TERROR KEEP CHAPTER XX
He stood, holding the half-swooning girl, peering into the face he could only see by the reflected light of his lantern, and then suddenly the safe fell back from him without warning, leaping a gaping cavern.
He lifted her in his arms, ran across the vestibule into the open air. Somebody shouted his name in the distance, and he ran blindly toward the voice. Once he stumbled over a great crack that had appeared in the earth, but managed to recover himself, though he was forced to release his grip of the girl.
She was alive ... breathing ... her breath fanned his cheek and gave him new strength....
The sound of falling walls behind him; immense, hideous roarings and groanings; thunder of sliding chalk and rock and earth—he heard only the breathing of his burden, felt only the faint beating of her heart against his breast.
"Here you are!"
Somebody lifted Margaret Belman from his arms. A big soldier pushed him into a wagon, where he sprawled at full length, breathless, more dead than alive, by the side of the woman he loved; and then, with a whirr of wheels, the ambulance sped down the hillside toward safety. Behind him, in the darkness, the House of Tears shivered and crackled, and the work of ancient masons vanished piecemeal, tumbling over new cliffs, to be everlastingly engulfed and hidden from the sight of man.
Dawn came and showed, to an interested party that had travelled by road and train to the scene of the great landslide, one gray wall, standing starkly on the edge of a precipice. A portion of the wrecked floor still adhered to the ruins, and on that floor the bloodstained bed where old man Flack had laid his murdered servant....
The story that Olga Flack told the police, which appears in the official records of the place, was not exactly the same as the story she told to Mr. Reeder that afternoon when, at his invitation, she came to the flat in Bennett Street. Mr. Reeder, minus his glasses and his general air of respectability, which his vanished side-whiskers had so enhanced, was at some disadvantage.
"Yes, I think Ravini was killed," she said, "but you are wrong in supposing that I brought him to my room at the request of my father. Ravini was a very quick-witted man and recognised me. He came to Larmes Keep because he"—she hesitated—"well, he was rather fond of Miss Belman. He told me this, and I was rather amused. At that time I did not know his name, although my husband did, and I certainly did not connect him with my father's arrest. He revealed his identity, and I suppose there was something in my attitude, or something I said, which recalled the schoolgirl he had met years before. The moment he recognised me as John Flack's daughter, he also recognised Larmes Keep as my father's headquarters.
"He began to ask me questions: whether I knew where the Flack million, as he called it, was hidden. And of course I was horrified, for I knew why Daver had allowed him to come.
"My father had recently escaped from Broadmoor, and I was worried sick for fear he knew the trick that Daver had played. I wasn't normal, I suppose, and I came near to betraying my father, for I told Ravini of his escape. Ravini did not take this as I had expected; he rather overrated his own power, and was very confident. Of course, he did not know that father was practically in the house, that he came up from the cave every night"
"The real entrance to the cave was through the safe in the vestibule?" said Mr. Reeder. "That was an ingenious idea. I must confess that the safe was the last place in the world I should have considered."
"My father had it put there twenty years ago," she said. "There always was an entrance from the centre of the Keep to the caves below, many of which were used as prisons or as burying-places by the ancient owners of Larmes."
"Why did Ravini go to your room?" asked Mr. Reeder. "You will excuse the—um—indelicacy of the question, but I want"
She nodded.
"It was a last desperate effort on my part to scare Ravini from the house. You mustn't forget that I was watched all the time; Daver or my mother were never far from me, and I dared not let them know, and through them my father, that Ravini was being warned. Naturally, Ravini, being what he was, saw another reason for the invitation. He had decided to stay on until I made my request for an interview and told him that I wanted him to leave by the first train in the morning after he learned what I had to tell him."
"And what had you to tell him?" asked Mr. Reeder.
She did not answer immediately, and he repeated the question.
"That my father had decided to kill him"
Mr. Reeder's eyes almost closed.
"Are you telling me the truth, Olga?" he asked gently, and she went red and white.
"I am not a good liar, am I?" Her tone was almost defiant. "Now I'll tell you. I met Ravini when I was little more than a child. He meant ... a tremendous lot to me, but I don't think I meant very much to him. He used to come down to see me in the country where I was at school..."
"He's dead?"
She could only nod her head. Her lips were quivering.
"That is the truth," she said at last. "The horror of it was that he did not recognise me when he came to Larmes Keep. I had passed completely from his mind until I revealed myself in the garden that night."
"Is he dead?" asked Mr. Reeder for the second time.
"Yes," she said. "They struck him down outside my room—I don't know what they did with him. They put him through the safe, I think." She shuddered.
J. G. Reeder patted her hand.
"You have your memories, my child," he said to the weeping girl, "and your letters."
It occurred to him after Olga had gone that Ravini must have written rather interesting letters.