The House of a Thousand Candles, Meredith Nicholson [13 inch ebook reader TXT] 📗
- Author: Meredith Nicholson
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chance to prove yourself the man your grandfather
wished you to be. And now you come to me in a shocking
bad humor—I really think you would like to be
insulting, Mr. Glenarm, if you could.”
“But Pickering—you came back with him; he is
here and he’s going to stay! And now that the property
belongs to you, there is not the slightest reason why
we should make any pretense of anything but enmity.
When you and Arthur Pickering stand together I take
the other side of the barricade! I suppose chivalry
would require me to vacate, so that you may enjoy at
once the spoils of war.”
“I fancy it would not be very difficult to eliminate
you as a factor in the situation,” she remarked icily.
“And I suppose, after the unsuccessful efforts of Mr.
Pickering’s allies to assassinate me, as a mild form of
elimination, one would naturally expect me to sit calmly
down and wait to be shot in the back. But you may tell
Mr. Pickering that I throw myself upon your mercy.
I have no other home than this shell over the way, and
I beg to be allowed to remain until—at least—the bluebirds
come. I hope it will not embarrass you to deliver
the message.”
“I quite sympathize with your reluctance to deliver
it yourself,” she said. “Is this all you came to say?”
“I came to tell you that you could have the house,
and everything in its hideous walls,” I snapped; “to
tell you that my chivalry is enough for some situations
and that I don’t intend to fight a woman. I had accepted
your own renouncement of the legacy in good
part, but now, please believe me, it shall be yours to-morrow.
I’ll yield possession to you whenever you ask
it—but never to Arthur Pickering! As against him
and his treasure-hunters and assassins I will hold out
for a dozen years!”
“Nobly spoken, Mr. Glenarm! Yours is really an
admirable, though somewhat complex character.”
“My character is my own, whatever it is,” I blurted.
“I shouldn’t call that a debatable proposition,” she
replied, and I was angry to find how the mirth I had
loved in her could suddenly become so hateful. She
half-turned away so that I might not see her face. The
thought that she should countenance Pickering in any
way tore me with jealous rage.
“Mr. Glenarm, you are what I have heard called a
quitter, defined in common Americanese as one who
quits! Your blustering here this afternoon can hardly
conceal the fact of your failure—your inability to keep
a promise. I had hoped you would really be of some
help to Sister Theresa; you quite deceived her—she
told me as she left to-day that she thought well of you,
—she really felt that her fortunes were safe in your
hands. But, of course, that is all a matter of past history
now.”
Her tone, changing from cold indifference to the
most severe disdain, stung me into self-pity for my stupidity
in having sought her. My anger was not against
her, but against Pickering, who had, I persuaded myself,
always blocked my path. She went on.
“You really amuse me exceedingly. Mr. Pickering
is decidedly more than a match for you, Mr. Glenarm,
—even in humor.”
She left me so quickly, so softly, that I stood staring
like a fool at the spot where she had been, and then I
went gloomily back to Glenarm House, angry, ashamed
and crestfallen.
While we were waiting for dinner I made a clean
breast of my acquaintance with her to Larry, omitting
nothing—rejoicing even to paint my own conduct as
black as possible.
“You may remember her,” I concluded, “she was the
girl we saw at Sherry’s that night we dined there. She
was with Pickering, and you noticed her—spoke of her,
as she went out.”
“That little girl who seemed so bored, or tired? Bless
me! Why her eyes haunted me for days. Lord man,
do you mean to say—”
A look of utter scorn came into his face, and he eyed
me contemptuously.
“Of course I mean it!” I thundered at him.
He took the pipe from his mouth, pressed the tobacco
viciously into the bowl, and swore steadily in Gaelic
until I was ready to choke him.
“Stop!” I bawled. “Do you think that’s helping me?
And to have you curse in your blackguardly Irish dialect!
I wanted a little Anglo-Saxon sympathy, you
fool! I didn’t mean for you to invoke your infamous
gods against the girl!”
“Don’t be violent, lad. Violence is reprehensible,”
he admonished with maddening sweetness and patience.
“What I was trying to inculcate was rather the fact,
borne in upon me through years of acquaintance, that
you are—to he bold, my lad, to be bold—a good deal
of a damned fool.”
The trilling of his r’s was like the whirring rise of
a flock of quails.
“Dinner is served,” announced Bates, and Larry led
the way, mockingly chanting an Irish love-song.
THE DOOR OF BEWILDERMENT
We had established the practice of barring all the
gates and doors at nightfall. There was no way of
guarding against an attack from the lake, whose frozen
surface increased the danger from without; but we
counted on our night patrol to prevent a surprise from
that quarter. I was well aware that I must prepare to
resist the militant arm of the law, which Pickering
would no doubt invoke to aid him, but I intended to
exhaust the possibilities in searching for the lost treasure
before I yielded. Pickering might, if he would,
transfer the estate of John Marshall Glenarm to Marian
Devereux and make the most he could of that service,
but he should not drive me forth until I had satisfied
myself of the exact character of my grandfather’s fortune.
If it had vanished, if Pickering had stolen it
and outwitted me in making off with it, that was another
matter.
The phrase, “The Door of Bewilderment,” had never
ceased to reiterate itself in my mind. We discussed a
thousand explanations of it as we pondered over the
scrap of paper I had found in the library, and every
book in the house was examined in the search for further
clues.
The passage between the house and the chapel seemed
to fascinate Larry. He held that it must have some
particular use and he devoted his time to exploring it.
He came up at noon—it was the twenty-ninth of
December—with grimy face and hands and a grin on his
face. I had spent my morning in the towers, where it
was beastly cold, to no purpose and was not in a mood
for the ready acceptance of new theories.
“I’ve found something,” he said, filling his pipe.
“Not soap, evidently!”
“No, but I’m going to say the last word on the tunnel,
and within an hour. Give me a glass of beer and a
piece of bread, and we’ll go back and see whether we’re
sold again or not.”
“Let us explore the idea and be done with it. Wait
till I tell Stoddard where we’re going.”
The chaplain was trying the second-floor walls, and
I asked him to eat some luncheon and stand guard while
Larry and I went to the tunnel.
We took with us an iron bar, an ax and a couple of
hammers. Larry went ahead with a lantern.
“You see,” he explained, as we dropped through the
trap into the passage, “I’ve tried a compass on this
tunnel and find that we’ve been working on the wrong
theory. The passage itself runs a straight line from
the house under the gate to the crypt; the ravine is a
rough crescent-shape and for a short distance the tunnel
touches it. How deep does that ravine average—about
thirty feet?”
“Yes; it’s shallowest where the house stands. it
drops sharply from there on to the lake.”
“Very good; but the ravine is all on the Glenarm side
of the wall, isn’t it? Now when we get under the wall
I’ll show you something.”
“Here we are,” said Larry, as the cold air blew in
through the hollow posts. “Now we’re pretty near that
sharp curve of the ravine that dips away from the wall.
Take the lantern while I get out the compass. What
do you think that C on the piece of paper means? Why,
chapel, of course. I have measured the distance from
the house, the point of departure, we may assume, to
the chapel, and three-fourths of it brings us under those
beautiful posts. The directions are as plain as daylight.
The passage itself is your N. W., as the compass
proves, and the ravine cuts close in here; therefore, our
business is to explore the wall on the ravine side.”
“Good! but this is just wall here—earth with a layer
of brick and a thin coat of cement. A nice job it must
have been to do the work—and it cost the price of a
tiger hunt,” I grumbled.
“Take heart, lad, and listen,”—and Larry began
pounding the wall with a hammer, exactly under the
north gate-post. We had sounded everything in and
about the house until the process bored me.
“Hurry up and get through with it,” I jerked impatiently,
holding the lantern at the level of his head. It
was sharply cold under the posts and I was anxious to
prove the worthlessness of his idea and be done.
Thump! thump!
“There’s a place here that sounds a trifle off the key.
You try it.”
I snatched the hammer and repeated his soundings.
Thump! thump!
There was a space about four feet square in the wall
that certainly gave forth a hollow sound.
“Stand back!” exclaimed Larry eagerly. “Here goes
with the ax.”
He struck into the wall sharply and the cement
chipped off in rough pieces, disclosing the brick beneath.
Larry paused when he had uncovered a foot of
the inner layer, and examined the surface.
“They’re loose—these bricks are loose, and there’s
something besides earth behind them!”
I snatched the hammer and drove hard at the wall.
The bricks were set up without mortar, and I plucked
them out and rapped with my knuckles on a wooden
surface.
Even Larry grew excited as we flung out the bricks.
“Ah, lad,” he said, “the old gentleman had a way
with him—he had a way with him!” A brick dropped
on his foot and he howled in pain.
“Bless the old gentleman’s heart! He made it as
easy for us as he could. Now, for the Glenarm millions,
—red money all piled up for the ease of counting it—
a thousand pounds in every pile.”
“Don’t be a fool, Larry,” I coughed at him, for the
brick dust and the smoke of Larry’s pipe made breathing
difficult.
“That’s all the loose brick—bring the lantern closer,”
—and we peered through the aperture upon a wooden
door, in which strips of iron were deep-set. It was fastened
with a padlock and Larry reached down for the ax.
“Wait!” I called, drawing closer with the lantern.
“What’s this?”
The wood of the door was fresh and white, but burned
deep on the surface, in this order, were the words:
THE DOOR
OF
BEWILDERMENT
“There are dead men inside, I dare say! Here, my
lad, it’s not for me to turn loose the family skeletons,”
—and Larry stood aside while I swung the ax and
brought it down with a crash on the padlock. It was
of no flimsy stuff and the remaining bricks cramped me,
but
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