Burgo's Romance

by T. W. Speight

"Never, so help me Heaven!" exclaimed Burgo fervently as he bent and touched his uncle's forehead with his lips. "But we will talk about the past another time. I have come to take you away from here--and to take you away from her. I have good friends outside to help me. But there is no time to lose. Come--let me help you to dress."

There was a decanter on the table containing brandy. He mixed a portion of it with some water, and at his request Sir Everard drank it off.

The baronet comprehended that a crisis had come, and he wasted no time in asking questions. He let Burgo help him to dress; indeed, he was quite as eager to be gone as his nephew was to get him away.

It was evident that he was very weak, but excitement had lent him a fictitious strength, which, however, would presently evaporate for lack of stamina to back it up. His face, too, had grown greyer and more haggard in the interval since Burgo had seen him last, and his hair was now as colourless as driven snow.

As Burgo was helping his uncle to put on his fur-lined overcoat, he said; "Do you think, sir, that Miss Roylance would leave here in your charge? It would be a thousand pities--would it not?--to leave her behind."

"It would indeed. She is a good girl, a noble girl, and--and I'm afraid she is not very happy here. She ought to go with us by all means." It never struck him to ask how it happened that his nephew was acquainted with Dacia Roylance.

After placing his uncle in an easy-chair, and administering a little more brandy-and-water, he left the room in order to speak to Marchment. Although not more than a quarter of an hour had elapsed since they set foot inside the Keep, he knew that the latter would be growing impatient. And yet to go and to be compelled to leave Dacia behind, and that without the chance of a parting word between them, was a prospect which wrung his heart with anguish of a kind such as heretofore he had not known. If only he could have seized upon Mother Sprowle, or one of the female domestics, and have sent a message to Dacia that he wanted to see her without loss of time But there was no one to send. Except Vallance and his uncle, no one in the house appeared to have been disturbed, for the servants slept in another wing. What to do he knew not.

Marchment and his men were gathered in the entrance-hall out of which the corridor led. The captain of the Naiad had seated himself on one of the lower stairs, and was smoking a cigarette with an air of the utmost sang-froid.

"I hope I have not altogether exhausted your patience," said Burgo as he came up. "My uncle is now ready, and----"

He stopped like one suddenly stricken dumb. His eyes had caught a glimpse of something white on the stairs. Looking up, he beheld Dacia coming slowly down, her crutch under her left arm, and her right hand gliding over the balusters, but on the soft carpet her crutch made no sound. Late as the hour was, she had not gone to bed, and on hearing a murmur of strange voices in the hall she had quitted her room and crept to the darkest corner of the gallery, whence she could see all that went on below without any risk of discovery. Alarmed, and utterly at a loss to account for the presence of armed strangers in the house, who yet had something about them which seemed to mark them out from common burglars, she had not known what to do. But the moment she saw Burgo emerge from the corridor in which his uncle's bedroom was situated she hesitated no longer. So long as he was there, everything must be right.