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Page 95
Mr. Henderson looked at me with pathetic hesitance.
"There are guests in the house--mourners who attended
the ceremony to-day. They--"
"Will never know, if we are in error," interrupted Smith.
"Good God! why do you delay?"
"You wish it to be kept secret?"
"You and I, Mr. Henderson, and Dr. Petrie will go now.
We require no other witnesses. We are answerable only
to our consciences."
The lawyer passed his hand across his damp brow.
"I have never in my life been called upon to come to so
momentous a decision in so short a time," he confessed.
But, aided by Smith's indomitable will, he made his decision.
As its result, we three, looking and feeling like conspirators,
hurried across the park beneath a moon whose placidity was a rebuke
to the turbulent passions which reared their strangle-growth in
the garden of England. Not a breath of wind stirred amid the leaves.
The calm of perfect night soothed everything to slumber.
Yet, if Smith were right (and I did not doubt him),
the green eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu had looked upon the scene;
and I found myself marveling that its beauty had not wilted up.
Even now the dread Chinaman must be near to us.
As Mr. Henderson unlocked the ancient iron gates he turned to Nayland Smith.
His face twitched oddly.
"Witness that I do this unwillingly," he said--"most unwillingly."
"Mine be the responsibility," was the reply.
Smith's voice quivered, responsive to the nervous vitality pent
up within that lean frame. He stood motionless, listening--and I
knew for whom he listened. He peered about him to right and left--
and I knew whom he expected but dreaded to see.
Above us now the trees looked down with a solemnity different from
the aspect of the monarchs of the park, and the nearer we came to our
journey's end the more somber and lowering bent the verdant arch--
or so it seemed.
By that path, patched now with pools of moonlight, Lord Southery
had passed upon his bier, with the sun to light his going;
by that path several generations of Stradwicks had gone
to their last resting-place.
To the doors of the vault the moon rays found free access.
No branch, no leaf, intervened. Mr. Henderson's face looked ghastly.
The keys which he carried rattled in his hand.
"Light the lantern," he said unsteadily.
Nayland Smith, who again had been peering suspiciously about into
the shadows, struck a match and lighted the lantern which he carried.
He turned to the solicitor.
"Be calm, Mr. Henderson," he said sternly. "It is your plain
duty to your client."
"God be my witness that I doubt it," replied Henderson,
and opened the door.
We descended the steps. The air beneath was damp and chill.
It touched us as with clammy fingers; and the sensation was
not wholly physical.
Before the narrow mansion which now sufficed Lord Southery, the great engineer
whom kings had honored, Henderson reeled and clutched at me for support.
Smith and I had looked to him for no aid in our uncanny task, and rightly.
With averted eyes he stood over by the steps of the tomb, whilst my friend
and myself set to work. In the pursuit of my profession I had undertaken
labors as unpleasant, but never amid an environment such as this.
It seemed that generations of Stradwicks listened to each turn of every screw.
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