Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 4).djvu/464

 end of the room opened, and Bertha Trelawney entered like a shadow, and we stood face to face. She seemed to me to have grown two or three years older, and she wore a look of ineffable mental suffering.

"You wish to see me?" she murmured, faintly.

"I do, madam," I answered, as I offered her a chair, into which she sank like a mechanical figure. "I am sorry to disturb you at this hour; sorry, too, to intrude upon your sorrow, for you have a sorrow, and a skeleton haunts you."

"What do you mean?" she asked, as she shuddered, sighed, and looked nervously around the room.

"I must ask you another question by way of answer to yours," I said. "Did you know David Brinsley?"

"I have seen him," she replied, after some moments of hesitancy.

"Do you believe him to be dead?" The question startled her.

She rose to her feet suddenly; her eyes flashed, and her pale cheeks flushed a little. Pointing at me, and looking altogether as if she was some imperious ruler uttering a stern decree, she said, hoarsely:—

"Go! quit the house. I'll answer no more questions."

Bearing in mind that it is best to leave an angry woman, like a sleeping dog, alone; and as Miss Bertha Trelawney had so far played into my hands that I felt further questioning then would be supererogation, I bowed as gracefully as I could, and said:—

"Certainly, madam, I will comply with your request," and bidding her good-night, which elicited no response, I withdrew; but I was conscious that I took forth from that chamber of shadows a link that would prove an important one in the chain I was patiently trying to piece together. The circumstances of the hour necessarily made me thoughtful, and almost unconsciously I found myself going down the leaf-strewn path beneath the avenue of trees that led to the lodge-gate, when suddenly I was aroused by the sound of someone approaching.

I immediately stepped off the path and amongst the trees, where I stood concealed. The approaching person proved to be Mr. Trelawney. I followed with the intention of accosting him, but ere he had gone very far his sister met him. She had evidently been on the watch. She was without bonnet, but had wrapped a shawl around her head. She seized his arm eagerly, and I heard her say, in a tone pregnant with anxiety and grief:—

"Oh, Samuel! I am so glad you have come. That dreadful man Donovan has been here, and it seems to me as if he had tugged at my very heartstrings and rifled my brain. I must not—dare not—see him again, for he makes me weak and powerless, when I should be strong and defiant."

"What do you mean?" demanded her brother, hotly.

What answer she made to this I know not, for they had passed beyond the radius of my hearing. Yet something—instinct or prescience, call it what you will—prompted me to linger about the house, as if in a vague and undefined way I expected the trees or