“They had removed the papers?”
“To the bank, or to London, or to Stubbs’s. The place was as clean as a platter! Not a length of green tape or an end of parchment was left!”
“Then what have you gained?” Basset asked.
Audley looked slyly at him, his head on one side. “Ay, what?” he said. “But I’ll tell you my father’s story. At one time the part of the room under the stairs was crumbling and the rats got in. The steward told the old lord and he went to see it. ‘Brick it up!’ he said. The steward objected that there would not be room—the place was full; there were boxes everywhere, some under the stairs. The old lord tapped one of the boxes with his gold-headed cane. ‘What’s in these!’ he asked. ‘Old papers,’ the steward explained. ‘Of no use, my lord, but curious; old leases for lives, and terriers.’ ‘Terriers?’ cried the old lord. ‘Then, by G—d, brick ’em up with the rats!’ And that day at dinner he told my father the story and chuckled over it.”
“And that’s what you’ve had in your mind all this time?” Basset said. “Do you think it was done?”
“The old lord bricked up many a pipe of port, and I think that he would do it for the jest’s sake. And”— John Audley turned and looked in his companion’s face—“the part under the stairs is bricked up, and the room is as square and as flush as the family vault—and very like it. The old lord,” he added sardonically, “knows what it is to be bricked up himself now.”
“And still there may be nothing there to help you.”
Audley rose from his chair. “Don’t say it!” he cried passionately. “Or I’ll say that there’s no right in the world, no law, no providence, no God! Don’t dare to say it!” he continued, his cheeks trembling with excitement. “If I believed that I should go mad! But it is there! It is there! Do you think that it was for naught I heard that story? That it was for naught I remembered it, for naught I’ve carried the story in my mind all these years? No, they are there, the papers that will give me mine and give it to Mary after me! They are there! And you must help me to get them.”
“I cannot do it, sir,” Basset replied firmly. “I don’t think that you understand what you ask. To break into Audley’s house like any common burglar, to dig down his wall, to steal his deeds——”
John Audley shook his fist in the young man’s face. “His house!” he shrieked. “His wall! His deeds! No, fool, but my house, my wall, my deeds! my deeds! If the papers are there all’s mine! All! And I am but taking my own! Can’t you see that? Can’t you see it? Have I no right to take what is my own?”