“It might have made a difference in his feelings towards me if he were not a sweet-tempered boy,” she said. “I was very angry with Ronald. Oh, my dear, if you knew what these weeks have been, you would pity me! The constant fear—the terrible uncertainty!” She shuddered. “There have been many times when I have been tempted to send him away and let him take his chance. But I could not do it. After all, though I cannot feel any affection for him now, he was my little brother once—just such a boy as Jack. That is the time I try to remember. And my mother left him to my care.”
Her eyes were suddenly kind and soft. I wondered how I could ever have thought her cold—or mad.
“But how long is it to go on?” I asked. “You can’t keep such a secret for ever.”
“There is a chance of getting him out of Australia,” she said. “He has a friend connected with a ship which will leave Adelaide next week—ten days from now, or thereabouts. It is a cargo-ship only, and this friend has promised to arrange a passport for him and get him on board, if I can get him to Adelaide. We have been trying to work out a plan to go to Southport farther down the coast; from there he could make his way up to the main line and reach Adelaide by train. But now we are afraid to move, for everything is complicated by the robberies in the neighbourhood. With the police on the alert—with those terrible black trackers about!—what can we dare to do? I am at my wits’ end.”
“But they will not come here,” I said. “Dr. Firth’s place is three miles away, and there is nothing to bring the police to The Towers.”
“I do not know,” she said slowly. She was silent, gripping my hand so tightly that it ached. Suddenly she dropped it, sprang up, and began to pace the room, wrapped in thought; and I sat watching her helplessly. The minutes went by while she went back and forth, like a caged animal. Then she came back.
“It has been a relief to tell you,” she said. “I have longed to talk to some one—the thing has been too hard to bear all alone. Listen—I will tell you the worst fear of all.”
“Each the very counterpart of the other, they stood
together, and I looked from one to the other with dazed eyes,
utterly bewildered.”
The Tower Rooms] [Page 160