lightning-like, upon my consciousness. "Thank heaven! thank heaven!" I could hear her sob. I hoped that she did not look–that she had closed her eyes, or covered them with her hands, but Wildred did not give me time to make suggestions. He was more nimble, if he was less strong, than I.
I could feel, through all his writhings, that he was trying to force me along with him towards a certain corner of the room, and, realising it, resolved to thwart him, whatever his object might be. I had come to the knowledge exactly one second too late, however. He had managed to place his foot on a bell concealed under one of the rugs on the floor, and I heard its summons go pealing shrilly out through the house.
I remembered how I had looked for a bell in this room once before; it was scarcely to be wondered at, considering its position, that I had not found it.
In another moment the servant-accomplice would come to the assistance of his master. Had it not been for Karine's presence I felt that I should not have found it difficult in my present mood to have held them both in check, but as it was I should greatly have preferred only one antagonist.
The struggle in which I was engaged with Wildred had degenerated into a species of wrestling match. I had him down on one knee at last, and bending his arms behind him while he poured forth a volley of deadly oaths–his strange, light eyes flashing into mine–I attempted to tie his hands together with my silk handkerchief, wound into a slip-knot I had learned to make at sea.
He was slippery as a serpent in my grasp, and it was taking all I knew to manage him, when a cry from Karine gave me the first warning that I was attacked from behind.
The confidential man had stolen in as noiselessly as I had crept upon the roof and to the skylight.
"Take that, then!" I heard him snarl savagely, and a low exclamation from my darling told me that in some way he had revenged himself upon her. For an instant I lost my presence of mind and my hold upon Wildred. Involuntarily I turned to go to Karine's rescue, and the movement was a fatal one. Wildred was up like a rod of steel that has been forcibly bent backward. The two threw themselves upon me together. I felt a sharp, hot pain run fiercely through my side, and knew that I had been stabbed. My one thought was for the girl. If they worked their will upon me, and killed me before her eyes, what was to become of her?
"Run, Karine–escape!" I panted. I could not see her, but I was assured that she had not obeyed by the loud screams for help which she was desperately uttering.
Again I got Wildred down, but the other man was on top of me, and for the second time I felt the burning pain, this time in my shoulder. I fought like a mad creature now, with the intent to kill, which I had not had before; but the conviction grew within me that, battle as I might, the effort would be all in vain.
Sparks danced before my eyes, and then everything grew dim. Out of chaos came a shriek from Karine. Could it be a cry of joy? What reason was there for rejoicing?
But there followed a renewed crashing of glass, the muffled thud of feet descending from a height upon the soft surface of rugs, and the sound of men's voices.
It seemed to me that Cunningham's was among them, but a strange, cold pall of darkness enveloped me, and I knew no more.
Afterwards I learned how it was that Cunningham, with two detectives from Scotland Yard, had arrived in the very "nick of time."
His statements to the police authorities had been necessarily so elaborate, and had been deemed so extraordinary, that it had taken some time to create the desired impression at headquarters.
He had been still at "The Yard" when my wire had arrived. When at last he had induced the "powers that be" to grant a warrant for Wildred's arrest on suspicion of having murdered Harvey Farnham, and to send a couple of men to the House by the Lock, where my telegram had announced that he was probably to be found, it was too late to catch anything save the ten o'clock train.
Having reached the door of the grim old mansion, Karine's cries for help, ringing out upon the night through the broken skylight, had told them in which direction to proceed, and they had used the same method of surmounting the obstacles which I had adopted and left for them.
The servant was secured, but Wildred, seeing with his usual quickness that all hope of escape was over, had shot himself through the heart before the officers could reach him. So died a man who had accomplished the death of many another, and through his humble accomplice (who now breaks stones at Portland), and the wretched wife found prisoned in a room upstairs, the secrets of his numerous crimes and the dark House by the Lock were revealed.
It was not for many a day after that night's terrible experience that I heard all the truth. What with the two wounds I had received, and the strain of the past few weeks, which had begun to tell upon me at last, for a time I lay in rather a precarious condition. But one morning I woke to consciousness, and found that the beautiful face which had been near me in my dreams was present in reality. Karine and her brother had nursed me through more than a fortnight's illness.
Had I been quite myself I would have felt that then was not the time to speak of love to the girl who had endured so much. But the words were uttered before my judgment would let me restrain them, as it so often had done in the first sweet, sad days of our acquaintance.
"Forgive me," I said weakly. "I'm a brute. You've been such an angel to me–and I oughtn't to have told you now."
"Oughtn't you?" she answered softly. "Do you remember my saying one evening at the Savoy Hotel that there was only one thing in the world which might even then keep me from making a marriage that was horrible to me?"
"I remember well," I returned. "I remember everything you ever said to me. Will you tell me what that one thing was?"
"I meant if you had loved me. Sometimes I–thought you did, but you would never say so. You only asked to be 'my friend.'"
"Oh, if I had but known–if I had but dared!" I exclaimed. "I was perishing of love for you from the first night I ever saw your face. Is it too late now? I don't ask to be your friend, I ask to be everything–your lover, and your husband."
"And I give you everything," she said.
So it came about that the sunshine of happiness drove forth the black shadows which would fain have lingered to haunt us like ghosts from the House by the Lock.
The Guests of Hercules
