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Page 13
Sir Charles waved his hand reassuringly. "A mere nothing. It will
pass," he whispered.
"But I fear," continued Harley, "that--"
He ceased abruptly, and ran to his host's assistance, for the
latter, evidently enough, was in the throes of some sudden
illness or seizure. His fresh-coloured face was growing
positively livid, and he plucked at the edge of the table with
twitching fingers. As Harley reached his side he made a sudden
effort to stand up, throwing out his arm to grasp the other's
shoulder.
"Benson!" cried Harley, loudly. "Quick! Your master is ill!"
There came a sound of swift footsteps and the door was thrown
open.
"Too late," whispered Sir Charles in a choking voice. He began to
clutch his throat as Benson hurried into the room.
"My God!" whispered Harley. "He is dying!"
Indeed, the truth was all too apparent. Sir Charles Abingdon was
almost past speech. He was glaring across the table as though he
saw some ghastly apparition there. And now with appalling
suddenness he became as a dead weight in Harley's supporting
grasp. Raspingly, as if forced in agony from his lips:
"Fire-Tongue," he said . . . "Nicol Brinn..."
Benson, white and terror-stricken, bent over him.
"Sir Charles!" he kept muttering. "Sir Charles! What is the
matter, sir?"
A stifled shriek sounded from the doorway, and in tottered Mrs.
Howett, the old housekeeper, with other servants peering over her
shoulder into that warmly lighted dining room where Sir Charles
Abingdon lay huddled in his own chair--dead.
CHAPTER III. SHADOWS
"Had you reason to suspect any cardiac trouble, Doctor
McMurdoch?" asked Harley.
Doctor McMurdoch, a local practitioner who had been a friend of
Sir Charles Abingdon, shook his head slowly. He was a tall,
preternaturally thin Scotsman, clean-shaven, with shaggy dark
brows and a most gloomy expression in his deep-set eyes. While
the presence of his sepulchral figure seemed appropriate enough
in that stricken house, Harley could not help thinking that it
must have been far from reassuring in a sick room.
"I had never actually detected anything of the kind," replied the
physician, and his deep voice was gloomily in keeping with his
personality. "I had observed a certain breathlessness at times,
however. No doubt it is one of those cases of unsuspected
endocarditis. Acute. I take it," raising his shaggy brows
interrogatively, "that nothing had occurred to excite Sir
Charles?"
"On the contrary," replied Harley, "he was highly distressed
about some family trouble, the nature of which he was about to
confide to me when this sudden illness seized him."
He stared hard at Doctor McMurdoch, wondering how much he might
hope to learn from him respecting the affairs of Sir Charles. It
seemed almost impertinent at that hour to seek to pry into the
dead man's private life.
To the quiet, book-lined apartment stole now and again little
significant sounds which told of the tragedy in the household.
Sometimes when a distant door was opened, it would be the sobs of
a weeping woman, for the poor old housekeeper had been quite
prostrated by the blow. Or ghostly movements would become audible
from the room immediately over the library--the room to which the
dead man had been carried; muffled footsteps, vague stirrings of
furniture; each sound laden with its own peculiar portent,
awakening the imagination which all too readily filled in the
details of the scene above. Then, to spur Harley to action, came
the thought that Sir Charles Abingdon had appealed to him for
aid. Did his need terminate with his unexpected death or would
the shadow under which he had died extend now? Harley found himself
staring across the library at the photograph of Phil Abingdon.
It was of her that Sir Charles had been speaking when that
mysterious seizure had tied his tongue. That strange, fatal
illness, mused Harley, all the more strange in the case of a man
supposedly in robust health--it almost seemed like the working of
a malignant will. For the revelation, whatever its nature, had
almost but not quite been made in Harley's office that evening.
Something, some embarrassment or mental disability, had stopped
Sir Charles from completing his statement. Tonight death had
stopped him.
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