“Well,” muttered Chester, “I see my way now, and I am not going to sit down calmly over the matter. I must—I will see her again.”
Then he trembled, and the hot burning sensation came once more. But it passed off, and he felt that he must be calm and wait till he had another long sleep, when he hoped to be quite restored.
He lay trying now to forget all that had passed, so as to rest for a while; but sleep would not come, and he could do nothing but dwell upon his adventures at that mysterious house. It was so strange. The servants had evidently been sent away, so that they might know nothing of what threatened for long enough to prove a murder. He wanted to know of none other cause for the quarrel. His patient must have been shot down while defending his sister from some insult offered by the clever, overbearing, unprincipled scoundrel who seemed to lord it over all.
And as Chester lay thinking, an intense desire came over him to learn more of the family who had literally imprisoned him, and kept him there all those days. When there, it had seemed for the most part like some romantic dream; and as he lay now at home thinking, the vague intangibility of those nights and days appeared to him more fanciful and strange than ever; so much so, that there were moments when he was ready to ask himself whether, after all, it was not the result of imagination.
He recalled all the actors in the little social drama—the men whom he had seen on the first night, and who dropped out of sight afterwards; the two ladies—the wives of the brothers—both quiet, startled-looking women, of the type that would be seen exhibiting the latest fashions at some race, at Lord’s, or at a meeting of the Four-in-Hand Club, and evidently slaves of their husbands—and he recalled now how the wife of the elder brother seemed to hold her lord in dread.
“There’s something more about that place than one knows,” Chester thought to himself as he turned from side to side, “and I cannot—I will not, sit down and patiently bear such treatment. To-morrow I’ll go and demand an explanation. I have a good excuse,” he said half aloud and with a bitter laugh; “there is my promised fee, and—Pish!” he exclaimed savagely. “If I am to prove a scoundrel, I will be an honest one. I will ferret out who and what they are. I behaved like a child in not having some explanation earlier—in yielding passively as I did without reason—no, not without reason. I could not help it. Heaven help me! I will—I must see her again. It is fate!”
He jumped up in bed, for a sudden thought now sent a chill of horror through him, as for the first time the drugging which had taken place showed itself in another light.
“To get rid of me,” he muttered, as the great drops of sweat gathered on his face, “and—the last thing I remember—Marion—her head fallen upon the couch beside her brother, helpless now to protect her—drugged, insensible, at the mercy of that villain; and I here without stirring or raising a hand.”
Some little time later, feeling weak and faint, he was standing in the hall reaching down his hat, and for a moment he had a feeling of compunction. Isabel—his sister—what would they think of his strange, base infatuation?
“What they will,” he said between his teeth. “Placed in such circumstances, no man could be master of himself. I must save her, even if we never meet again;” and the door closed after him loudly, as, half mad now with excitement, Marion’s eyes seeming to lure him on, he stepped out into the darkness of the night.