CHAPTER XI.

A CLUE.

Burgo crossed to the door and stood listening with bated breath and one ear pressed against it, but the silence indoors remained unbroken. After waiting for full two minutes, but which seemed to him nothing short of a quarter of an hour, he went back and gave a longer and a still more vigorous tug at the rope. Then he listened again, and presently he was rewarded by hearing the banging of a door somewhere in the lower parts of the house, followed by a peculiar thumping sound, faint at first, but which gradually came nearer as it quitted the flagged hall and advanced slowly up the oaken staircase, its approach being marked by a distinct tap on each stair, twenty-six in all. Burgo had counted them many a time when a boy, just as he had slidden many a time down the broad, polished oaken balusters.

As he stood listening his heart beat a little faster than common, and he told himself that had that sound broken upon his ear in the dead of night, he could scarcely have heard it without a shudder. Nearer it came till it stopped opposite the door of his room. Then the key was turned, and the door flung roughly open, and to Burgo's astonished eyes there stood revealed a short, thickset, blear-eyed old man, with what seemed to him a most unprepossessing cast of face, whose chief garment was a greasy, much-worn overcoat, which reached nearly to his heels. He was lame, and it was the tapping of the heavy iron-shod stick which he used to aid him in walking that had so puzzled Burgo.

For a few seconds the men stared at each other in silence. Then Burgo said: "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

"Didn't you ring, sir?" asked the man. Burgo nodded. "Very well, then, ain't I come to let you out?"

"Who told you to come and let me out, as you term it?"

"My leddy."

"And where is her ladyship?"

"Gone."

"Gone! And where is Sir Everard?

"Gone too--they're all gone."

For a moment or two Burgo's brain reeled, and he had to steady himself against the doorpost. He was weak from want of food, and he had not yet recovered from the effects of the narcotic.

"And when did Sir Everard and Lady Clinton take their departure?" was his next question.

"Between seven and eight o'clock last night."

"Bound for where!"

The fellow favoured Burgo with a cunning grin. "It's none o' my business to answer that question, sir. Maybe I know, and maybe I don't, but if you ask no questions, you'll be told no lies."

Burgo smothered the execration that rose to his lips. To have vented his temper on such a fellow would have been absurd. Besides, he had not done with him.

"And who may you be, my friend, if the question is not an impertinent one?" he asked.

"I'm the caretaker appointed by her leddyship. Me and my old woman have got to look after the house while the family's out of town."

"What has poor Benny Hines done to be turned adrift?" queried Burgo to himself. Then aloud he said: "And so you were told by her ladyship to come and let me out when I rang, were you?"

Again the man grinned. "What I was told was, that there was a young gentleman upstairs what had taken more to drink than was good for him, and that he was sleeping it off, and that when he rang I was to go upstairs and unlock the door."

Mr. Brabazon laughed aloud; but it was not a pleasant laugh to hear. "Oh, ma chère tante, que je vous aime beaucoup!" he exclaimed. The man was to come when I rang the bell, but care had been taken by robbing him of his matchbox and cutting the bell rope to delay the summons as long as possible.

For a few moments he stood considering, then drawing half a sovereign from his pocket and balancing it on the end of his forefinger, he said with a meaning look at the man: "Come now, I have no doubt that if you chose you could tell me where the luggage which the family took with them was addressed to."

The man glanced from the coin to Burgo's face, and then back again with a cunning leer. Then drawing a step or two nearer, he said in something between a whisper and a croak: "I don't mind telling you, sir, that I did make it my business--and why not, hey?--to see where her leddyship's big trunk was directed for.",

"Yes," said Burgo.

"Brussels was the word I read, sir, in letters a inch long."

Burgo tossed him the coin. The information was well worth it.

Half an hour later a hansom deposited him and his portmanteau at the door of his lodgings.

When he had had a bath and some breakfast he felt more like himself again. Then he lighted a pipe and sat down to consider.

His distrust of Lady Clinton, which not all her smiles and all her amiability had sufficed to eradicate, had proved to be but too well grounded. When she had found him, as the result of an accident, reinstated in Sir Everard's good graces she accepted the situation like the clever woman she was, but it had only made her all the more determined to carry out her own schemes, and she had done so with a boldness and a decision which gave Burgo a far higher opinion of her powers than he had held before. She had brushed him from her path after a fashion which not one woman in a thousand would have had either the brain to plan or the courage to carry out. Once more she had Sir Everard under her sole control, and there was no one to say her nay. What had heretofore lurked in the background of Burgo's mind as nothing more than a sinister shadow now took shape and consistency--grew and spread till it overshadowed him like a huge funereal pall, on which an invisible finger traced in letters of molten flame the one word _Murder_. Burgo faced the word while he shuddered at it. By what purpose save one had she been actuated from the beginning?--and recent events clearly proved that she was still as firmly bent on carrying it out as ever she had been. What that end was it seemed to him there was no longer any need to ask.

One solitary gleam of comfort came to him, and one only. It was derived from his uncle's words: "I shall not die till after the 12th of October." Meanwhile he had been spirited away--whither?

"If her ladyship thinks she has finally choked me off she will find herself very considerably mistaken," said Burgo to himself with a grim smile, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "Ten o'clock to-morrow morning will find me in Brussels."

There were two people whom he told himself he should like to see before leaving town--to wit, Mr. Garden and old Benny Hines. So, leaving the packing of his portmanteau till later in the day, he now sallied forth with the intention of calling on the latter of the two first. He had not forgotten that the old man's niece was parlour-maid at No. 22, and it seemed to him, seeing how unlikely it was that Lady Clinton should have taken any of the servants with her, unless it were her own maid and her husband's valet, that he might be able to obtain indirectly, through Benny, some information with regard to the proceedings of the day before, which would prove serviceable to him.

On reaching the house he found there both Benny and the old man's niece, and as the latter had already exhausted her budget of news as far as her uncle and aunt were concerned, she was only too glad to have another listener, and that one a handsome young man, to what she could tell about the doings at No. 22.

It appeared that no sooner was breakfast over on the previous day than Lady Clinton summoned all the servants into the morning-room, with the exception of her maid and her husband's valet, and there told them that, in consequence of Dr. Hoskins having ordered Sir Everard to quit London with the least possible delay, the establishment would be broken up that very day, that they, the domestics, would be paid a month's wages each in lieu of notice, and that they must one and all be ready to quit by five o'clock that same afternoon. After that she (Polly) had been employed all the morning in packing trunks under her mistress's supervision. About mid-day the Signora Dusanti and her little girl had taken their departure. Somewhat later the servants had all been summoned again to the morning-room and paid what was due to them, with a little present to each over and above their wages. By six o'clock there was no one left in the house save her ladyship, Sir Everard, the maid, and the valet. And that was all Miss Polly had to tell.

Burgo, without in the least doubting the girl's good faith, was somewhat sceptical on the latter point. Details which to her might seem of no importance might be of vital consequence to him.

"And did nobody trouble to wonder what had become of me, Polly?" he smilingly asked, "nor why I had so mysteriously disappeared?"

"Oh, yes, sir, Mr. Vallance told us at breakfast that you had been called away in the course of the night to attend the deathbed of a near relation."

"Ah, then Vallance _is_ one of her ladyship's tools, as I suspected all along," was Burgo's unspoken comment. "My uncle probably suspected it too, which would account for his unconcealed dislike of the fellow." What he said aloud was, "It was a statement which reflected great credit on Mr. Vallance's powers of invention."

"Was it not true, then, sir?" asked Polly, with wide-open eyes.

"Not one word of it. But never mind that now. I suppose you did not see Sir Everard again before you left the house?"

"Oh, yes, I did, sir. The poor gentleman was much worse yesterday, and before Dobson, the butler, left, her ladyship asked him to help Vallance to carry Sir Everard downstairs into the drawing-room."

"To carry him down! Do you mean to say that he could no longer come downstairs with the help of Vallance's arm on one side and the balusters on the other, as he had lately been in the habit of doing?"

"He had to be carried down, sir, by the two men between them. As Dobson said, 'He couldn't put one foot before the other.' I just caught a glimpse of him and it was enough to make my heart ache. His face looked more like that of a corpse than of a still breathing man."

Burgo's heart ached too, but the grief he felt was largely leavened with indignation. That his uncle in the course of a few short hours should have changed so radically for the worse was to his mind consistent with one theory, and one only. Sir Everard had had some drug, or pill, or potion administered to him which had brought on a sudden relapse, and had thereby incapacitated him for protesting against, or offering any opposition to, whatever arrangements his wife might choose to make. Burgo cursed her ladyship in his heart as he sat there.

A minute or two passed before he could control himself sufficiently to question Polly further.

Then he said: "I suppose you didn't happen to overhear for what place her ladyship was bound? It would most likely be some place abroad--perhaps in Italy or the South of France."

"The label on her ladyship's trunk was directed to some place--it was a queer name, and I can't quite call it to mind--'near Oakbarrow station.'"

"What!" exclaimed Burgo, with a burst of amazement. "Are you sure of that, Polly?"

"I read it with my own eyes, sir."

"This is news indeed! Was the name of the place you can't quite call to mind Garion Keep?"

Polly considered for a moment or two with a finger pressed to her lips. Then she said with an air of conviction, "Yes, sir, that was it--I'm sure of it now--Garion Keep; and a very funny name I thought it."

"That old scoundrel at No. 22 lied to me in order to put me off the scent," said Burgo to himself; "whether of his own accord or by her ladyship's instructions does not matter now."

After a few more questions Burgo took his leave. Polly had nothing more of consequence to tell him.

From there he drove to Mr. Garden's office, only to learn, to his great disappointment, that the lawyer had gone for a brief holiday. He felt that he had never stood more in need of his counsel than just then. After a call on Mr. Hendry, the jobmaster, he made his way back to his lodgings.

The information furnished him by Polly with regard to Lady Clinton's destination had simplified matters for him exceedingly. Instead of following his uncle and her to Brussels--supposing them to have gone there--all he had now to do, so as at once to bring himself into proximity with them, was to book himself for Oakbarrow station by the night mail from Euston.

Burgo had been at Garion Keep for a couple of days with his uncle about six years previously, and only a short time after the latter had succeeded to the property--such as it was. It had been a bequest to him from a dear friend, an old bachelor without kith or kin, and he had run down from town, taking his nephew with him, to look at the place. It was an old-fashioned ramshackle structure, in a great state of disrepair, fronting the sea, and situated on a bleak and desolate reach of the Cumberland coast. Unfortunately the weather had been very cold and stormy during the time they were there, and Sir Everard, after a stay of forty-eight hours, during which he had never ceased to shiver, had been glad to turn his back on the place and to hurry southward again as fast as steam could carry him.

Now, it was quite conceivable to Burgo why Lady Clinton should be desirous of carrying off her husband to the Keep. There she would be able, so to speak, to immure him; there he would be lost to the world; there, without a creature to interfere with her, she would be able to slowly consummate her fell design. But what he could not understand was how her ladyship had become acquainted with the place and its suitability for her purpose. He could hardly believe that Sir Everard would have suggested it of his own accord, and yet Lady Clinton must surely have known something, nay, a good deal, about it before venturing with her invalid husband on so long a journey. From what Burgo had seen of her he took her pre-eminently for a woman who calculated each step before she took it, and made sure there was firm ground for her foot to rest upon.

As we have seen, it had been Burgo's intention to leave Euston that same evening by the mail train; but, in the course of the afternoon, in the act of leaping off a bus, he slipped and sprained his ankle so severely that for the next ten days he was a prisoner to his room, and compelled to divide his time between bed and sofa.

It was merely one instance more of _l'homme propose_.