“To be sure. That’s all, Bates.”
He gravely bade me good night, and I followed him to the outer door and watched his departing figure, lighted by a single candle that he had produced from his pocket.
I stood for several minutes listening to his step, tracing it through the hall below—as far as my knowledge of the house would permit. Then, in unknown regions, I could hear the closing of doors and drawing of bolts. Verily, my jailer was a person of painstaking habits.
I opened my traveling-case and distributed its contents on the dressing-table. I had carried through all my adventures a folding leather photograph-holder, containing portraits of my father and mother and of John Marshall Glenarm, my grandfather, and this I set up on the mantel in the little sitting-room. I felt to-night as never before how alone I was in the world, and a need for companionship and sympathy stirred in me. It was with a new and curious interest that I peered into my grandfather’s shrewd old eyes. He used to come and go fitfully at my father’s house; but my father had displeased him in various ways that I need not recite, and my father’s death had left me with an estrangement which I had widened by my own acts.
Now that I had reached Glenarm, my mind reverted to Pickering’s estimate of the value of my grandfather’s estate. Although John Marshall Glenarm was an eccentric man, he had been able to accumulate a large fortune; and yet I had allowed the executor to tell me that he had died comparatively poor. In so readily accepting the terms of the will and burying myself in a region of which I knew nothing, I had cut myself off from the usual channels of counsel. If I left the place to return to New York I should simply disinherit myself. At Glenarm I was, and there I must remain to the end of the year; I grew bitter against Pickering as I reflected upon the ease with which he had got rid of me. I had always satisfied myself that my wits were as keen as his, but I wondered now whether I had not stupidly put myself in his power.
CHAPTER V
A RED TAM-O’-SHANTER
I looked out on the bright October morning with a renewed sense of isolation. Trees crowded about my windows, many of them still wearing their festal colors, scarlet and brown and gold, with the bright green of some sulking companion standing out here and there with startling vividness. I put on an old corduroy outing suit and heavy shoes, ready for a tramp abroad, and went below.
The great library seemed larger than ever when I beheld it in the morning light. I opened one of the French windows and stepped out on a stone terrace, where I gained a fair view of the exterior of the house, which proved to be a modified Tudor, with battlements and two towers. One of the latter was only half-finished, and to it and to other parts of the house the workmen’s scaffolding still clung. Heaps of stone and piles of lumber were scattered about in great disorder. The house extended partly along the edge of a ravine, through which a slender creek ran toward the lake. The terrace became a broad balcony immediately outside the library, and beneath it the water bubbled pleasantly around heavy stone pillars. Two pretty rustic bridges spanned the ravine, one near the front entrance, the other at the rear. My grandfather had begun his house on a generous plan, but, buried as it was among the trees, it suffered from lack of perspective. However, on one side toward the lake was a fair meadow, broken by a water-tower, and just beyond the west dividing wall I saw a little chapel; and still farther, in the same direction, the outlines of the buildings of St. Agatha’s were vaguely perceptible in another strip of woodland.
The thought of gentle nuns and school-girls as neighbors amused me. All I asked was that they should keep to their own side of the wall.