He took the pipe from his mouth, pressed the tobacco viciously into the bowl, and swore steadily in Gaelic until I was ready to choke him.
“Stop!” I bawled. “Do you think that’s helping me? And to have you curse in your blackguardly Irish dialect! I wanted a little Anglo-Saxon sympathy, you fool! I didn’t mean for you to invoke your infamous gods against the girl!”
“Don’t be violent, lad. Violence is reprehensible,” he admonished with maddening sweetness and patience. “What I was trying to inculcate was rather the fact, borne in upon me through years of acquaintance, that you are,—to he bold, my lad, to be bold,—a good deal of a damned fool.”
The trilling of his r’s was like the whirring rise of a flock of quails.
“Dinner is served,” announced Bates, and Larry led the way, mockingly chanting an Irish love-song.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE DOOR OF BEWILDERMENT
We had established the practice of barring all the gates and doors at nightfall. There was no way of guarding against an attack from the lake, whose frozen surface increased the danger from without; but we counted on our night patrol to prevent a surprise from that quarter. I was well aware that I must prepare to resist the militant arm of the law, which Pickering would no doubt invoke to aid him, but I intended to exhaust the possibilities in searching for the lost treasure before I yielded. Pickering might, if he would, transfer the estate of John Marshall Glenarm to Marian Devereux and make the most he could of that service, but he should not drive me forth until I had satisfied myself of the exact character of my grandfather’s fortune. If it had vanished, if Pickering had stolen it and outwitted me in making off with it, that was another matter.
The phrase, “The Door of Bewilderment,” had never ceased to reiterate itself in my mind. We discussed a thousand explanations of it as we pondered over the scrap of paper I had found in the library, and every book in the house was examined in the search for further clues.
The passage between the house and the chapel seemed to fascinate Larry. He held that it must have some particular use and he devoted his time to exploring it.