CHAPTER XL

WHEN he awoke it was with a sensation of pain extending all over his body. He was lying on the tiled floor of a small room, which was evidently the kitchen and living room of a labourer’s cottage. A door wide open showed the glimpse of a garden gone to ruin and overgrown with a monstrous growth of weeds.

By the door, holding a spade in one hand, stood Klein.

Freyberger tried to move, but failed. His body was absolutely rigid. From the nape of his neck to his heels ran a board, to which he was splinted by turn upon turn of rope. He tried to speak—he was gagged.

Klein stood and looked at him.

After the first glance round, Freyberger saw nothing but Klein. He could scarcely see his withered face in the shadow cast by the doorpost, but the hand holding the spade stood out awful in its energy and brutality, lit by the storm-light illuminating the doorway.

Then the old man, assured that his victim was awake and in full possession of his senses, began to speak in pantomime.

He pointed to his own lips and to the barred front door as if to indicate secrecy and the fact that the terrible things about to take place would never be known to the world.

Freyberger was not deaf, and the old man was not speechless, yet he never uttered a word, though he chuckled at times, making that sound which had frozen Leloir’s heart when he had heard it issue from the lips of Sir Anthony Gyde in the corridor at Throstle Hall.

Then the demon at the doorway began, in pantomime, to dig with his spade, shovelling up imaginary earth from an imaginary grave; without a word he went through the postures necessary in dragging a heavy body to the graveside and flinging it in. Then he spat three times into the imaginary grave, and closed it in. All this without a word.

Then turning from his victim he went into the garden and began to dig the real grave.

Freyberger’s eyes travelled about the floor of the room; they lit upon an object, it was a sandbag. He knew now what had happened to him. Sandbagged on the road, dragged into this cottage, bound and gagged, he lay now waiting for the last act in the tragedy—his own burial.

The service for the burial of the dead would not be required over his grave, for, that Klein would bury him alive, he felt certain.

He lay listening to the patter of the rain on the leaves in the garden and the sound of the spade.

Incessant, rhythmical, it seemed wielded by a giant.