The squire turned round with a frown.
'What the deuce are you dawdling about, Benson? Give me my stick and get me out of this.'
By midnight all was still in the vast pile of Murewell. Outside, the night was slightly frosty. A clear moon shone over the sloping reaches of the park; the trees shone silverly in the cold light, their black shadows cast along the grass. Robert found himself quartered in the Stuart room, where James II. had slept, and where the tartan hangings of the ponderous carved bed, and the rose and thistle reliefs of the walls and ceilings, untouched for two hundred years, bore witness to the loyal preparations made by some bygone Wendover. He was mortally tired, but by way of distracting his thoughts a little from the squire, and that other tragedy which the great house sheltered somewhere in its walls, he took from his coat-pocket a French Anthologie which had been Catherine's birthday gift to him, and read a little before he fell asleep.
Then he slept profoundly—the sleep of exhaustion. Suddenly he found himself sitting up in bed, his heart beating to suffocation, strange noises in his ears.
A cry 'Help!' resounded through the wide empty galleries.
He flung on his dressing-gown, and ran out in the direction of the squire's room.
The hideous cries and scuffling grew more apparent as he reached it. At that moment Benson, the man who had helped to carry the squire, ran up.
'My God, sir!' he said, deadly white, 'another attack!'
The squire's room was empty, but the door into the lumber-room adjoining it was open, and the stifled sounds came through it.
They rushed in and found Meyrick struggling in the grip of a white figure, that seemed to have the face of a fiend and the grip of a tiger. Those old bloodshot eyes—those wrinkled hands on the throat of the doctor—horrible!