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House of a Thousand Candles, The (version 2)

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<h2>CHAPTER XXIV</h2> <h3>A PROWLER OF THE NIGHT</h3> Down we plunged into the cellar, through the trap and to the Door of Bewilderment. “Don’t expect too much,” admonished Larry; “I can’t promise you a single Spanish coin.” “Perish the ambition! We have blocked Pickering’s game, and nothing else matters,” I said. We crawled through the hole in the wall and lighted candles. The room was about seven feet square. At the farther end was an oblong wooden door, close to the ceiling, and Larry tugged at the fastening until it came down, bringing with it a mass of snow and leaves. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we are at the edge of the ravine. Do you see the blue sky? And yonder, if you will twist your necks a bit, is the boat-house.” “Well, let the scenic effects go and show us where you found those papers,” I urged. “Speaking of mysteries, that is where I throw up my hands, lads. It’s quickly told. Here is a table, and here is a tin despatch box, which lies just where I found it. It was closed and the key was in the lock. I took out that packet—it wasn’t even sealed—saw the character of the contents, and couldn’t resist the temptation to try the effect of an announcement of its discovery on your friend Pickering. Now that is nearly all. I found this piece of paper under the tape with which the envelope was tied, and I don’t hesitate to say that when I read it I laughed until I thought I should shake down the cellar. Read it, John Glenarm!” He handed me a sheet of legal-cap paper on which was written these words: <blockquote> <center>HE LAUGHS BEST WHO LAUGHS LAST </center> </blockquote> “What do you think is so funny in this?” I demanded. “Who wrote it, do you think?” asked Stoddard. “Who wrote it, do you ask? Why, your grandfather wrote it! John Marshall Glenarm, the cleverest, grandest old man that ever lived, wrote it!” declaimed Larry, his voice booming loudly in the room. “It’s all a great big game, fixed up to try you and Pickering,—but principally you, you blockhead! Oh, it’s grand, perfectly, deliciously grand,—and to think it should be my good luck to share in it!” “Humph! I’m glad you’re amused, but it doesn’t strike me as being so awfully funny. Suppose those papers had fallen into Pickering’s hands; then where would the joke have been, I should like to know!” “On you, my lad, to be sure! The old gentleman wanted you to study architecture; he wanted you to study his house; he even left a little pointer in an old book! Oh, it’s too good to be true!” “That’s all clear enough,” observed Stoddard, knocking upon the despatch box with his knuckles. “But why do you suppose he dug this hole here with its outlet on the ravine?” “Oh, it was the way of him!” explained Larry. “He liked the idea of queer corners and underground passages. This is a bully hiding-place for man or treasure, and that outlet into the ravine makes it possible to get out of the house with nobody the wiser. It’s in keeping with the rest of his scheme. Be gay, comrades! To-morrow will likely find us with plenty of business on our hands. At present we hold the fort, and let us have a care lest we lose it.” We closed the ravine door, restored the brick as best we could, and returned to the library. We made a list of the Pickering notes and spent an hour discussing this new feature of the situation. “That’s a large amount of money to lend one man,” said Stoddard. “True; and from that we may argue that Mr. Glenarm didn’t give Pickering all he had. There’s more somewhere. If only I didn’t have to run—” and Larry’s face fell as he remembered his own plight. “I’m a selfish pig, old man! I’ve been thinking only of my own affairs. But I never relied on you as much as now!” “Those fellows will sound the alarm against Donovan, without a doubt, on general principles and to land a blow on you,” remarked Stoddard thoughtfully. “But you can get away, Larry. We’ll help you off to-night. I don’t intend to stand between you and liberty. This extradition business is no joke,—if they ever get you back in Ireland it will be no fun getting you off. You’d better run for it before Pickering and his sheriff spring their trap.” “Yes; that’s the wise course. Glenarm and I can hold the fort here. His is a moral issue, really, and I’m in for a siege of a thousand years,” said the clergyman earnestly, “if it’s necessary to beat Pickering. I may go to jail in the end, too, I suppose.” “I want you both to leave. It’s unfair to mix you up in this ugly business of mine. Your stake’s bigger than mine, Larry. And yours, too, Stoddard; why, your whole future—your professional standing and prospects would be ruined if we got into a fight here with the authorities.” “Thank you for mentioning my prospects! I’ve never had them referred to before,” laughed Stoddard. “No; your grandfather was a friend of the Church and I can’t desert his memory. I’m a believer in a vigorous Church militant and I’m enlisted for the whole war. But Donovan ought to go, if he will allow me to advise him.” Larry filled his pipe at the fireplace. “Lads,” he said, his hands behind him, rocking gently as was his way, “let us talk of art and letters,—I’m going to stay. It hasn’t often happened in my life that the whole setting of the stage has pleased me as much as this. Lost treasure; secret passages; a gentleman rogue storming the citadel; a private chaplain on the premises; a young squire followed by a limelight; sheriff, school-girls and a Sisterhood distributed through the landscape,—and me, with Scotland Yard looming duskily in the distance. Glenarm, I’m going to stay.” There was no shaking him, and the spirits of all of us rose after this new pledge of loyalty. Stoddard stayed for dinner, and afterward we began again our eternal quest for the treasure, our hopes high from Larry’s lucky strike of the afternoon, and with a new eagerness born of the knowledge that the morrow would certainly bring us face to face with the real crisis. We ranged the house from tower to cellar; we overhauled the tunnel, for, it seemed to me, the hundredth time. It was my watch, and at midnight, after Stoddard and Larry had reconnoitered the grounds and Bates and I had made sure of all the interior fastenings, I sent them off to bed and made myself comfortable with a pipe in the library. I was glad of the respite, glad to be alone,—to consider my talk with Marian Devereux at St. Agatha’s, and her return with Pickering. Why could she not always have been Olivia, roaming the woodland, or the girl in gray, or that woman, so sweet in her dignity, who came down the stairs at the Armstrongs’? Her own attitude toward me was so full of contradictions; she had appeared to me in so many moods and guises, that my spirit ranged the whole gamut of feeling as I thought of her. But it was the recollection of Pickering’s infamous conduct that colored all my doubts of her. Pickering had always been in my way, and here, but for the chance by which Larry had found the notes, I should have had no weapon to use against him. The wind rose and drove shrilly around the house. A bit of scaffolding on the outer walls rattled loose somewhere and crashed down on the terrace. I grew restless, my mind intent upon the many chances of the morrow, and running forward to the future. Even if I won in my strife with Pickering I had yet my way to make in the world. His notes were probably worthless, —I did not doubt that. I might use them to procure his removal as executor, but I did not look forward with any pleasure to a legal fight over a property that had brought me only trouble. Something impelled me to go below, and, taking a lantern, I tramped somberly through the cellar, glanced at the heating apparatus, and, remembering that the chapel entrance to the tunnel was unguarded, followed the corridor to the trap, and opened it. The cold air blew up sharply and I thrust my head down to listen. A sound at once arrested me. I thought at first it must be the suction of the air, but Glenarm House was no place for conjectures, and I put the lantern aside and jumped down into the tunnel. A gleam of light showed for an instant, then the darkness and silence were complete. I ran rapidly over the smooth floor, which I had traversed so often that I knew its every line. My only weapon was one of Stoddard’s clubs. Near the Door of Bewilderment I paused and listened. The tunnel was perfectly quiet. I took a step forward and stumbled over a brick, fumbled on the wall for the opening which we had closed carefully that afternoon, and at the instant I found it a lantern flashed blindingly in my face and I drew back, crouching involuntarily, and clenching the club ready to strike. “Good evening, Mr. Glenarm!” Marian Devereux’s voice broke the silence, and Marian Devereux’s face, with the full light of the lantern upon it, was bent gravely upon me. Her voice, as I heard it there,—her face, as I saw it there,—are the things that I shall remember last when my hour comes to go hence from this world. The slim fingers, as they clasped the wire screen of the lantern, held my gaze for a second. The red tam-o’-shanter that I had associated with her youth and beauty was tilted rakishly on one side of her pretty head. To find her here, seeking, like a thief in the night, for some means of helping Arthur Pickering, was the bitterest drop in the cup. I felt as though I had been struck with a bludgeon. “I beg your pardon!” she said, and laughed. “There doesn’t seem to be anything to say, does there? Well, we do certainly meet under the most unusual, not to say unconventional, circumstances, Squire Glenarm. Please go away or turn your back. I want to get out of this donjon keep.” She took my hand coolly enough and stepped down into the passage. Then I broke upon her stormily. “You don’t seem to understand the gravity of what you are doing! Don’t you know that you are risking your life in crawling through this house at midnight? —that even to serve Arthur Pickering, a life is a pretty big thing to throw away? Your infatuation for that blackguard seems to carry you far, Miss Devereux.” She swung the lantern at arm’s length back and forth so that its rays at every forward motion struck my face like a blow. “It isn’t exactly pleasant in this cavern. Unless you wish to turn me over to the lord high executioner, I will bid you good night.” “But the infamy of this—of coming in here to spy upon me—to help my enemy—the man who is seeking plunder—doesn’t seem to trouble you.” “No, not a particle!” she replied quietly, and then, with an impudent fling, “Oh, no!” She held up the lantern to look at the wick. “I’m really disappointed to find that you were a little ahead of me, Squire Glenarm. I didn’t give you credit for so much—perseverance. But if you have the notes—” “The notes! He told you there were notes, did he? The coward sent you here to find them, after his other tools failed him?” She laughed that low laugh of hers that was like the bubble of a spring. <center> <ANTIMG alt="I beg your pardon!" src="images/image_p311.jpg" height-obs="514" width-obs="318" /> </center> “Of course no one would dare deny what the great Squire Glenarm says,” she said witheringly. “You can’t know what your perfidy means to me,” I said. “That night, at the Armstrongs’, I thrilled at the sight of you. As you came down the stairway I thought of you as my good angel, and I belonged to you, —all my life, the better future that I wished to make for your sake.” “Please don’t!” And I felt that my words had touched her; that there were regret and repentance in her tone and in the gesture with which she turned from me. She hurried down the passage swinging the lantern at her side, and I followed, so mystified, so angered by her composure, that I scarcely knew what I did. She even turned, with pretty courtesy, to hold the light for me at the crypt steps,—a service that I accepted perforce and with joyless acquiescence in the irony of it. I knew that I did not believe in her; her conduct as to Pickering was utterly indefensible,—I could not forget that; but the light of her eyes, her tranquil brow, the sensitive lips, whose mockery stung and pleased in a breath,—by such testimony my doubts were alternately reinforced and disarmed. Swept by these changing moods I followed her out into the crypt. “You seem to know a good deal about this place, and I suppose I can’t object to your familiarizing yourself with your own property. And the notes—I’ll give myself the pleasure of handing them to you to-morrow. You can cancel them and give them to Mr. Pickering,— a pretty pledge between you!” I thrust my hands into my pockets to give an impression of ease I did not feel. “Yes,” she remarked in a practical tone, “three hundred and twenty thousand dollars is no mean sum of money. Mr. Pickering will undoubtedly be delighted to have his debts canceled—” “In exchange for a life of devotion,” I sneered. “So you knew the sum—the exact amount of these notes. He hasn’t served you well; he should have told you that we found them to-day.” “You are not nice, are you, Squire Glenarm, when you are cross?” She was like Olivia now. I felt the utter futility of attempting to reason with a woman who could become a child at will. She walked up the steps and out into the church vestibule. Then before the outer door she spoke with decision. “We part here, if you please! And—I have not the slightest intention of trying to explain my errand into that passage. You have jumped to your own conclusion, which will have to serve you. I advise you not to think very much about it,—to the exclusion of more important business,—Squire Glenarm!” She lifted the lantern to turn out its light, and it made a glory of her face, but she paused and held it toward me. “Pardon me! You will need this to light you home.” “But you must not cross the park alone!” “Good night! Please be sure to close the door to the passage when you go down. You are a dreadfully heedless person, Squire Glenarm.” She flung open the outer chapel-door, and ran along the path toward St. Agatha’s. I watched her in the starlight until a bend in the path hid her swift-moving figure. Down through the passage I hastened, her lantern lighting my way. At the Door of Bewilderment I closed the opening, setting up the line of wall as we had left it in the afternoon, and then I went back to the library, freshened the fire and brooded before it until Bates came to relieve me at dawn. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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