The Viking's Skull

by John R. Carling

Moved by the thought that it might be a burglar, Godfrey stepped quietly from his bed, and cautiously opening the door to the extent of a few inches, peeped out.

There, a few feet distant, with his back towards him, was Viscount Walden moving quietly along the corridor. Evidently he had not been to bed, for he was still wearing the dress suit he had worn at dinner: to it he had added a hard felt hat, into the brim of which there was stuck a lighted candle, after the fashion of a Cornish miner.

With both hands he was half-dragging, half-carrying the cypress chest about which he had displayed so much concern. It was the accidental fall of this reliquary that had roused Godfrey from sleep.

Now, when a young man is detected in the dead of night stealing along with a reliquary that he has tried to introduce surreptitiously into his father's house, it may be inferred that he is actuated by a bad motive; such, at least, was Godfrey's inference. Accordingly, though conscious of the meanness of espionage, yet, moved by a feeling for which he could not account, he resolved to follow the viscount, and ascertain, if possible, the meaning of this strange proceeding.

Waiting till Ivar had turned a corner of the corridor, Godfrey, having hurriedly slipped into his clothes, stole forth in his stockinged feet and followed at a distance, lurking within the shadows, and exercising the utmost vigilance to prevent himself from being seen. Fortunately, there were at intervals, various pieces of furniture, as well as curtains and recesses, of all which Godfrey took prompt advantage whenever Ivar seemed on the point of giving a backward glance.

The viscount's course, after he had left the corridor in which the bedrooms were situated, conducted him down a staircase and along a second corridor, this latter terminating at the door of the Picture Gallery. Here he paused, and sat down upon the box to rest himself. He was no athlete, and the moving of this heavy chest was a tax upon his strength.

By the grim and dismal circle of light shed around by the taper in Ivar's hat Godfrey could see that the viscount's face was pale and marked by an expression of fear, and that he gave a start at the sudden coughing of the night wind among the trees without.

Some of the fear manifested by him seemed to pass over to Godfrey, who found himself becoming strangely suspicious as to the contents of the chest. The secrecy observed by the viscount was extremely suggestive of the theory of crime. Was the reliquary the receptacle of guilty evidence which Ivar, unable to dispose of elsewhere, was bringing to Ravenhall as the safest place of concealment?

The reliquary itself, apart altogether from the consideration of its contents, had something gruesome about it. Though the exterior carvings were mediæval in character, Godfrey, who was somewhat of a connoisseur on wood, had felt, when surveying the chest at the entrance-hall, that it was far more ancient than the middle ages: with that durability peculiar to cypress wood, the chest might have seen the classic days of Greece: differing little in shape from an Egyptian mummy-case, it might have held the embalmed remains of a Rameses: nay, its antiquity perhaps antedated the very Pyramids themselves!