Burgo's Romance

by T. W. Speight

He felt chilled in every limb, only his head still throbbed and burned; but, happily, the pain was less poignant than before. Drawing a counterpane off the bed, he wrapt it round him, and sat down by the window. Both inside the house and out the silence for some time remained unbroken, but by-and-by there came to Burgo's ear a faint rumble of wheels from the busy thoroughfare into which Great Mornington Street debouches at its upper end; then, before long, the sounds became more frequent, and, after a little longer, almost continuous. Then he knew that the dead time of the night was past, and that he should not have much longer to wait for the first signs of day.

But already he had become far less concerned about his own predicament than about what it might possibly portend to his uncle, for that Lady Clinton was at the bottom of the business he never for a moment doubted. That it had been conceived and carried out with the view of bringing about a climax, or a breach of some kind in the new and cordial relations between his uncle and himself, seemed, on the face of it, hardly open to question.

And yet, for the life of him, he could not see in what way drugging him, or making a prisoner of him for four-and-twenty hours (for, of course, it was absurd to suppose that he would allow himself to remain locked up there after daylight had fairly set in), could in any way conduce to whatever end her ladyship might have in view. But, in the absence of any foundation on which to build, surmise and speculation were futile, and the merest waste of time. He would put them resolutely aside, and indulge in them no more. It was an easy enough promise to make, but a difficult one to keep.

After what to Burgo seemed an interminable time, a faint ghostly light began to broaden in the reaches of the upper sky, and the silver lamps of night to be extinguished one by one, for with the coming of dawn the fog had vanished. And now Burgo began to listen for some signs and tokens of reviving life in the household below stairs. But time went on, and the daylight broadened, but all his listening remained in vain. Within doors no faintest sound broke the silence. It was unaccountable. How long should he wait before he rang the bell and summoned some one? What, however, if there was no one to summon? "But that's absurd," he told himself, with a shrug. "If the servants are not down already, they can't be long now. I'll wait another half-hour, and then----" His eyes had wandered to the bell-pull, or, rather, to the place where it ought to have been, for it was no longer there. It had been severed within a foot of the ceiling. As Burgo's eyes took in the fact, the blood for a moment or two seemed to curdle round his heart. More than all that had gone before it served to strike him with a chill dismay.

But it was no time for inaction. Not a moment longer would he sit there waiting for he knew not what. By this time daylight was sufficiently advanced to enable him to discern everything in the room. With Burgo necessity was the mother of contrivance. What he now did was to take off his braces, separate them at the joining, and tie them end to end.

Then, having dragged his bed, which ran on castors, into position, he placed a chair on it, and having climbed on to the latter, he found that he could just reach to knot one end of his braces to the severed bell-pull. Then, having descended from his somewhat insecure perch, he gave a vigorous tug at his improvised rope, and awaited the result.

[CHAPTER XI.]

A CLUE.

Burgo crossed to the door and stood listening with bated breath and one ear pressed against it, but the silence indoors remained unbroken. After waiting for full two minutes, but which seemed to him nothing short of a quarter of an hour, he went back and gave a longer and a still more vigorous tug at the rope. Then he listened again, and presently he was rewarded by hearing the banging of a door somewhere in the lower parts of the house, followed by a peculiar thumping sound, faint at first, but which gradually came nearer as it quitted the flagged hall and advanced slowly up the oaken staircase, its approach being marked by a distinct tap on each stair, twenty-six in all. Burgo had counted them many a time when a boy, just as he had slidden many a time down the broad, polished oaken balusters.

As he stood listening his heart beat a little faster than common, and he told himself that had that sound broken upon his ear in the dead of night, he could scarcely have heard it without a shudder. Nearer it came till it stopped opposite the door of his room. Then the key was turned, and the door flung roughly open, and to Burgo's astonished eyes there stood revealed a short, thickset, blear-eyed old man, with what seemed to him a most unprepossessing cast of face, whose chief garment was a greasy, much-worn overcoat, which reached nearly to his heels. He was lame, and it was the tapping of the heavy iron-shod stick which he used to aid him in walking that had so puzzled Burgo.