CHAPTER XV
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT
Somewhere in the darkness of the ancient house a deep-toned bell tolledthe hour of two. The sound came to Grant, broad awake in his room, asif from a great distance--tocsin strokes against the bowl of the desertsky. Four times in his sleepless vigil he had heard that bell measuringnight watches, and each successive hour struck seemed the period to acentury.
He had gone to bed with a heavy ache following his words with Beniciaand her abrupt termination of his pleading. On his first review of thegirl's abnegation of the love she could not conceal the whole thinghad seemed fantastic, almost childish in its essence of witch-bane andbelief in blighting curse. How could this virile creature of a fine andcultured mind conceive herself the heritor of a weight of guilt carrieddown from some ancestor in the dim past? There was the superstitionof the evil eye among ignorant peasants of the Latin countries, to besure; but for a girl of Benicia's intelligence to be enslaved by suchmumbo-jumbo as Urgo had voiced--ridiculous!
Such was Grant's first review. Weighed from every angle and concedingthe girl he loved every mitigation of jangled nerves, nevertheless theman of the cities could find naught but lamentable folly in it all. Thefirst striking of the distant bell found him rebellious.
From where he lay he could look through a grated window up to theheavens: a square of dappled infinity. Insensibly his eyes begansingling out the stars, measuring the gulf between this and thatsteady-burning point of light. Somewhere outside a desert owl timedthe pulse of the night with an insistent call, unvarying, unwearying.The man on the bed found himself tallying the blood beats to hisbrain by this ghostly metronome. Beat--beat!--passing seconds ofmortality for the man Grant Hickman. Beat--beat!--How puny a thing, howinconsequential the life of a man when calipered by the time measure ofthose burning suns up yonder!
He rallied himself, for such drifting into the subjective was a newand puzzling experience for a practical man. But minute by minute thespirit of the desert, which is the spirit of chaos become ponderable,stole over him, chaining his imagination to things felt but notseen of men. A chill of the untoward and the unreal swept over him.He seemed to be braced nervously for some blow out of the void. Hisimagination played with a dim figure, the shape of El Rojo of thered hair riding--riding through the dark on his eternal mission ofdamnation.
The clock struck three and at the instant of the third stroke a shadowlike a bat's wing flitted across the bars of the window through whichthe eyes of the wakeful man had been roaming. A sharp tinkle of steelon stone split the silence of the chamber. Grant was galvanized into aleap from the bed. He stood shaking. Silence. Silence absolute as thegrave after that single sharp ring of steel on stone.
He looked up at the window where the flitting passage of the bat'swing had showed. Just the clear-burning stars there. The dim recessesof the room revealed no bulk of an intruder. Was this but the trick ofoverwrought nerves?
Grant fumbled for his matches and brought a light to the candle wick.By the waxing yellow glow he peered round the chamber. A flicker ofwhite reflection caught his eye and he almost leaped to a spot on thefloor directly beneath the window.
A dagger lay there. It was that curiously wrought affair of dulledsilver haft and double-edged blade which he had noted before as part ofthe rosette of ancient knives and short swords clamped against the highwainscoting above the window for a wall decoration--the weapons DonPadraic had pointed to with the pride of a collector that first day thewounded guest was brought in from the desert.
But how could this dagger have slipped from its sheath with no hand todisturb it? Grant stooped to pick it up.
He had the haft in his grip for a quarter-second, then dropped thething and leaped back as if from an asp. Something gummed the palm ofhis hand. Something showed dull black against the dim flicker of theblade. With a gasp he knelt and brought the candle closer.
Blood there on the blade! Blood on his hand!
He stood frozen while the pumping of his heart volleyed thunder againsthis ear drums. Murder cried aloud from that stained thing of silver andsteel on the floor. Somewhere in this rambling old pile--somewhere inthe silence a swift stroke that had snuffed out a life, and then themurderer, fleeing, had flung this weapon through the window. He hadflung it almost at the feet of the only one in the whole house who wasnot sleeping.
Alarm! He must give the alarm while yet the murderer was near thescene! Spur to action followed swiftly upon Grant's momentary numbness.He threw a dressing robe over him and ran through the door of hischamber giving onto the arcade about the patio. Just over the lowbalustrade lay the little jungle of flowering things, and on theopposite side, he remembered, hung the great Javanese gong Benicia usedto summon the servants to the patio. Grant leaped the low balustradeand stumbled crashing through the geraniums and giant fuchsias towardthe dim moon of metal he saw in the shadows of an arch.
He came to the gong, groped for the padded mace hanging over it. Thepatio roared with its released thunders.
Muffled shouts. Banging of doors. Lights. A white figure cameblundering through the arcade; it was Bim Bagley.
"Some one's been murdered!" Grant greeted him. "A dagger--through mywindow!"
Came others--servants with blankets clutched around them. Bim directedthem to run to the great door in the outer wall and catch any skulkerthey might find in the gardens beyond the house. Only dimly awarehimself of something untoward, the big man could give no more specificdirections.
Then Benicia, bare-footed, her hair fallen down over a blue robe shedrew together across her breast. Grant started towards her.
"Where is father?" she cried in a woman's divination, and Grant notedDon Padraic's absence. He saw the girl make a quick step for a closeddoor behind her. Unreasoned instinct prompted him to put himself beforethe door, denying her.
"No; let me," he commanded. She made a swaying step towards Grant butwas met by the door swiftly closing in her face. Inside the chamber,he turned the key in the lock and struck a match to grope for a candlewick.
In the pallid flicker he saw the figure of Don Padraic on his high bed.A dagger wound was in his breast.
And the girl outside the locked door stood very still. Her eyes, widewith horror, were fixed upon the spot where she had seen Grant put hishand in pushing open the door.
Three small smears of blood there.
Dust of the Desert Page 16