“It’s no good going over that!” Mrs. Toft replied impatiently. “He means, Miss, that up to three nights ago he slept in the Master’s room. Then when the Master seemed better Toft came back to his bed.”
“I ought to have stayed with him,” Toft repeated. That seemed the one thought in his mind.
“But where is he?” Mary cried. “Where? Every moment we stand talking—can’t you think where he might go? Are there no hiding—places in the house? No secret passages?”
Mrs. Toft raised her hands. “Lord’s sake!” she exclaimed. “There’s the locked closet in his room where he keeps his papers. I never looked there. It’s seldom opened, and——”
She did not finish. With one accord they hurried through the library and up the stairs to the old tapestried room, where Mr. Audley had slept and for the last month had lived. The others had been in it since his disappearance, Mary had not; and she felt a thrill of awe as she passed the threshold. The angular faces, the oblique eyes, of the watchers in the needlework on the wall, that from generation to generation had looked down on marriage and birth and death—what had they seen during the past night? On what had they gazed, she asked herself. Mrs. Toft, less fanciful or more familiar with the room, had no such thoughts. She crossed the floor to a low door which was outlined for those who knew of its existence, by rough cuts in the arras. It led into a closet, contained in one of the turrets.
Mrs. Toft tried the door, shook it, knocked on it. Finally she set her eye to the keyhole. “He’s not there,” she said. “There’s no key in the lock. He’d not take out the key, that’s certain.”
Mary scanned the disordered room. Books lay in heaps on the deep window-seats, and even on the floor. A table by one of the windows was strewn with papers and letters; on another beside the bed-head stood a tray with night drinks, a pair of candles, an antique hour-glass, a steel pistol. The bedclothes were dragged down, as if the bed had been slept in, and over the rail at the foot, half hidden by the heavy curtains, hung a nightgown. She took this up and found beneath it a pair of slippers and a shoehorn.
“He was dressed then?” she exclaimed.
Toft eyed the things. “Yes, Miss, I’ve no doubt he was,” he said despondently. “His overcoat’s gone.”
“Then he meant to leave the house?” Mary cried.