With a genial nod, he quitted the room, and presently the creaking of the ancient woodwork of the staircase told that he had retired upstairs. Left to himself, Hugh Trenchard made a tour of the ground floor, closely examining the fastenings of every door and window. Satisfied on this score, he mounted the stairs and entered the room of tragic memories.
Setting the lighted candle on the small spindle-legged table, Hugh took a quick glance round the apartment. It appeared exactly the same as when he had last seen it, on that night of grim excitement when Silas Marie had been spirited away so completely and mysteriously. There stood the great four-poster bed, its fringed canopy looking like a funereal catafalque amid the looming shadows which stretched themselves like dusky tongues across the floor, and hung in dark masses in the corners and clustered against the oak-beamed walls. The aged room seemed to have assumed a frown, menacing and malignant, as though its worm-burrowed heart were registering silent disapproval at this invasion of its drowsy sanctuary. A faint and elusive odor hung in the stagnant air. It was not exactly the stale smell exhaled by damp and decay; neither was it the lingering trace of some Old World perfume clinging to the faded tapestries. It seemed a curious combination of both, and gave rise to thoughts unpleasantly morbid and suggestive. Hugh lost no time in crossing to the window and throwing open the leaded casements to their fullest extent.
For a while he stood there, inhaling the gusts of clean, sweet air which still retained the salt tang of the sea in spite of its twenty-mile sweep across the rolling moors. The sky was almost cloudless, and the slender sickle of the moon gave just sufficient light to make the scene a world of vague shapes, sensed rather than actually seen, with here and there a glint of dull silver that marked the course of some meandering streamlet. Once the deep stillness was broken by the shrill hoot of some questing owl, and once again Hugh thought he could detect the passage of a slinking animal shape amid the tall bracken which lay beyond the confines of the house-garden—reminders that, though the great Moor seemed to sleep tranquilly, the inexorable conflict of tooth and claw knew no truce.
So absorbed was he in the quiet beauty of the night, that when he heard a faint creak of the swinging door he idly set it down as being caused by a chance current of wind. Not until he caught the sound of a faint padding footfall in the room behind, him did he realize that he was not alone.
"Hullo, Ronnie!" he said, without turning his head. "So you don't find yourself so inclined for sleep as you imagined"
He broke off with a quick gasping intake of breath as he felt something cold and hard pressed into the nape of his neck.
"Do not presume to utter a sound, Doctor Trenchard! Your friend Ronnie is sleeping as he has never slept before, and you will sleep even sounder if you do not obey me instantly. I have come here for two things—the key of the safe downstairs and the information of where I can find Miss Joan Endean. If you do not give me both within the space of the next ten seconds, I shall be under the painful necessity of cutting short a most promising career by pressing this trigger!"
Hugh stiffened like a man suddenly turned to stone. There was no mistaking those sibilant, coldly enunciated accents.
