Adventure stories; Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Kidnapping -- Fiction; Love stories
"It's--it's queer--and--and hurty," he whispered. "Muhammed? He would
make it well."
She pulled him to her tenderly.
"Does it hurt badly?" she asked. "Muhammed hasn't come to us--yet."
He looked wonderingly around him.
"The house--opened--and let us right in," he mused. "We came up on the
sea--right up--as fast as a train. And Dad? Dad was with us then."
She looked up questioningly at Aylmer. And he had gathered up the dead
Carbineer's cloak and was arranging it against the stern. He made a
motion towards it.
"Sleep is all the medicine we can give him," he advised. "Let him rest.
Meanwhile we must use the light while we have it."
She nodded quickly and laid the child gently down. He smiled at her
drowsily again, whispered a half-distinguishable appeal to be told when
the Moor "came back," and then nature's healing hand closed over his
eyes. He slept--the deep, dead sleep of exhaustion.
Aylmer raised the lamp. Together they paced the length of their prison.
The gray flags were bare except where the Carbineer's body lay. With a
little gesture of compassion, Aylmer straightened the stiffening limbs,
and covered the stern, unfaltering face with the dead man's
handkerchief. And then they passed on, to confront the hill of rubble
which closed the cloister's end. And here they halted, as they looked
down.
Claire shuddered.
A gray sleeve emerged from the stones and an open hand seemed to appeal
for the help which came all too late. Aylmer dragged fiercely at the
ruined wall. A block or two became unseated. These shouldered out others
to rumble at their feet.
A gray-clad body became exposed. They looked at it, instinct preparing
them to recognize what they saw. Battered and disfigured though it was,
they knew it for Miller's face.
For a moment they kept silence, looking at it fixedly. The eyes were
open, but death had wiped out from them the imperturbability which they
had held through life. Fear had gripped the gray man at the last. Horror
had been with him--even panic.
Aylmer leaned down and covered the fear-haunted eyes.
"He has gone, and taken his mystery with him," he said. "What his life
was we shall never ascertain. What led him to betray us? That is beyond
our learning. It may have been no more than fear and the desire to save
himself. I think there was something behind it all that has escaped us,
but"--he shrugged his shoulders as he looked about him--"what does it
matter now?"
He held the lantern at arm's length as he spoke, and looked searchingly
round. The gray stone ringed them in relentlessly. Was there any
expedient in which they could find a challenge to the arbitrary decree
of Fate? He saw none.
The girl at his side watched him. And then her eyes met his. And as he
spoke his voice was strangely gentle.
"God interfered between Landon and his evil purpose, as you said He
would. Perhaps, who knows, He may have other mercies reserved for us.
But in any case we must teach each other to be strong."
She nodded gravely.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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