“Only a moment now, gentlemen,” said Bates, an odd smile on his face. He was looking past me toward the right end of the fireplace. There seemed to be in the air a feeling of something impending. Even Morgan and his men, half-crouching ready for a rush at me, hesitated; and Pickering glanced nervously from one to the other of us. It was the calm before the storm; in a moment we should be at each other’s throats for the final struggle, and yet we waited. In the wall I heard still the sound of steps. They were clear to all of us now. We stood there for what seemed an eternity—I suppose the time was really not more than thirty seconds—inert, waiting, while I felt that something must happen; the silence, the waiting, were intolerable. I grasped my pistol and bent low for a spring at Morgan, with the overturned table and wreckage of the chandelier between me and Pickering; and every man in the room was instantly on the alert.
All but Bates. He remained rigid—that curious smile on his blood-smeared face, his eyes bent toward the end of the great fireplace back of me.
That look on his face held, arrested, numbed me; I followed it. I forgot Morgan; a tacit truce held us all again. I stepped back till my eyes fastened on the broad paneled chimney-breast at the right of the hearth, and it was there now that the sound of footsteps in the wall was heard again; then it ceased utterly, the long panel opened slowly, creaking slightly upon its hinges, then down into the room stepped Marian Devereux. She wore the dark gown in which I had seen her last, and a cloak was drawn over her shoulders.
She laughed as her eyes swept the room.
“Ah, gentlemen,” she said, shaking her head, as she viewed our disorder, “what wretched housekeepers you are!”
Steps were again heard in the wall, and she turned to the panel, held it open with one hand and put out the other, waiting for some one who followed her.
Then down into the room stepped my grandfather, John Marshall Glenarm! His staff, his cloak, the silk hat above his shrewd face, and his sharp black eyes were unmistakable. He drew a silk handkerchief from the skirts of his frock coat, with a characteristic flourish that I remembered well, and brushed a bit of dust from his cloak before looking at any of us. Then his eyes fell upon me.
“Good morning, Jack,” he said; and his gaze swept the room.
“God help us!”
It was Morgan, I think, who screamed these words as he bolted for the broken door, but Stoddard caught and held him.