CHAPTER XXVIII.

A MURDER IN THE DARK.

“Salome, I am going to shut up the house and take all the ladies away! They have gone down to the yacht already. Pack your things, and be as quick as you can, the three of you. I don’t want to waste any time in getting off.”

The servants’ quarters were on the other side of the house from Andria’s shaded veranda; the three women had heard nothing as they sat chattering with the doors shut to keep out the noontide heat. Yet Salome leaped to her feet with a sudden foreboding, as she saw her master open the door.

There was a look on his face she had reason to know, and as he spoke her own grew ashy. Yet to Chloe and Amelia Jane his matter-of-fact words were joyful tidings indeed, and scarcely uttered before they were gone to gather their belongings. But Salome stood just as she was when she sprang up and saw her master’s face.

“Go!” he said sharply. “I’ve no time to wait for you.”

“Where’m I going?” she asked sullenly. “Where’ve I got to go?”

“Where you like, but out of this and away from me! I’ve no further use for a servant who harbors men in my house in secret.”

So he knew! Salome’s face grew a shade more gray.

“He’s gone!” she said. “He went last night.”

“He’s gone, but you’ll go, too!” he answered, with a meaning not lost on her. “Get your things.”

“Master, master!” her voice came strangled as she threw herself at his feet. “I can’t go nowhere, you know dat.”

“It’s no concern of mine. I’ve hidden you long enough when you betray me. You can come or stay, or drown or hang, as you like. Thank your stars I don’t send you back to Jamaica! You fool, who’s to know you in England?”

But she had seen his eyes as she scrambled to her feet. There would be no England for her. She knew too much to leave, and too much to tell where he was going. A dark night, a high wind and a heavy sea, and--even her miserable life was dear to her!

“Dat’s true, dey’s no one’ll know me in England,” she said softly; too softly if the man had been his usual acute self. She turned quietly away and followed the other women.

Her master’s heart “beat quick and thick, like a madman on a drum,” as he stood in the scorching courtyard. No one could get to the big house without crossing the paved yard, which no one should do. Raimond, with his white sleeve rolled up till an ugly stain was hidden, had carried Beryl down to the yacht. Her fall had stunned her, and she hung heavy like the dead in his arms. What he had begun in Andria’s room the crazy man and his jaguars would finish, when the house lay empty and deserted, with no one to bar the doors.

Erceldonne turned with a sharp word as the three black servants came out, each with a bundle on her head.

Something had quieted Chloe and Amelia Jane, or else it was the dreaded presence of their master that lent speed to their feet as they hurried down the path before him. Salome had never opened her lips as she gathered up her clothes. She walked before Egerton with a slowness that maddened him, for he dared not precede her. The great door of the house stood open as they passed, and she saw it. What man in his senses would go away and leave his house open, for the things that haunted the place to ravage? Yet she said nothing as they went on in the blazing sun.

There was not a sound anywhere; not a breeze even, when they reached the corner of the path and saw the open bay before them, with the boat waiting at the shore and Chloe and Amelia Jane already in it in their haste to be gone. Yet even Chloe and ’Melia Jane leaped to their feet at the sudden strident howl that waked the noonday hush. They had heard that cry before; in the night it had broken their dreams, but in the broad daylight it brought the terror of death on them.

From far up behind the house it rang, something between a wail and a scream, but full of a hideous menace, a ravening fierceness. Before Erceldonne could draw breath, it seemed as though hell had broken loose behind him. Sharp, snarling cries ran under that awful, ceaseless wailing, and each second were louder and louder.

“Run!” cried the man, with white lips, feeling in his pocket for the revolver that was not there. “Run!”

But Salome, like a black statue, stood in his way.

“Dey smells de white blood,” she said politely. “De meat fur de jaguars’ wedding.”

With a furious word, Erceldonne sprang past her. He was brave enough, but not for the terror that runs scenting its prey in daylight. He tripped and fell headlong over the bundle she threw in front of him, but before she could seize him he was up on his feet and running wildly. In the hideous uproar that came nearer and nearer, Salome laughed.

“Run, run!” she screamed aloud. “You ain’t going quick enough; dey got de heels of you!” She bowed and swayed in horrible derision, as he stumbled, recovered himself, and tore on. The next instant she had taken to her heels and was running faster than Erceldonne himself. But not to the boat. Something yellow and white had flashed by her, hunting silently, without a sound. By instinct, she ran, she knew not where; and as she ran she shrieked.

The Italian captain of the _Flores_ had been a cutthroat from his youth up, and now made an excellent livelihood by hiring out his yacht and asking no questions. But even he was pale as he stood on the bridge and took the boat away from that accursed island. That there should be wild animals in so desolate a place seemed natural enough to a man who knew nothing of the Azores except the name; yet he had never seen even tigers so fierce as to hunt men in broad day. And hunt they had. Mr. Egerton had saved his life by a bare fifty yards, and the screams of the black servants, who had been too fat to run, rang in the captain’s ears still.

No wonder the signorina had been carried on board half-dead, or that the two colored women crouched, weeping, on the deck.

“The place is accursed,” he said sharply to his first officer, who would have liked to stay and hunt the strange, fierce beast that had stood snarling at the very water’s edge and disappeared like magic as he drew his revolver. “If Mattel had not been a son of the devil he would not have got off in his skin last night.”

Mr. Raimond Erle drew a long breath of relief as he sat with his father in the saloon and heard the steady sound of the screw. He glanced at Erceldonne, seated opposite him, and aged by ten years by that flight down the glaring hillside.

“That was a damned lucky escape,” he said slowly. “I didn’t half-believe in your beasts before. But they’ve done well by you now!”

“How?”

Erceldonne’s breath came unevenly still.

“Do you ever read the papers?” but his own hand shook as he lifted his whisky and soda, for, for form’s sake, the two sat at luncheon, waited on by the servants, who could not understand a word they said. “Well, it will be an item: ‘Strange and Terrible Story From’--we can find a place. But it will go like this:

“‘News comes through Reuter’s Agency’--and they shall get their information in some very natural way that can’t be challenged--‘news comes through Reuter’s Agency that the Honorable Brian Heriot, heir-presumptive to Baron Heriot, and his wife have been killed while jaguar-hunting in--South America? The late Mr. Heriot was at one time well known in London society, and his wife, who perished with him, was a whilom celebrated beauty, known, for want of another name, as “The Lovely Andria.” The present Lord Heriot is unmarried and the title will devolve on the Heriots of Maxwellton. No particulars of the tragedy have yet been obtained by our correspondent.’ There, that will explain the sad tale we have to tell our charges, and everything will be perfectly open and aboveboard!”

The whisky had warmed him. He never flinched at the thought of how Andria Erle must die.

“Have you no sense?” cried Erceldonne angrily.

“We dare not set any rumors going.”

“Public press--nothing to do with us. Some Englishman is certain to have been killed jaguar-hunting--South America is a big place, and his name will do for the first unidentified fool that gets eaten. Put a thing into people’s heads and they’ll think it.”

“That won’t explain the girl knowing of it!”

Raimond leaned across the table and spoke so low his father could just hear.

“The girl is my affair,” he said slowly. “You made a fool of yourself with your island and your governess, and your fright of an old woman over whom you knew you had the whip-hand the instant you found the girl. If it hadn’t been for your crazy friend and his jaguars we should have been up a tree. When Beryl’s my wife we can find out who she is--and no reverend mother can get her away then!”

“How do you propose to make her sign the register? I’ve no reason to suppose you can make a marriage under a false name any more legal than the rest of the world!” said his father cynically.

“That’s my concern,” answered Raimond fiercely. “You’ve managed this business so far, and you’ve made a mess of it. If it hadn’t been for you carrying off the girl like a pirate in a dime novel and getting the only woman you had reason to fear for her governess, there would have been no trouble. The girl was coming to me like a tame bird when that red-haired devil opened the shutters! As it is, she heard nothing to matter; your ‘excellent woman’ had evidently kept a close tongue in her head. But thanks to you, I’ve a hard job instead of an easy one. I tell you plainly that if she were not as beautiful as women are made, I’d let her go to the devil--or Mother Felicitas!”

“And her money to the convent and Erceldonne to the hammer--or you and I kicked out!”

“Exactly.”

The brief courage of whisky had died out of him; he was suddenly cold in the hot, close cabin. To Andria he gave no thought except that a millstone was gone from about his neck. But from Brian Heriot, who had been his friend, he could not get his thoughts.

That blind shot in the dark, that long carrying of a burden under which he had sweated, though his father had helped in the task; that sudden light of the match the latter had struck as they lifted a man’s body for the last time to cast it down a rocky gully that reeked with a strange, wild scent--the man who had fired the shot turned sick as the match burned out, for, in its flickering light, he had seen the face that would not leave his memory.

In his amazed and horrified recognition of the man who had been his friend, he might even then have tried to save him, but his very start of astonishment sent the body the faster into that black gully. What happened next he scarcely knew. It was all a dream of mad panic, with himself and Erceldonne flying through the night till dawn came and found them in their boat.

There was no one on watch on the deserted deck, not even Mattel knew when they returned, careful body-servant though he was. It had taken all Raimond Erle’s nerve to put on his night-clothes and lie down on his bed. He had been acting, acting ever since, except for those few minutes alone with the woman who had risen as if from the dead to balk him.

He had feigned nothing there, only given rein to his fury till, with a last jerk of his wrist, his work was done. And he was tired of feigning now.

“Listen!” he said, with outspoken brutality, “once for all. If you so much as name him to me again, I’m done with you. You can sink or swim, as you like. I will never have him spoken of in my hearing.”

For answer, a girl’s voice rang out from a shut cabin near-by, high and shrill as voices are in delirious pain.

“Brian!” it called. “Brian, where are you? Heriot, Heriot!”

For a moment the man trembled, and then the very rage of hell came over him, that it was Beryl who called on Heriot and not Andria.

So it had been for her sake that Heriot was on the island! For a moment he grinned like an angry dog; and then he saw the servants gazing at him in scared amazement, and forced himself to laugh.

“Let her call,” he said to his father, in the English they could not understand. “She’s got to call louder yet to wake the dead!”