a closet and found his overcoat, and Tregarvon helped him to put it on. Then he gave the temporary cripple an arm through the laboratory corridor and down the stair. At the steps he lifted Hartridge bodily into the mechanician’s seat of the car. As yet there had been no hint given of their destination, but when he took his place behind the wheel Tregarvon asked for driving directions.
“Westward, on the cross-mountain road,” was the brief reply, and no other word was exchanged until the swiftly driven machine was approaching the intersection of the cross-road with the west-brow pike. Then Hartridge said: “To your left,” and Tregarvon had a sudden sinking of the heart. A mile away he could see the lights of Westwood House, and a great fear rose up to unsteady his hand as he made the turn out of the cross-road.
Tregarvon’s fear was realized in some measure when, at Hartridge’s direction, the car made a second left-hand turn into the Westwood grounds and was brought to a stand before the door of the old mansion. “I have obeyed you blindly thus far,” he said, as he was lifting Hartridge out of the car. “But now you must tell me. Is it Judge Birrell?”
“Wait,” said the schoolmaster, and Tregarvon helped the lame man up the steps and steadied him while he groped for the knocker. Before he could knock, the door opened silently under the hand of the judge’s daughter, and Tregarvon again gave Hartridge an arm to help him over the threshold.
Though the hall was but dimly lighted he saw at once that there had been a pitiful change in Richardia. There was the shadow of a deep grief in her eyes when she greeted him, and the hand that she gave him was nerveless and cold. He had never seen her in black before, and that, and the chill of the great hall and the grave silence of his car companion, made him feel as if he had entered a house of mourning.
Without a word in explanation the changed Richardia led him to the stair and signed to him to precede her. Tregarvon hesitated only long enough to see that the professor was hobbling away toward the lighted library. Then he stood aside and slipped an arm under Richardia’s. “They hadn’t told me you had been ill,” he said reproachfully; and as they went up together the nearness of her set his blood afire and for the moment he forgot the scene in the deep wood timing itself in the Sunday afternoon of revealment.
At the stairhead a door stood ajar, with the flickering light of an open fire in the room beyond shining through the narrow opening. With a quick premonition that a tragedy was about to be revealed, Tregarvon followed his guide into the room. It was a huge chamber, spacious enough to belittle the few pieces of old-fashioned furnishings, and in the great four-poster bed lay a young man with an arm in a sling and his bandaged head propped high among the pillows. Though the face of the sick man was haggard and emaciated, Tregarvon recognized it instantly. It was the face of the handsome young fellow who had kept the Sunday afternoon tryst with Richardia.
It was only natural that he should be checked by a sudden feeling of antagonism, but before it could find expression it was swallowed up in an astoundment too great to be measured. Richardia had led him to the bedside and she was saying quietly: “Mr. Tregarvon has come, brother. Shall I leave him alone with you?”
The sick man roused himself with an effort that was plainly distressful. “Yes,” he said shortly. And after Richardia had gone: “I’m the man you’re looking for.”