Terror keep
“Fix your belt to the rod, hold fast to the nearest rung, and I will
climb up over you,” said Mr. Reeder.
Never an acrobat moved with greater nimbleness than this man who so
loved to pose as an ancient. There was need for hurry. The very iron
to which he was clinging trembled and vibrated in his grasp. The fall
of stone down the well was continuous and constituted a very real
danger. Some of the rungs, displaced by the earth tremors, came away
in their grasp. They were less than half-way up when the air was
filled with a sighing and a hissing that brought Reeder’s heart to his
mouth.
Holding on to a rung of the ladder, he put out his hand. The opposite
wall, which should have been well beyond his reach, was at less than
arm’s-length away!
The well was bulging under unexpected and tremendous stresses.
“Why have you stopped?” asked Gray anxiously.
“To scratch my head,” snarled Reeder. “Hurry!”
They climbed another forty or fifty feet, when from below came a
rumble and a crash that set the whole well shivering.
They could see starlight now, and distant objects, which might be
heads, that overhung the mouth of the well.
“Hurry!” breathed J. G. Reeder, and moved as rapidly as his younger
companion.
_Boom!_
The sound of a great gun, followed by a thunderous rumbling, surged up
the well.
J. G. Reeder set his teeth. Please God Margaret Belman had escaped
from that hell--or was mercifully dead!
Nearer and nearer to the mouth they climbed, and every step they took
was accompanied by some new and awful noise from behind them. Gray’s
breath was coming in gasps.
“I can’t go any further!” croaked the detective. “My strength has
gone!”
“Go on, you miserable…!” yelled Reeder, and whether it was the shock
of hearing such violent language from so mild a man, or the discovery
that he was within a few feet of safety, Gray took hold of himself,
climbed a few more rungs, and then felt hands grip his arm and drag
him to safety.
Mr. Reeder staggered out into the night air and blinked at the ring of
men who stood in the light of a naphtha flare.
Was it his imagination, or was the ground swaying beneath his feet?
“Nobody else to come up, Mr. Reeder?”
The officer in charge of the Engineers asked the question, and Reeder
shook his head.
“Then all you fellows clear!” said the officer sharply. “Move towards
the house and take the road to Siltbury--the cliff is collapsing in
sections.”
The flare was put out, and the soldiers, abandoning their apparatus,
broke into a steady run towards Larmes Keep.
“Where is the girl--Miss Crewe?” asked Reeder, suddenly remembering
her.
“They’ve taken her to the house,” said Big Bill Gordon, who had made a
mysterious appearance from nowhere. “And, Reeder, we have captured the
gold-convoy! The two men in charge were a fellow who calls himself
Hothling and another named Dean--I think you know their real names.…
Caught them just as the trolley was driving into the quarry cave. This
means a big thing for you----”
“To hell with you and your big things!” stormed Reeder in a fury.
“What big things do I want, my man, but the big thing I have lost?”
Very wisely, Big Bill Gordon made no attempt to argue the matter.
They found the banqueting-hall crowded with policemen, detectives, and
soldiers. The girl had been taken into Daver’s office, and here he
found her in the hands of the three women servants who had been
commandeered to run the establishment whilst the police were in
occupation. The dust had been washed from her face, and she was
conscious, but still in that half-bemused condition in which Reeder
had found her.
She stared at him for a long time as though she did not recognise him
and was striving to recall that portion of her past in which he had
figured. When she spoke, it was to ask a question.
“There is no news of--father?”
“None,” said Reeder, almost brutally. “I think it will be better for
you, young lady, if he is dead.”
She nodded.
“He _is_ dead,” she said with conviction. And then, rousing herself,
she struggled to a sitting position and looked at the servants. Mr.
Reeder interpreted that glance and sent the women away.
“I don’t know what you are going to do with me,” she said, “but I
suppose I am to be arrested--I should be arrested, for I have known
all that was happening, and I tried to lure you to your death.”
“In Bennett Street, of course,” said Mr. Reeder. “I recognised you the
moment I saw you here--you were the lady with the rouged face.”
She nodded and continued.
“Before you take me away, I wish you would let me have some papers
that are in the safe,” she said. “They have no value to anybody but
myself.”
He was curious enough to ask her what they were.
“They are letters… in the big, flat box that is locked.… Even Daver
did not dare open that. You see, Mr. Reeder”--her breath came more
quickly--“before I met my--husband, I had a little romance--the sort
of romance that a young girl has when she is innocent enough to dream
and has enough faith in God to hope. Is my husband arrested?” she
asked suddenly.
Mr. Reeder was silent for a moment. Sooner or later she must know the
truth, and he had an idea that this awful truth would not cause her
very much distress.
“Your husband is dead,” he said.
Her eyes opened wider.
“Did my father----”
“Your father killed him--I suppose so. I am afraid I was the cause.
Coming back to find Margaret Belman, I told Daver all that I knew
about your marriage. Your father must have been hiding behind the
panelling and heard.”
“I see,” she said simply. “Of course it was father who killed him--I
knew that would happen as soon as he learnt the truth. Would you think
I was heartless if I said I am glad? I don’t think I am really glad:
I’m just relieved. Will you get the box for me?”
She put her hand down her blouse, and pulled out a gold chain at the
end of which were two keys.
“The first of these is the key of the safe. If you want to see
the--the letters, I will show them to you, but I would rather not.”
At that moment he heard hurrying footsteps in the passage outside; the
door was pulled open, and a young officer of Engineers appeared.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but Captain Merriman thinks we ought to
abandon this house. I’ve got out all the servants and we’re rushing
them down to Siltbury.”
Reeder stooped down and drew the girl to her feet.
“Take this lady with you,” he said, and, to Olga: “I will get your
box, and I may not--I am not quite sure--ask you to open it for me.”
He waited till the officer had gone, and added:
“Just now I am feeling rather--tender towards young lovers. That is a
concession which an old lover may make to youth.”
His voice had grown husky. There was something in his face that
brought the tears to her eyes.
“Was it… not Margaret Belman?” she asked in a hushed voice, and she
knew before he answered that she had guessed well.
Tragedy dignified this strange-looking man, so far past youth, yet
holding the germ of youth in his heart. His hand fell gently on her
shoulder.
“Go, my dear,” he said. “I will do what I can for you--perhaps I can
save you a great deal of unhappiness.”
He waited until she had gone, then strolled into the deserted lounge.
What an eternity had passed since he had sat there, munching his toast
and drinking his cup of tea, with an illustrated newspaper on his
knees!
The place in the half gloom seemed full of ancient ghosts. The House
of Tears! These walls had held sorrows more poignant, more hopeless
than his.
He went to the panelled wall and rubbed his finger down the little
scar in the wood that a thrown knife had made, and smiled at the
triviality of that offence.
He had reason to remember the circumstances, without the dramatic
reminder which nature gave. Suddenly the floor beneath him swayed, and
the two lights went out. He guessed that the earth tremors were
responsible for the snapping of wires, and he hurried into the
vestibule, and had passed from the house, when he remembered Olga
Crewe’s request.
The lantern was still hanging about his neck. He switched it on and
went back to the safe and inserted the key. As he did so, the house
swayed backwards and forwards like a drunken man. The clatter of
glass, the crackle of overturned wardrobes, startled him, so that he
almost fled with his mission unperformed. He even hesitated; but a
promise was a promise to J. G. Reeder. He put the key in again, turned
the lock and pulled open one of the great doors--and Margaret Belman
fell into his arms!
CHAPTER XX
/He/ stood, holding the half-swooning girl, peering into the face he
could only see by the reflected light of his lantern, and then
suddenly the safe fell back from him without warning, leaving a gaping
cavern.
He lifted her in his arms, ran across the vestibule into the open air.
Somebody shouted his name in the distance, and he ran blindly towards
the voice. Once he stumbled over a great crack that had appeared in
the earth, but managed to recover himself, though he was forced to
release his grip of the girl.
She was alive… breathing… her breath fanned his cheek and gave him new
strength.…
The sound of falling walls behind him; immense, hideous roarings and
groanings; thunder of sliding chalk and rock and earth--he heard only
the breathing of his burden, felt only the faint beating of her heart
against his breast.
“Here you are!”
Somebody lifted Margaret Belman from his arms. A big soldier pushed
him into a wagon, where he sprawled at full length, breathless, more
dead than alive, by the side of the woman he loved; and then, with a
whirr of wheels, the ambulance sped down the hillside towards safety.
Behind him, in the darkness, the House of Tears shivered and crackled,
and the work of ancient masons vanished piecemeal, tumbling over new
cliffs, to be everlastingly engulfed and hidden from the sight of man.
Dawn came and showed to an interested party that had travelled by road
and train to the scene of the great landslide, one grey wall, standing
starkly on the edge of a precipice. A portion of the wrecked floor
still adhered to the ruins, and on that floor the blood-stained bed
where old man Flack had laid his murdered servant.…
The story which Olga Flack told the police, which appears in the
official records of the place, was not exactly the same as the story
she told to Mr. Reeder that afternoon when, at his invitation, she
came to the flat in Bennett Street. Mr. Reeder, minus his glasses and
his general air of respectability, which his vanished side-whiskers
had so enhanced, was at some disadvantage.
“Yes, I think Ravini was killed,” she said, “but you are wrong in
supposing that I brought him to my room at the request of my father.
Ravini was a very quick-witted man, and recognised me. He came to
Larmes Keep because he”--she hesitated--“well, he was rather fond of
Miss Belman. He told me this, and I was rather amused. At that time I
did not know his name, although my husband did, and I certainly did
not connect him with my father’s arrest. He revealed his identity, and
I suppose there was something in my attitude, or something I said,
which recalled the schoolgirl he had met years before. The moment he
recognised me as John Flack’s daughter, he also recognised Larmes Keep
as my father’s headquarters.
“He began to ask me questions: whether I knew where the Flack million,
as he called it, was hidden. And of course I was horrified, for I knew
why Daver had allowed him to come.
“My father had recently escaped from Broadmoor, and I was worried sick
for fear he knew the trick that Daver had played. I wasn’t normal, I
suppose, and I came near to betraying my father, for I told Ravini of