There was no shaking him, and the spirits of all of us rose after this new pledge of loyalty. Stoddard stayed for dinner, and afterward we began again our eternal quest for the treasure, our hopes high from Larry’s lucky strike of the afternoon, and with a new eagerness born of the knowledge that the morrow would certainly bring us face to face with the real crisis. We ranged the house from tower to cellar; we overhauled the tunnel, for, it seemed to me, the hundredth time.
It was my watch, and at midnight, after Stoddard and Larry had reconnoitered the grounds and Bates and I had made sure of all the interior fastenings, I sent them off to bed and made myself comfortable with a pipe in the library.
I was glad of the respite, glad to be alone,—to consider my talk with Marian Devereux at St. Agatha’s, and her return with Pickering. Why could she not always have been Olivia, roaming the woodland, or the girl in gray, or that woman, so sweet in her dignity, who came down the stairs at the Armstrongs’? Her own attitude toward me was so full of contradictions; she had appeared to me in so many moods and guises, that my spirit ranged the whole gamut of feeling as I thought of her. But it was the recollection of Pickering’s infamous conduct that colored all my doubts of her. Pickering had always been in my way, and here, but for the chance by which Larry had found the notes, I should have had no weapon to use against him.
The wind rose and drove shrilly around the house. A bit of scaffolding on the outer walls rattled loose somewhere and crashed down on the terrace. I grew restless, my mind intent upon the many chances of the morrow, and running forward to the future. Even if I won in my strife with Pickering I had yet my way to make in the world. His notes were probably worthless, —I did not doubt that. I might use them to procure his removal as executor, but I did not look forward with any pleasure to a legal fight over a property that had brought me only trouble.
Something impelled me to go below, and, taking a lantern, I tramped somberly through the cellar, glanced at the heating apparatus, and, remembering that the chapel entrance to the tunnel was unguarded, followed the corridor to the trap, and opened it. The cold air blew up sharply and I thrust my head down to listen.
A sound at once arrested me. I thought at first it must be the suction of the air, but Glenarm House was no place for conjectures, and I put the lantern aside and jumped down into the tunnel. A gleam of light showed for an instant, then the darkness and silence were complete.
I ran rapidly over the smooth floor, which I had traversed so often that I knew its every line. My only weapon was one of Stoddard’s clubs. Near the Door of Bewilderment I paused and listened. The tunnel was perfectly quiet. I took a step forward and stumbled over a brick, fumbled on the wall for the opening which we had closed carefully that afternoon, and at the instant I found it a lantern flashed blindingly in my face and I drew back, crouching involuntarily, and clenching the club ready to strike.
“Good evening, Mr. Glenarm!”
Marian Devereux’s voice broke the silence, and Marian Devereux’s face, with the full light of the lantern upon it, was bent gravely upon me. Her voice, as I heard it there,—her face, as I saw it there,—are the things that I shall remember last when my hour comes to go hence from this world. The slim fingers, as they clasped the wire screen of the lantern, held my gaze for a second. The red tam-o’-shanter that I had associated with her youth and beauty was tilted rakishly on one side of her pretty head. To find her here, seeking, like a thief in the night, for some means of helping Arthur Pickering, was the bitterest drop in the cup. I felt as though I had been struck with a bludgeon.
“I beg your pardon!” she said, and laughed. “There doesn’t seem to be anything to say, does there? Well, we do certainly meet under the most unusual, not to say unconventional, circumstances, Squire Glenarm. Please go away or turn your back. I want to get out of this donjon keep.”