“They are all right,” I assured him. “He is a well-known English savant, as I told you. And after all, supposing he is not, what can these two do against us. Come in. It will amuse you.”
He came in. The Professor sympathetically inquired as to his health, and we sat for a good while chatting over our tea. Some of the Schönvalhof archives were produced to gratify our visitors’ interest in the place. Miss Seemarsh asked all sorts of questions; how we liked being buried in the country, if we did not have many visitors to keep us in touch with the outer world, and how long we proposed to stay before returning to Buyda. All these very natural questions were interspersed with naïve comments and comparisons between such a life and that of a London savant of many engagements and an unquenchable thirst for investigation.
Suddenly something appeared to have gone wrong with the Professor’s injured hand. He made an expression of pain, saying his wound had been troubling him for some little time. His daughter was full of a somewhat rueful solicitude.
“Oh, I do wish it would get well quickly,” she half murmured to me. “It is a trial when father can’t work. I would far rather it had been my own hand. Father, hadn’t you better let me dress it for you again? I have brought the ointment and the bandages in my pocket.” She pulled out a little parcel.
“If we might ask to have a little warm water taken into a dressing-room, Gertrude might make things more comfortable for me,” her father said, holding the arm as though in pain.
I jumped up and said I would see to it myself. So accustomed to suspicion was I that my watch over my friends had become almost automatic.
I led the way to a chamber, with a balcony commanding a lovely view across the valley.
I left them and waited in the hall till they should come down. After a while it struck me that it would, perhaps, be as well to warn Szalay that the strangers were near him. His room, where he spent most of his time, adjoined Von Lindheim’s. We had done all we could to prevent his presence in the house being known to any one outside it, and I thought it just as well that he should keep close and not be seen even by these English people, who might be questioned by Rallenstein’s spies.
So I ran quickly upstairs. When I reached the corridor leading to the principal bedrooms, I was rather surprised to see the door of the room in which I had left the Seemarshes standing half-open. I knocked. No answer, I looked in; the room was empty. I went out to the head of the stairs; they were not to be seen. As I hurried along the corridor in search of them they came quickly round a corner and met me.
“Oh, there you are,” cried the Professor. “You can guide us back. We mistook the turning to the stairs and lost our way. What a labyrinth this house is.”