I.The Obtrusion of Parson LollyHighglen House, Aidenn Vale, Radnorshire,October 3, 1925. 12.30A.M.Heaven smile on us if it can! Heaven watch and ward us. This is a wedding party!Crofts Pendleton has just brought me the fresh candles and this writing-book. He wished me God-speed in my endeavours and good-night.“Good-night!” It sounded like a travesty, or a challenge.Surely I am the sane one here if anyone is. Yet I cannot name the curse that lies on my spirit and keeps in my eyes the vision of the two faces, the golden hair above the black! Never-to-be-forgotten moment! But I shall not let it unnerve me now, as it seemed to then.The worst of it is that I am confined in a musty chamber (among store-rooms!) on the second floor where the web-scribbled ceiling slants down with the roof and the eaves murmur uncannily just above my window—a room to make flesh thrill and creep. It looks like a chamber where murderers may have lurked in bygone days. The narrow, deep-set window, the old twisty candle-brackets high on the stone wall, the joined chest with never a nail to fasten its boards, the severely plain four-square bedstead—they all remind me that I am in a building centuries old where any or every fiendish deed may have been performed. I wish that this storey, like the rest of the house, were equipped with a good up-to-date electric service. The blinking light of candles is not very comfortable in the gloom.Nearly a page written, yet nothing pertinent said. This isn’t economy in words. But now I’ll banish megrims, cease rambling, and come to the situation.I have been in Highglen House for a scant six hours. Events have been moving with intermittent swiftness ever since I came, and they had not been precisely quiet before my arrival. To-night, though it takes until dawn, I shall describe as far as I can the happenings of the last day unless I drift off to sleep in the process. But no, even with doors locked, sleep is not likely to trouble anyone much to-night, not after the alarm all of us—I don’t except myself in this case—have just had.Moreover, until the nowhere-to-be-found Sir Brooke puts in an appearance, or some word is heard from him, there will be little rest for me, with Eve Bartholomew knocking at the door every fifteen minutes, with, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Bannerlee; are you still up? It’ssosilly of me, of course—Sir Brooke can take care of himself as well as any of us—better, I’m sure, than most—and yet I’m not so sure—but it’s really odd, isn’t it? Now I know it’s silly of me—but I’ve just had another idea. Don’t you think it’s possible that Sir Brooke took the wrong train? Of course I don’t know whether you can do that in Shrewsbury in the afternoon—but perhaps he got on the wrong platform, or something—he never was an expert on getting about, poor dear—and then he may have gone to sleep and not noticed where he was going. He has a way of doing that in trains—I know him so well, you see. Perhaps he didn’t learn until he got off at some scrubby little place where there’s no telegraph. And then, of course, that explains why there’s been no message from him.”I have learned a good deal about Sir Brooke’s character since Mrs. B. began her raids with a Macbethean knocking and a stage whisper. His chief trait seems to be utter fickleness of memory, his next that something, or lack of something, which makes able-bodied women like Mrs. B. call men “dear” with “poor” prefixed. He is near-sighted, liable to vertigo philanthropic, and a nuisance.I said Macbethean knocking—I suppose that proves I’m a little highly-strung myself. Certainly she caused a warm, douche-like sensation to pass clear over my scalp to the nape of my neck. We have had an evening which would make the staidest—I have a severe mind to draw a line through these pages and begin anew. This isn’t what I intended at all. My candles are bearded now, and I haven’t scratched my subject. I repent and reform this very instant. I am going to try to put down things in order, as they have unfolded themselves in the course of one of the most amazing days I, or any human being, ever lived through.Yet first (before taking my way back to the hilltop where I wandered this afternoon, never having so much as heard of Highglen House!) while the spirit is urgent and the clutch of sense is keen, I’ll transcribe the maddening events of the half-hour just past. Before I forget—but shall I ever forget?There they were in the Hall of the Moth, civilizees of assorted temperaments, ignoring their alarms, submerging their differences, and levelling their intellects in the fascination of a card game. How “instructive and amusing” had been my introduction by Pendleton to each of them in this very Hall scarcely more than an hour before! Save for Alberta, that luscious wife of his, I had never laid eyes on one of them previous to this evening.Straight on my entering the Hall, Pendleton had cavalierly handed me around from person to person.First he revealed me to his wife, who set down her cards and rose with one of the gladdest smiles I have ever seen. She was tall and gracious. Her face, surrounded by its lustre of close-clipped, wavy hair, was a joy to look at, being both pearly-clear and firm, like an exquisite lily-petal of classic marble.“Alfred! We hear that you have been raiding Aidenn Forest.”“Please!” I laughed. “I wouldn’t call it anything so forcible as—”But already Pendleton had presented me to Mrs. Belvoir. I withdrew my hand from its clasp of Alberta’s and took the cold fingers of the colourless man’s wife. What thoughts lay behind those brooding lids and that close-lipped mouth? Her face had a wavering indistinctness, like a face seen under flowing water.“How do you do?” she said in that rich voice, gave me one full look with eyes cold and pale as sapphires, and blinked languidly, as if the discussion were closed.Pendleton did not let me linger in perplexity. He gave me up to Belvoir, who shook hands with a faint smile, saying, “Mr. Bannerlee and I spelled our names to each other in the hall a little while ago.”Next was Lord Ludlow. “I’ve seen him,” remarked his Lordship, gazing at me with a little asperity, crinkling the skin over the high-pitched bridge of his nose, and sat down, for he was wishful of continuing the game, or of giving the impression that such was his desire.I was whisked to the second table and made acquainted with the sole woman there. Eve Bartholomew (God give her peace!) grasped my hand for a tug or two, exclaiming hurriedly, “Oh, how do you do?” And she added, with ill-feigned casualness, “They say you’ve been out on the hills to-day. You’re sure you haven’t seen Sir Brooke?”“Quite sure, Mrs. Bartholomew.”“Or hear of anyone who might be him—he?”“No.”Next I was set face-to-face with her partner, the red-faced young man, who I was not surprised to learn was Sean Cosgrove. His head was large, his features large, too, without being lubberly. The ruddiness of his complexion was accentuated by his very black and shining hair, short and thick. There was something grim and settled in the line of his jaw, and his blazing black eyes bore out the character of determination. He shook hands unsmiling, gravely.“My congratulations,” I offered.He gave a short bow, looking at the floor. Then, “I have heard of you,” he said, with not a trace of Irish lilt or accent in his speech.“Is it possible?”“You are a searcher for the buried lore of antiquity. Is not that so?” he asked with a certain lofty seriousness.“I have done a little research among the British saints, but I hardly expected my labours—”“They honour you,” asserted Cosgrove, but my smile of deprecation and anything further he was about to say were cut off by Pendleton, who relentlessly kept me on the go, and I faced the next guest.Two men had been partners at this table; I now found myself staring at a waxed moustache, and a very elegantly tapered and needle-pointed specimen of craftsmanship it was. The rest of his face was nothing remarkable, only a little swarthy-purplish with brandy, and a trifle stary-eyed. I was not prepossessed with this gentleman, judging him to be the sort who shows his cleverness to an assorted public in quips to barmaids and dance-hall musicians. His name, “Mr. Charlton Oxford,” struck me as strainedly aristocratic, though no fault of his.“Chawmed.”“Aesthete,” flashed through my brain, but a query-note raised itself after the word. “Just plain fool,” I concluded.“Youarebeing bandied about, aren’t you?”I was surprised by the fluence and ease of his voice, and his lightening smile, the big darkish man’s who had been dealing the cards so ritualistically a few minutes before. He lifted his weight as if it were that of a bubble, and I saw that indeed he was big, bearing his torso on stanchion-legs. His mass must have been twice mine.“Gilbert Maryvale, our complete man of business—iron-castings,” said Pendleton, with evident gladness that his tale was over.I saw a quick brightness come and go in Gilbert Maryvale’s eyes at that description, as if the eyeball had darted out a little from its station under thatch-brows.“The winner of the Newman Prize for Lucid Prose, I think, in—let me see—Nineteen-nineteen? May I congratulate you, Mr. Bannerlee, although the time is past? I have read your ‘Poets of Enervation’ with delight.”“No, Mr. Maryvale, that was not my essay.”“Surely I haven’t mistaken the name?”“You have mistaken only the man. ‘Poets of Enervation’ was the overflow of my cousin Norval’s pen. We were in the University together. I made a bid for the Newman myself, but was buried. Norval and I are often mistaken for each other, even in our literary occupations.”“No doubt you ran him close,” observed the big man twinkingly.“I’m afraid not. And now, as Mr. Cosgrove has said, I am devoted to dustier things, and the prose I give my time to is far from lucid.”“But you wring lucidity out of it.”Maryvale resumed his seat, picked up his hand, as did the rest, for in spite of much invitation I insisted on remaining aloof from the game. Broad capable cheek-bones, sudden forceful chin he had, but I had an awareness there was much more than capability and force in this “complete man of business.” That allusion to the Prize Essay for Lucid Prose was a poser. Was there another trafficker in iron-castings in the United Kingdom who had read “Poets of Enervation”?—or one who would speak of it kindly if he had?Well, all this was past, half-forgotten in ensuing talk. But now, at one minute to midnight, a new presence was in the Hall, threatening the mirth of the Feast! Anger!For Lord Ludlow and Sean Cosgrove were having a beautiful row.The Irishman’s gaze was hard and heavy, and seemed to bore into his antagonist. His face, I noticed, was still suffusing with blood. No one else ventured to intervene as madly as I had just done, and the silence when the two men ceased parleying was like the yawn of ocean after a gigantic wave.Cosgrove’s bitterness seemed to be growing steadily, like the awful momentum of a railway train, and I had no doubt that the time was not many seconds away when he would arise and beard his foe with menacing hands. Lord Ludlow’s acerbity was like the nervous, sputtering viciousness of a dynamo. From his eyes seemed to come green electric sparks, while he shifted his ire from me toward Cosgrove again.“As for you, sir—”“I accuse you—”Hark!The great Hall of the Moth where we stood was gripped in a new hush, for the clock in the corner was speaking. I had regarded it curiously in the evening, a fine old carcase with hood, waist, and base enveloped in spider’s web marqueterie which obliterated the graining of the wood. The brass dial was finely engraved, and Cupid’s head appeared four times delicately chiselled in the spandrils.Now its chime gave the burden it has tolled for two hundred years, and midnight was ringing sternly through the House from the Hall of the Moth. It is a strange clock, devised by some brooding or twisted or philosophic mind long ago: it strikes, they say, only at midnight, proclaiming the death and the birth of a day. The tones, vigorous and vibrant, were mellow with centuries, and their song was poignant.Like some greybeard councillor’s, the old clock’s voice appeared to abash the hasty peer and the slowly enraged Irishman. They stared at each other in grimness for an interim of seconds before his Lordship shrugged his shoulders, cackled “Humph!” loudly, and turned to the disrupted card-table. Cosgrove’s clenched hands came down in his lap relaxed, and he, too, turned back to his table, moving his lips without utterance.But the game did not go on. It could hardly have pursued its placid course again after this very distressing interruption of our peace, even if the crying sound had not begun from somewhere outside the Hall.A low, tremulous, wheedling cry, strangled sometimes into a moan—it froze every face and turned every eye to stone.“What’s that?” gulped Eve Bartholomew. . . .“Whereis it?” asked Belvoir, and one could tell that the “stick of dynamite” had not much breath to spare.But no one seemed to have the breath or the brain to answer him. My own belief for a moment was that it proceeded from a plane above our heads, instead of from somewhere in the long portrait-lined passage outside the Hall of the Moth. This seemed to be Pendleton’s notion, too, for with a tense “upstairs!” our host moved to the nearest door to the corridor. But Alberta Pendleton, dismayed (like all of us, no doubt) by the thought of the hovering menace that had shadowed Highglen House, hurried across to her husband and clung to him, positively clung to him, as I have seen actresses do in plays.“No, Crofts dear—no, no! Wait—let someone go with you!”“It’s up there,” declared Pendleton with steel-trap enunciation. “The damned thing’s come again—up there.”“That’s why you mustn’t go.”“It’s up there,” he said doggedly, and tugged to loose himself. But she took step for step with him, finally turning in his path with her back against the door.“We’ll all go,” said Maryvale.“All the men,” said Cosgrove. “The women lock the doors behind us.”“Ring for the servants,” said someone shakenly, I think Charlton Oxford.“Listen! . . . It’s not there any more. . . . It’s stopped.” We listened with Mrs. Bartholomew; beyond our taut breathings and the tick-tack-tock of the carcase in the corner—nothing.“Ring for the servants, I tell you!”“Listen! It’s out there.”“Out there!”“On the lawn.”Unmistakably now the low wordless cry came through the half-opened french window leading to the broad lawns beyond the entrance drive. Pendleton was across the room in a trice, heedless of Alberta’s protest; so were Maryvale and Cosgrove and I; so were all of us. We followed our host through the window-entrance. Out to the darkness we went from the bright-lit hall in a little throng, and when we were outside, hearing the lonesome, half-whining cry no more, we recoiled and huddled a little, like scared titmice.Hardly a quarter of a minute—prolonged by our bewilderment and dread—could have gone by, and we stood irresolute upon the fringe of the lawn, when the cry came toward us again, and now it was followed by a woman’s voice, different from the cry:“Oh, come here, come here! I couldn’t call you and leave her alone.”At the sound of that voice Cosgrove stamped like a raving beast. “Paula,” he bellowed, and plunged across the obscurity of the lawn.Following among those whose urgence was less than his, my eyes, which deviated from straight ahead, caught sight of a spine-stirring thing. It was motion, but of what? A darker mass on the dark sward. Size, shape, untellable—but moving, moving to the right, now seeming to crawl, now leaping—only an amorphous blob of black—moving, and swiftly, toward the north, moving stilly, with only a small rustling sound at whiles.“Look there!” I exclaimed to someone who was near me, catching his arm. (It was Oxford.)“Hey! What!”“That—going off there—a black thing.”“I don’t see it.” Nor did he want to, I judged.I guided his arm, extending it in the proper line. “Sight by that.”But I could not make him see it. He and I then diverged from the others, not much to his liking, and while we hastened after the nameless thing, I bethought me that I had changed my electric torch to these clothes. I hauled it from a side pocket, darted a cone of yellow ahead of us, cast an elliptic figure of yellow on the grass, but found no trace of the thing.Oxford, however, saw an object ahead which made him give a yell. He stopped petrified, and I followed his look far before us. What we both then saw was too distant to be the thing I had observed nearby, unless it were indeed a fiend possessed of superhuman powers. He was crossing a patch of ground a hundred yards away where the moon streamed down unscathed by clouds; save for the quick, brief clearing, indeed, we should not have caught sight of him. Like the hopping, gliding thing on the lawn, he was black, or robed in black. Contrary to report, however, if this were Parson Lolly, his figure appeared not to be tall but distinctly short and squatty. Just then the fringe of a cloud partly obfuscated the moon, but still that space was clearer than all around it. While the figure glided toward the trees, it seemed to heave its shoulders and grow a foot, two feet, taller! Again it writhed itself into greater height, its long cloak billowing, and again! Just before gaining the covert of branches, it turned toward us a moment, twice the height of a man. And its head, if head it had, was only a pointed thing with unguessable features in the cavern of its hood. The moon was absolutely overcast when the figure, again wheeling about, went beneath the trees.“Do we go after it?” I asked sardonically.“We—we do not.”“Righto.”I heard a gurgle from Oxford’s lips and guessed that his heart must be rotating in his throat. His shoulder to my touch was quivering, and while we went to rejoin the rest he staggered as if in drink, although certainly sober. But his nerves aren’t the best, I shouldn’t wonder, for there must be regular occasions when he quaffs and quaffs again.They were a chastened, vaguely murmurous company we discovered almost beneath the arch of the ancient gate-house with its ivy swarming up and up, now standing lone, its walls on either side all shorn away. Only a spurt or two of a match they had to see by, until I came with my torch and they made way for me. The light on the weather-beaten stone was like the circle of an old medallion or mellowed painting: two women, one pallid and lifeless, the other, seated on the grass, supporting the lovely, unconscious head on her knees.I supposed instantly that this was the young English-woman, Millicent Mertoun, who lay wan—the most beautiful creature, I believe, I have ever seen. Fine breeding, fine spirit were in her stricken face. Cold loveliness, indeed, with the life gone out of it; eyes set widely apart, closed beneath straight black eyebrows which were now lifted apeak with the intensity of strain that showed in the fine lines across her forehead and the slight drawing-back of her short upper lip, disclosing her large, evenly graduated teeth. The lashes that rested upon her cheeks were remarkably long, deep black, and it was their fragile, almost imperceptible stirring alone that betokened a possible reawakening to life. Her chin was softly rounded, and in the disorder of her abundant black hair a delicate ear was exposed. The suspension of life had withdrawn the blood from the full-contoured lips, left the cheeks pallid, but while I gazed at the face and the aristocratic little neck, twined about so by the tumbling length of masses of black hair, I had a whisper of what beauty the face might have when expression was restored to it, and the eyes, of unguessable depth and sweetness, were open.Of the other woman’s head I caught only the partly averted profile, while she bent over Miss Mertoun, with one hand clasping together at the throat the unconscious girl’s loose gown, apparently a garment of negligée. She, of course, must be the American girl, for it was at the sound of her voice that Sean Cosgrove had torn across the lawn. There was dignity, I thought, in her head with its straitly fastened golden-brown hair, and a lovely tenderness in the solicitude of her pose.She was in the midst of speech, relating the adventure which had brought her and her companion to that plight. She did not look up or turn her head when the light from my hand broke over her, and all the while she spoke her watchful gaze was for the features of the girl whose senses were benumbed. American speech it was, yet the words came from her lips with a chiselled precision, the tone tending toward viola depth.“—blinding, yes, not blinding alone, but maddening. I got her into looser clothing—she wouldn’t go to bed. She gave no sign of fainting, but the pain drove her into delirium more than once, and I almost sent for someone else to help me with her. Then the pain went down, and suddenly she went to sleep.”Someone, I think Cosgrove, took a step nearer. “No, keep away, please. Don’t try to move her yet.”“But, Paula, how did you ever come—?”The American girl precluded the end of Alberta Pendleton’s question. “Of course I am coming to that. She went sound asleep, and I thought it better not to undress her; so I let her lie on the bed, and I curled up in the chair by the window. Millicent’s wretched evening had left me tired out, too, and I don’t remember anything more until when I woke up to find her awake again and wandering about. There was enough light from the globe by the mirror to see that she was terribly distressed, but it was not with pain this time. She was suffering from some—”Paula Lebetwood hesitated for a moment, then recommenced. “I think she was walking in her sleep.”A note of surprise and pity came from all our mouths.“Were her eyes open?” asked Mrs. Belvoir.“Yes, with the darkest vagueness in them.”“Didn’t she recognize you?”“I don’t know.”“What?”“You see, it all happened so quickly. Only a couple of seconds after I had roused myself the clock in the Hall of the Moth commenced ringing midnight. Millicent stopped for a moment and put her hand to her heart, a queer thing, I thought. ‘It’s his music,’ she said, and made for the door.”Renewed exclamations of surprise attested our close-held interest.“She ran down the hall—”“But, Paula, did you let her—?”“She was too strong for me, or perhaps too quick. She twisted away from me when I tried to prevent her from leaving the room. She almost flew down the hall; I was afraid she would throw herself down the stairs, and I caught up with her just in time. We came down—”“Did she make any sound?” burst in Pendleton.“Yes, a wailing sound—if there were any words, I couldn’t distinguish them. Didn’t you hear her? Oh, I was wishing you would. I didn’t dare to cry out, you know, since she was in that dangerous state.”“We heard, dear,” said Alberta Pendleton. “But the sound kept changing, and we were undecided.”“She had a definite intention to go out, and out of the front entrance we went whether I would or not. And then, then, while we were far away on the lawn, we saw the—the—I can’t name it.”“What was it like?” asked Pendleton, and I recall that all of us closed in a little further to hear.“The head, I suppose you’d call it. It was—awful.”“What—where?”“Didn’t any of you see it?” she asked in much surprise, yet not for a second lifting her intent look from Millicent Mertoun’s face. “It was just after that I noticed that foul reek of blood.”“Blood!” That was Eve Bartholomew’s cry.“Oh, haven’t you noticed that either? The smell was so bad, I feared it would have some ghastly effect on Millicent. I hoped she wouldn’t notice it, in her condition. And then—we were beyond the gate-house, coming back toward the mansion, when we saw—the head.”“Where, for God’s sake?”“About a hundred feet away from us. I heard something stirring first, something scuttling, you might say. Then we saw it. Ugh! . . . Straight out of hell, surely. . . .”Pendleton’s excitement was getting too much for him, and he broke through courtesy. “Why do you keep boggling it? Where was it? What did it do?”“Crofts!” reprimanded Alberta.Still with averted face, Paula Lebetwood tried to satisfy our fuming host. “Where? I don’t know exactly where. Near the gate-house here, I suppose. It seemed thirty or forty yards away. It was enormous, about six feet high—oh, fully that. It hung in the air—there wasn’t any body beneath. And it didn’t do anything, just remained there long enough to be seen, half a second, perhaps, and disappeared with a sort of sigh. I thought I heard a sigh. It—well, it simply went out. . . . It was hideous.”“What did it look like, dear?” asked Alberta, more to anticipate her bluff husband than to satisfy curiosity, for her question was tremulous.“Hideous—a great round head with red goggle eyes and a hole for a nose and broken teeth all grinning. It looked alive and staring—worse than any mask I’ve ever seen—an indecent thing. . . . Oh, don’t think that it was hallucination—poor Millicent saw it too, though it came and went like the winking of an eye. It seemed to strike to her heart—and to mine, for that matter—and she could manage to walk only a few steps more—on my arm—through the archway before she weakened and collapsed, and I saw you all there outside the french window, and called.”She turned her head full toward us for the first time since Oxford and I had come from our private chase. Such was my position when she lifted her bent head that I, and only I, saw, on the yellow-lit ground revealed beyond, a small placard with uncouth letters thereon, large enough to be read in spite of their unshapeliness:PARSON LOLLY SeNds REGaRDs LooK OUT FOR PARSON LOLLYA storm sprang in my mind, such a whirlwind of spirit as I believe I have never before experienced, when behind the quick, expectant face of this American girl, one so tender to her stricken friend, one so fearless, I saw that obscene sign. She was at first dazzled by the light in my hand, and her dark blue eyes show wonderfully bright and wild. Her gold hair then had a fine-spun beauty. And beside the old gate-tower lay the sneering message of one who affronted both manhood and womanhood. Anger at the marauder who made beauty his victim, shame for being duped, fear of being duped again, a craving to bring the rascal down—these and I know that not what other unleashed gales met in the cross-roads of my mind. The winds rose to raving, towered into hurricanes. My soul was dizzy, staggering. I was not rational at that moment—then the gales went down. I bit my lip hard, stepped around the two women there, picked up the sign (which had been printed with a smudgy pencil on a stiff folio sheet) and showed it to the rest.“Parson Lolly!” exclaimed more than one.Then Oxford, perhaps intending to be jocose, said,“ ‘Beware of Parson Lolly.’ Beggar’s a bit late, it seems to me.”“At least,” said Crofts Pendleton thickly “it proves he’s human—the devil!”“In some ways human, perhaps,” amended Maryvale.“What else, then?”“Less than human. Consider the birds of the air, my friends. They are, I suppose, less than human—yet—they—can—fly!”I gave a stout shrug to rid myself of the disquiet compelled by such a suggestion.Anxiety over Miss Mertoun’s exposure to the midnight air prompted Alberta Pendleton, not for the first time, to urge taking her inside the Hall. But Miss Lebetwood shook her head in a determined manner, and with a gesture showed that she believed it was too far to carry her to the mansion.“It’s very mild out here now,” she declared. “I know sleep-walking people. If she were to wake up while she’s being taken, it might have some long-lasting ill effect. Alberta, please don’t ask again. I want her to be in my arms when she opens her eyes. You good people don’t need to stay. I—and Sean—can wait here with her alone.”But none of us would go. Then while we waited to see a greater sign of life than the restlessness of those long black lashes on the pallid cheek, down from the dark north came that ragged, hungry voice I had heard while alone earlier in the night, a cry that tore at our nerves and congealed our blood to ice-drops in our veins. A carnal, raving cry, thinning to a shriek that pierced the ear, swelling to a howl that loosened the knees.Of that dire, abysmal wail of mad desire, an overtone must have found a counterpart in Cosgrove’s spirit. Out of the past of his kind, that had seen things more clearly in the dusk than in the plain light of day, that had loved cries of battle and death more than joyful cries, some strain may have wrung the man’s soul. Terribly to all of us, he raised his voice in answer to the inhuman call; I, at least, had no sense of body or of time and place while he burst into a black rain of words, a torrent of rancour, and defiance against the fiend of the pit, whose incarnate self he seemed to hear in the voice of the beast.But a low call from Paula Lebetwood reduced him to a stunning silence. “I think she’s coming to.”The unconscious girl’s fingers fluttered briefly; her lips stirred; her whole body stirred a little. She turned once, twice, restlessly, and sank, with a little sigh, comfortably and trustingly into the American girl’s embrace. The trace of a sneer had vanished from her face, and her breast moved with her breathing.“She’s sleeping now,” said Alberta Pendleton, and stooped beside the pair on the grass.Miss Lebetwood whispered, “Dearest, do you hear me? Do you know me? It’s Paula. . . . Dearest, do you hear me?” She stroked the pale forehead free of its last furrow.“Yes,” came like a shadow of a word from the sleeping girl.“Dearest, Paula wants you to come with her.” Still she spoke, soothing, caressing, in the effort to woo her to awaken peacefully. And the eyes of Millicent Mertoun opened, revealing themselves to be of a deep blackness that rivalled her errant hair, opened to see only the smile of love on the face of the American girl bending over her; and the English girl smiled too.“Your headache is all gone, isn’t it, dearest?”“Yes . . . but where . . . is this?”“Don’t be frightened, dear. It’s the lawn by the gate-house. Now we’re going inside.”“But how? . . . I don’t understand . . . these people.”Miss Lebetwood kissed her cheek, leaned her forehead against it. “Never mind, dearest. Everyone is a friend, you know. Can you walk? Here, now.”The English girl was sitting up; she rubbed her eyes, and sent short, bewildered looks this way and that, far from comprehending her situation. Too many of the party were trying to explain everything to her, and she was beginning to look desperate and unhappy.“Never mind the silly people,” said Miss Lebetwood sensibly. “See—we’re just a few steps away from the house—where we’ve been before, you know. Now we must go in. Sean, help me.”The Irishman and the women at last began to support the strengthless girl into the Hall. It must have been a full quarter of an hour since we had poured out from that vaulted chamber into the enigmatic night and had heard the call from the gate-house. Now the servants were roused, summoned by someone, and lanterns were rushing across the lawn in our direction. I had commenced to go with the party about Miss Mertoun, desirous of casting a light before their feet. But Pendleton called me back somewhat peremptorily.“Bright enough from the Hall for ’em not to stumble by.” Alone in the great mansion the Hall of the Moth sparkled forth, but the glare from its massive chandelier was a sure guiding light. “We need you here,” added our host; “there’s a good deal more of this needs looking at.”At a phrase from him the lanterns began to swing hither and thither about the lawn, and we men of the party passed across the drawbridge under the resounding gate-house arch.“Is this usually lowered?” I asked.“Usually. Can be raised for the sport of it. It’s part of the main drive, you see. It must have been hereabout that they smelt—”He had no need to say more.“Great God, what an unholy stench!”“Itisblood!”“Bottles of it.”Crofts Pendleton’s voice shook. “I hope—it’s not—anything serious.”Just then nothing could have struck us as amusing. Lord Ludlow interjected, “Remember, sir, that there is a missing man—”“Oh, Lord, look there! My boot!”Belvoir lifted a foot for inspection, while I turned the eye of the torch upon it. The leather was stained with a fluid dark and thick.“My God!” observed Pendleton.“It’s jolly well begun to clot.”“Look out, you chaps, you’ll mire yourselves.”“Show us the place, Bannerlee.”My torch exposed a patch of darkened grass only a foot or so each way. There was nothing else about nearby.Pendleton, half aghast, kneeled on the edge of the patch and studied it.“A lot of blood’s been spilled here. It must have soaked down, a goodish bit of it, but there’s quite a pool about the grass roots. This spot will have to be guarded to-night. Pity we’ve tramped about.”A thick voice lifted in excitement from the north of us.“Oh, Mister Crofts, sir, do come here.”“What is it, Tenney? Let it stay, whatever it is.”“Small fear I’ll touch it, sir. It’s one of them old fightin’ irons.”“A weapon, by heaven!” exclaimed Lord Ludlow.“Has it blood on it?”“All sticky dried, sir.”We were beside the quaking man-servant in a jiffy or two, staring curiously where lay a small battle-axe, with an inconsiderable curve of blade. It was a weapon of uncommon slightness. Both metal and wood were dark with the same viscous fluid, the handle being quite slobbered with it.“From the armoury!” cried our host. “The foul devil’s actually been inside the house! Don’t touch it!”“That weapon was on the wall at a quarter before eight,” said Lord Ludlow. (Ah, I knew why he could say that!) “I was passing through to the library for my glasses.” (There, to be sure, the old rascal prevaricated.)“You don’t say!”“This looks like a serious crime,” remarked his Lordship.“Serious crime!” Pendleton snorted. “Ludlow, you surprise me. I thought it was child’s play.”“I think that by a serious crime our noble friend means a particular crime—don’t you, Ludlow? Isn’t it the customary euphemism?” asked Belvoir.“I mean murder, sir.”“Should have said so in the first place,” growled Pendleton, and added, “No need to say it at all.”“It’s jolly irregular, though,” declared Oxford. “All that blood in one spot, and this gory thing over here.”“This was not done according to rule,” rejoined his Lordship.“It was not carried out as planned,” declared Cosgrove, who had come out from the mansion again.“And one, er, detail only needs to be filled in.” That was Belvoir from somewhere in the darkness behind us. “The, er,corpus delicti.”“Gad, yes—scatter, now—search—all the way to Aidenn Water.”The cluster of lanterns spread into kaleidoscopic figures again, although the men seemed none too happy to leave the protection of one another. But they did not discover any further traces of the marauder or a vestige of a victim who might have furnished all that blood. My own light picked up the last find of the night, a round, battered object on the grass even further north than the blood-stained axe.“A hat!”“Can it be Sir Brooke’s?”Pendleton leaped ahead of us and snatched it from the ground, held it from him contemptuously.“I doubt it.”“I can tell you certainly that it is not Sir Brooke’s!”One man, at least, jumped at the sound of a female voice among us. There was Eve Bartholomew, standing tall and tragic, clinging, I thought, to the last pinch of nerve she possessed.“I couldn’t help being interested, you know,” she remarked ingenuously, and gave a little high-keyed laugh. “I just came from the Hall. But I can assure you that Sir Brooke has nothing to do with this affair. He would be mad to take any part in it. He would be mad to wear that rag of a disreputable hat.”“Yes, Mrs. Bartholomew,” I agreed, “he would. I was about to say, before you identified the hat as not Sir Brooke’s, that it belongs to me. I wore it down the slopes of Aidenn Vale.”“You did!”“Yes—none too new when I set forth with it this morning, it has suffered a lifetime’s wear and tear with me to-day. That is the history of the hat.”“But where did you see it last?” demanded Pendleton.“I left it hanging in the entrance-hall. And I saw it on the rack as you and I came down the stairs before we went in to the Bidding Feast.”“By gad, I remember it too,” he assented. “Then if—”But he never finished that sentence, whose protases and apodoses might have filled an hour. Quick with surmise, we turned back to the house.Millicent Mertoun and her retinue had by this time gone upstairs, but the Hall of the Moth was full of the women-servants of the house, arrayed in white as if risen from their graves in winding sheets. A small boy in a nightgown, scared half to death, was blubbering soulfully, as were some of the women. Blenkinson, the butler, the only man of them who had not got into clothes and gone forth, was quieting everyone with loud sibilance.Pendleton confronted them somewhat nervously.“There’s been too much racket about nothing,” he asserted. “Miss Mertoun walked a little in her sleep. That’s really all that’s happened. You’re all very silly, you see, to take on so. Now get to bed.”But when they had departed he turned upon Eve Bartholomew with a face full of bale. “I can tell you one thing about Sir Brooke. If he doesn’t show up to-morrow and clear things up a bit, he’ll find no Bidding Feast when he gets here. I’ll invite ’em to clear out. I’m not going to have my guests hounded and threatened.”Mrs. Bartholomew gasped. “Why, you can’t say that Sir Brooke has anything—”“I don’t know,” scowled Pendleton, “but I want him—here!”We are truly blissful marriage celebrators.. . . . A thought had been germinating in my mind ever since the moment of my near-madness on the lawn, when the iniquity of Parson Lolly had so taken hold of me. When we were alone:“Crofts, I want to prove I’m not crazy. Show me where you want me to sleep, and give me a book to write in. And keep it quiet, for heaven’s sake.”“A book to write in?”“I have many words within me craving to be penned. Give me a book to write in, and show me my room.”Well, this is the room, and these some of the words.Now to tell of the many things that happened to me to-day before these many things.
Highglen House, Aidenn Vale, Radnorshire,October 3, 1925. 12.30A.M.
Heaven smile on us if it can! Heaven watch and ward us. This is a wedding party!
Crofts Pendleton has just brought me the fresh candles and this writing-book. He wished me God-speed in my endeavours and good-night.
“Good-night!” It sounded like a travesty, or a challenge.
Surely I am the sane one here if anyone is. Yet I cannot name the curse that lies on my spirit and keeps in my eyes the vision of the two faces, the golden hair above the black! Never-to-be-forgotten moment! But I shall not let it unnerve me now, as it seemed to then.
The worst of it is that I am confined in a musty chamber (among store-rooms!) on the second floor where the web-scribbled ceiling slants down with the roof and the eaves murmur uncannily just above my window—a room to make flesh thrill and creep. It looks like a chamber where murderers may have lurked in bygone days. The narrow, deep-set window, the old twisty candle-brackets high on the stone wall, the joined chest with never a nail to fasten its boards, the severely plain four-square bedstead—they all remind me that I am in a building centuries old where any or every fiendish deed may have been performed. I wish that this storey, like the rest of the house, were equipped with a good up-to-date electric service. The blinking light of candles is not very comfortable in the gloom.
Nearly a page written, yet nothing pertinent said. This isn’t economy in words. But now I’ll banish megrims, cease rambling, and come to the situation.
I have been in Highglen House for a scant six hours. Events have been moving with intermittent swiftness ever since I came, and they had not been precisely quiet before my arrival. To-night, though it takes until dawn, I shall describe as far as I can the happenings of the last day unless I drift off to sleep in the process. But no, even with doors locked, sleep is not likely to trouble anyone much to-night, not after the alarm all of us—I don’t except myself in this case—have just had.
Moreover, until the nowhere-to-be-found Sir Brooke puts in an appearance, or some word is heard from him, there will be little rest for me, with Eve Bartholomew knocking at the door every fifteen minutes, with, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Bannerlee; are you still up? It’ssosilly of me, of course—Sir Brooke can take care of himself as well as any of us—better, I’m sure, than most—and yet I’m not so sure—but it’s really odd, isn’t it? Now I know it’s silly of me—but I’ve just had another idea. Don’t you think it’s possible that Sir Brooke took the wrong train? Of course I don’t know whether you can do that in Shrewsbury in the afternoon—but perhaps he got on the wrong platform, or something—he never was an expert on getting about, poor dear—and then he may have gone to sleep and not noticed where he was going. He has a way of doing that in trains—I know him so well, you see. Perhaps he didn’t learn until he got off at some scrubby little place where there’s no telegraph. And then, of course, that explains why there’s been no message from him.”
I have learned a good deal about Sir Brooke’s character since Mrs. B. began her raids with a Macbethean knocking and a stage whisper. His chief trait seems to be utter fickleness of memory, his next that something, or lack of something, which makes able-bodied women like Mrs. B. call men “dear” with “poor” prefixed. He is near-sighted, liable to vertigo philanthropic, and a nuisance.
I said Macbethean knocking—I suppose that proves I’m a little highly-strung myself. Certainly she caused a warm, douche-like sensation to pass clear over my scalp to the nape of my neck. We have had an evening which would make the staidest—
I have a severe mind to draw a line through these pages and begin anew. This isn’t what I intended at all. My candles are bearded now, and I haven’t scratched my subject. I repent and reform this very instant. I am going to try to put down things in order, as they have unfolded themselves in the course of one of the most amazing days I, or any human being, ever lived through.
Yet first (before taking my way back to the hilltop where I wandered this afternoon, never having so much as heard of Highglen House!) while the spirit is urgent and the clutch of sense is keen, I’ll transcribe the maddening events of the half-hour just past. Before I forget—but shall I ever forget?
There they were in the Hall of the Moth, civilizees of assorted temperaments, ignoring their alarms, submerging their differences, and levelling their intellects in the fascination of a card game. How “instructive and amusing” had been my introduction by Pendleton to each of them in this very Hall scarcely more than an hour before! Save for Alberta, that luscious wife of his, I had never laid eyes on one of them previous to this evening.
Straight on my entering the Hall, Pendleton had cavalierly handed me around from person to person.
First he revealed me to his wife, who set down her cards and rose with one of the gladdest smiles I have ever seen. She was tall and gracious. Her face, surrounded by its lustre of close-clipped, wavy hair, was a joy to look at, being both pearly-clear and firm, like an exquisite lily-petal of classic marble.
“Alfred! We hear that you have been raiding Aidenn Forest.”
“Please!” I laughed. “I wouldn’t call it anything so forcible as—”
But already Pendleton had presented me to Mrs. Belvoir. I withdrew my hand from its clasp of Alberta’s and took the cold fingers of the colourless man’s wife. What thoughts lay behind those brooding lids and that close-lipped mouth? Her face had a wavering indistinctness, like a face seen under flowing water.
“How do you do?” she said in that rich voice, gave me one full look with eyes cold and pale as sapphires, and blinked languidly, as if the discussion were closed.
Pendleton did not let me linger in perplexity. He gave me up to Belvoir, who shook hands with a faint smile, saying, “Mr. Bannerlee and I spelled our names to each other in the hall a little while ago.”
Next was Lord Ludlow. “I’ve seen him,” remarked his Lordship, gazing at me with a little asperity, crinkling the skin over the high-pitched bridge of his nose, and sat down, for he was wishful of continuing the game, or of giving the impression that such was his desire.
I was whisked to the second table and made acquainted with the sole woman there. Eve Bartholomew (God give her peace!) grasped my hand for a tug or two, exclaiming hurriedly, “Oh, how do you do?” And she added, with ill-feigned casualness, “They say you’ve been out on the hills to-day. You’re sure you haven’t seen Sir Brooke?”
“Quite sure, Mrs. Bartholomew.”
“Or hear of anyone who might be him—he?”
“No.”
Next I was set face-to-face with her partner, the red-faced young man, who I was not surprised to learn was Sean Cosgrove. His head was large, his features large, too, without being lubberly. The ruddiness of his complexion was accentuated by his very black and shining hair, short and thick. There was something grim and settled in the line of his jaw, and his blazing black eyes bore out the character of determination. He shook hands unsmiling, gravely.
“My congratulations,” I offered.
He gave a short bow, looking at the floor. Then, “I have heard of you,” he said, with not a trace of Irish lilt or accent in his speech.
“Is it possible?”
“You are a searcher for the buried lore of antiquity. Is not that so?” he asked with a certain lofty seriousness.
“I have done a little research among the British saints, but I hardly expected my labours—”
“They honour you,” asserted Cosgrove, but my smile of deprecation and anything further he was about to say were cut off by Pendleton, who relentlessly kept me on the go, and I faced the next guest.
Two men had been partners at this table; I now found myself staring at a waxed moustache, and a very elegantly tapered and needle-pointed specimen of craftsmanship it was. The rest of his face was nothing remarkable, only a little swarthy-purplish with brandy, and a trifle stary-eyed. I was not prepossessed with this gentleman, judging him to be the sort who shows his cleverness to an assorted public in quips to barmaids and dance-hall musicians. His name, “Mr. Charlton Oxford,” struck me as strainedly aristocratic, though no fault of his.
“Chawmed.”
“Aesthete,” flashed through my brain, but a query-note raised itself after the word. “Just plain fool,” I concluded.
“Youarebeing bandied about, aren’t you?”
I was surprised by the fluence and ease of his voice, and his lightening smile, the big darkish man’s who had been dealing the cards so ritualistically a few minutes before. He lifted his weight as if it were that of a bubble, and I saw that indeed he was big, bearing his torso on stanchion-legs. His mass must have been twice mine.
“Gilbert Maryvale, our complete man of business—iron-castings,” said Pendleton, with evident gladness that his tale was over.
I saw a quick brightness come and go in Gilbert Maryvale’s eyes at that description, as if the eyeball had darted out a little from its station under thatch-brows.
“The winner of the Newman Prize for Lucid Prose, I think, in—let me see—Nineteen-nineteen? May I congratulate you, Mr. Bannerlee, although the time is past? I have read your ‘Poets of Enervation’ with delight.”
“No, Mr. Maryvale, that was not my essay.”
“Surely I haven’t mistaken the name?”
“You have mistaken only the man. ‘Poets of Enervation’ was the overflow of my cousin Norval’s pen. We were in the University together. I made a bid for the Newman myself, but was buried. Norval and I are often mistaken for each other, even in our literary occupations.”
“No doubt you ran him close,” observed the big man twinkingly.
“I’m afraid not. And now, as Mr. Cosgrove has said, I am devoted to dustier things, and the prose I give my time to is far from lucid.”
“But you wring lucidity out of it.”
Maryvale resumed his seat, picked up his hand, as did the rest, for in spite of much invitation I insisted on remaining aloof from the game. Broad capable cheek-bones, sudden forceful chin he had, but I had an awareness there was much more than capability and force in this “complete man of business.” That allusion to the Prize Essay for Lucid Prose was a poser. Was there another trafficker in iron-castings in the United Kingdom who had read “Poets of Enervation”?—or one who would speak of it kindly if he had?
Well, all this was past, half-forgotten in ensuing talk. But now, at one minute to midnight, a new presence was in the Hall, threatening the mirth of the Feast! Anger!
For Lord Ludlow and Sean Cosgrove were having a beautiful row.
The Irishman’s gaze was hard and heavy, and seemed to bore into his antagonist. His face, I noticed, was still suffusing with blood. No one else ventured to intervene as madly as I had just done, and the silence when the two men ceased parleying was like the yawn of ocean after a gigantic wave.
Cosgrove’s bitterness seemed to be growing steadily, like the awful momentum of a railway train, and I had no doubt that the time was not many seconds away when he would arise and beard his foe with menacing hands. Lord Ludlow’s acerbity was like the nervous, sputtering viciousness of a dynamo. From his eyes seemed to come green electric sparks, while he shifted his ire from me toward Cosgrove again.
“As for you, sir—”
“I accuse you—”
Hark!
The great Hall of the Moth where we stood was gripped in a new hush, for the clock in the corner was speaking. I had regarded it curiously in the evening, a fine old carcase with hood, waist, and base enveloped in spider’s web marqueterie which obliterated the graining of the wood. The brass dial was finely engraved, and Cupid’s head appeared four times delicately chiselled in the spandrils.
Now its chime gave the burden it has tolled for two hundred years, and midnight was ringing sternly through the House from the Hall of the Moth. It is a strange clock, devised by some brooding or twisted or philosophic mind long ago: it strikes, they say, only at midnight, proclaiming the death and the birth of a day. The tones, vigorous and vibrant, were mellow with centuries, and their song was poignant.
Like some greybeard councillor’s, the old clock’s voice appeared to abash the hasty peer and the slowly enraged Irishman. They stared at each other in grimness for an interim of seconds before his Lordship shrugged his shoulders, cackled “Humph!” loudly, and turned to the disrupted card-table. Cosgrove’s clenched hands came down in his lap relaxed, and he, too, turned back to his table, moving his lips without utterance.
But the game did not go on. It could hardly have pursued its placid course again after this very distressing interruption of our peace, even if the crying sound had not begun from somewhere outside the Hall.
A low, tremulous, wheedling cry, strangled sometimes into a moan—it froze every face and turned every eye to stone.
“What’s that?” gulped Eve Bartholomew. . . .
“Whereis it?” asked Belvoir, and one could tell that the “stick of dynamite” had not much breath to spare.
But no one seemed to have the breath or the brain to answer him. My own belief for a moment was that it proceeded from a plane above our heads, instead of from somewhere in the long portrait-lined passage outside the Hall of the Moth. This seemed to be Pendleton’s notion, too, for with a tense “upstairs!” our host moved to the nearest door to the corridor. But Alberta Pendleton, dismayed (like all of us, no doubt) by the thought of the hovering menace that had shadowed Highglen House, hurried across to her husband and clung to him, positively clung to him, as I have seen actresses do in plays.
“No, Crofts dear—no, no! Wait—let someone go with you!”
“It’s up there,” declared Pendleton with steel-trap enunciation. “The damned thing’s come again—up there.”
“That’s why you mustn’t go.”
“It’s up there,” he said doggedly, and tugged to loose himself. But she took step for step with him, finally turning in his path with her back against the door.
“We’ll all go,” said Maryvale.
“All the men,” said Cosgrove. “The women lock the doors behind us.”
“Ring for the servants,” said someone shakenly, I think Charlton Oxford.
“Listen! . . . It’s not there any more. . . . It’s stopped.” We listened with Mrs. Bartholomew; beyond our taut breathings and the tick-tack-tock of the carcase in the corner—nothing.
“Ring for the servants, I tell you!”
“Listen! It’s out there.”
“Out there!”
“On the lawn.”
Unmistakably now the low wordless cry came through the half-opened french window leading to the broad lawns beyond the entrance drive. Pendleton was across the room in a trice, heedless of Alberta’s protest; so were Maryvale and Cosgrove and I; so were all of us. We followed our host through the window-entrance. Out to the darkness we went from the bright-lit hall in a little throng, and when we were outside, hearing the lonesome, half-whining cry no more, we recoiled and huddled a little, like scared titmice.
Hardly a quarter of a minute—prolonged by our bewilderment and dread—could have gone by, and we stood irresolute upon the fringe of the lawn, when the cry came toward us again, and now it was followed by a woman’s voice, different from the cry:
“Oh, come here, come here! I couldn’t call you and leave her alone.”
At the sound of that voice Cosgrove stamped like a raving beast. “Paula,” he bellowed, and plunged across the obscurity of the lawn.
Following among those whose urgence was less than his, my eyes, which deviated from straight ahead, caught sight of a spine-stirring thing. It was motion, but of what? A darker mass on the dark sward. Size, shape, untellable—but moving, moving to the right, now seeming to crawl, now leaping—only an amorphous blob of black—moving, and swiftly, toward the north, moving stilly, with only a small rustling sound at whiles.
“Look there!” I exclaimed to someone who was near me, catching his arm. (It was Oxford.)
“Hey! What!”
“That—going off there—a black thing.”
“I don’t see it.” Nor did he want to, I judged.
I guided his arm, extending it in the proper line. “Sight by that.”
But I could not make him see it. He and I then diverged from the others, not much to his liking, and while we hastened after the nameless thing, I bethought me that I had changed my electric torch to these clothes. I hauled it from a side pocket, darted a cone of yellow ahead of us, cast an elliptic figure of yellow on the grass, but found no trace of the thing.
Oxford, however, saw an object ahead which made him give a yell. He stopped petrified, and I followed his look far before us. What we both then saw was too distant to be the thing I had observed nearby, unless it were indeed a fiend possessed of superhuman powers. He was crossing a patch of ground a hundred yards away where the moon streamed down unscathed by clouds; save for the quick, brief clearing, indeed, we should not have caught sight of him. Like the hopping, gliding thing on the lawn, he was black, or robed in black. Contrary to report, however, if this were Parson Lolly, his figure appeared not to be tall but distinctly short and squatty. Just then the fringe of a cloud partly obfuscated the moon, but still that space was clearer than all around it. While the figure glided toward the trees, it seemed to heave its shoulders and grow a foot, two feet, taller! Again it writhed itself into greater height, its long cloak billowing, and again! Just before gaining the covert of branches, it turned toward us a moment, twice the height of a man. And its head, if head it had, was only a pointed thing with unguessable features in the cavern of its hood. The moon was absolutely overcast when the figure, again wheeling about, went beneath the trees.
“Do we go after it?” I asked sardonically.
“We—we do not.”
“Righto.”
I heard a gurgle from Oxford’s lips and guessed that his heart must be rotating in his throat. His shoulder to my touch was quivering, and while we went to rejoin the rest he staggered as if in drink, although certainly sober. But his nerves aren’t the best, I shouldn’t wonder, for there must be regular occasions when he quaffs and quaffs again.
They were a chastened, vaguely murmurous company we discovered almost beneath the arch of the ancient gate-house with its ivy swarming up and up, now standing lone, its walls on either side all shorn away. Only a spurt or two of a match they had to see by, until I came with my torch and they made way for me. The light on the weather-beaten stone was like the circle of an old medallion or mellowed painting: two women, one pallid and lifeless, the other, seated on the grass, supporting the lovely, unconscious head on her knees.
I supposed instantly that this was the young English-woman, Millicent Mertoun, who lay wan—the most beautiful creature, I believe, I have ever seen. Fine breeding, fine spirit were in her stricken face. Cold loveliness, indeed, with the life gone out of it; eyes set widely apart, closed beneath straight black eyebrows which were now lifted apeak with the intensity of strain that showed in the fine lines across her forehead and the slight drawing-back of her short upper lip, disclosing her large, evenly graduated teeth. The lashes that rested upon her cheeks were remarkably long, deep black, and it was their fragile, almost imperceptible stirring alone that betokened a possible reawakening to life. Her chin was softly rounded, and in the disorder of her abundant black hair a delicate ear was exposed. The suspension of life had withdrawn the blood from the full-contoured lips, left the cheeks pallid, but while I gazed at the face and the aristocratic little neck, twined about so by the tumbling length of masses of black hair, I had a whisper of what beauty the face might have when expression was restored to it, and the eyes, of unguessable depth and sweetness, were open.
Of the other woman’s head I caught only the partly averted profile, while she bent over Miss Mertoun, with one hand clasping together at the throat the unconscious girl’s loose gown, apparently a garment of negligée. She, of course, must be the American girl, for it was at the sound of her voice that Sean Cosgrove had torn across the lawn. There was dignity, I thought, in her head with its straitly fastened golden-brown hair, and a lovely tenderness in the solicitude of her pose.
She was in the midst of speech, relating the adventure which had brought her and her companion to that plight. She did not look up or turn her head when the light from my hand broke over her, and all the while she spoke her watchful gaze was for the features of the girl whose senses were benumbed. American speech it was, yet the words came from her lips with a chiselled precision, the tone tending toward viola depth.
“—blinding, yes, not blinding alone, but maddening. I got her into looser clothing—she wouldn’t go to bed. She gave no sign of fainting, but the pain drove her into delirium more than once, and I almost sent for someone else to help me with her. Then the pain went down, and suddenly she went to sleep.”
Someone, I think Cosgrove, took a step nearer. “No, keep away, please. Don’t try to move her yet.”
“But, Paula, how did you ever come—?”
The American girl precluded the end of Alberta Pendleton’s question. “Of course I am coming to that. She went sound asleep, and I thought it better not to undress her; so I let her lie on the bed, and I curled up in the chair by the window. Millicent’s wretched evening had left me tired out, too, and I don’t remember anything more until when I woke up to find her awake again and wandering about. There was enough light from the globe by the mirror to see that she was terribly distressed, but it was not with pain this time. She was suffering from some—”
Paula Lebetwood hesitated for a moment, then recommenced. “I think she was walking in her sleep.”
A note of surprise and pity came from all our mouths.
“Were her eyes open?” asked Mrs. Belvoir.
“Yes, with the darkest vagueness in them.”
“Didn’t she recognize you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“You see, it all happened so quickly. Only a couple of seconds after I had roused myself the clock in the Hall of the Moth commenced ringing midnight. Millicent stopped for a moment and put her hand to her heart, a queer thing, I thought. ‘It’s his music,’ she said, and made for the door.”
Renewed exclamations of surprise attested our close-held interest.
“She ran down the hall—”
“But, Paula, did you let her—?”
“She was too strong for me, or perhaps too quick. She twisted away from me when I tried to prevent her from leaving the room. She almost flew down the hall; I was afraid she would throw herself down the stairs, and I caught up with her just in time. We came down—”
“Did she make any sound?” burst in Pendleton.
“Yes, a wailing sound—if there were any words, I couldn’t distinguish them. Didn’t you hear her? Oh, I was wishing you would. I didn’t dare to cry out, you know, since she was in that dangerous state.”
“We heard, dear,” said Alberta Pendleton. “But the sound kept changing, and we were undecided.”
“She had a definite intention to go out, and out of the front entrance we went whether I would or not. And then, then, while we were far away on the lawn, we saw the—the—I can’t name it.”
“What was it like?” asked Pendleton, and I recall that all of us closed in a little further to hear.
“The head, I suppose you’d call it. It was—awful.”
“What—where?”
“Didn’t any of you see it?” she asked in much surprise, yet not for a second lifting her intent look from Millicent Mertoun’s face. “It was just after that I noticed that foul reek of blood.”
“Blood!” That was Eve Bartholomew’s cry.
“Oh, haven’t you noticed that either? The smell was so bad, I feared it would have some ghastly effect on Millicent. I hoped she wouldn’t notice it, in her condition. And then—we were beyond the gate-house, coming back toward the mansion, when we saw—the head.”
“Where, for God’s sake?”
“About a hundred feet away from us. I heard something stirring first, something scuttling, you might say. Then we saw it. Ugh! . . . Straight out of hell, surely. . . .”
Pendleton’s excitement was getting too much for him, and he broke through courtesy. “Why do you keep boggling it? Where was it? What did it do?”
“Crofts!” reprimanded Alberta.
Still with averted face, Paula Lebetwood tried to satisfy our fuming host. “Where? I don’t know exactly where. Near the gate-house here, I suppose. It seemed thirty or forty yards away. It was enormous, about six feet high—oh, fully that. It hung in the air—there wasn’t any body beneath. And it didn’t do anything, just remained there long enough to be seen, half a second, perhaps, and disappeared with a sort of sigh. I thought I heard a sigh. It—well, it simply went out. . . . It was hideous.”
“What did it look like, dear?” asked Alberta, more to anticipate her bluff husband than to satisfy curiosity, for her question was tremulous.
“Hideous—a great round head with red goggle eyes and a hole for a nose and broken teeth all grinning. It looked alive and staring—worse than any mask I’ve ever seen—an indecent thing. . . . Oh, don’t think that it was hallucination—poor Millicent saw it too, though it came and went like the winking of an eye. It seemed to strike to her heart—and to mine, for that matter—and she could manage to walk only a few steps more—on my arm—through the archway before she weakened and collapsed, and I saw you all there outside the french window, and called.”
She turned her head full toward us for the first time since Oxford and I had come from our private chase. Such was my position when she lifted her bent head that I, and only I, saw, on the yellow-lit ground revealed beyond, a small placard with uncouth letters thereon, large enough to be read in spite of their unshapeliness:
PARSON LOLLY SeNds REGaRDs LooK OUT FOR PARSON LOLLY
PARSON LOLLY SeNds REGaRDs LooK OUT FOR PARSON LOLLY
A storm sprang in my mind, such a whirlwind of spirit as I believe I have never before experienced, when behind the quick, expectant face of this American girl, one so tender to her stricken friend, one so fearless, I saw that obscene sign. She was at first dazzled by the light in my hand, and her dark blue eyes show wonderfully bright and wild. Her gold hair then had a fine-spun beauty. And beside the old gate-tower lay the sneering message of one who affronted both manhood and womanhood. Anger at the marauder who made beauty his victim, shame for being duped, fear of being duped again, a craving to bring the rascal down—these and I know that not what other unleashed gales met in the cross-roads of my mind. The winds rose to raving, towered into hurricanes. My soul was dizzy, staggering. I was not rational at that moment—then the gales went down. I bit my lip hard, stepped around the two women there, picked up the sign (which had been printed with a smudgy pencil on a stiff folio sheet) and showed it to the rest.
“Parson Lolly!” exclaimed more than one.
Then Oxford, perhaps intending to be jocose, said,
“ ‘Beware of Parson Lolly.’ Beggar’s a bit late, it seems to me.”
“At least,” said Crofts Pendleton thickly “it proves he’s human—the devil!”
“In some ways human, perhaps,” amended Maryvale.
“What else, then?”
“Less than human. Consider the birds of the air, my friends. They are, I suppose, less than human—yet—they—can—fly!”
I gave a stout shrug to rid myself of the disquiet compelled by such a suggestion.
Anxiety over Miss Mertoun’s exposure to the midnight air prompted Alberta Pendleton, not for the first time, to urge taking her inside the Hall. But Miss Lebetwood shook her head in a determined manner, and with a gesture showed that she believed it was too far to carry her to the mansion.
“It’s very mild out here now,” she declared. “I know sleep-walking people. If she were to wake up while she’s being taken, it might have some long-lasting ill effect. Alberta, please don’t ask again. I want her to be in my arms when she opens her eyes. You good people don’t need to stay. I—and Sean—can wait here with her alone.”
But none of us would go. Then while we waited to see a greater sign of life than the restlessness of those long black lashes on the pallid cheek, down from the dark north came that ragged, hungry voice I had heard while alone earlier in the night, a cry that tore at our nerves and congealed our blood to ice-drops in our veins. A carnal, raving cry, thinning to a shriek that pierced the ear, swelling to a howl that loosened the knees.
Of that dire, abysmal wail of mad desire, an overtone must have found a counterpart in Cosgrove’s spirit. Out of the past of his kind, that had seen things more clearly in the dusk than in the plain light of day, that had loved cries of battle and death more than joyful cries, some strain may have wrung the man’s soul. Terribly to all of us, he raised his voice in answer to the inhuman call; I, at least, had no sense of body or of time and place while he burst into a black rain of words, a torrent of rancour, and defiance against the fiend of the pit, whose incarnate self he seemed to hear in the voice of the beast.
But a low call from Paula Lebetwood reduced him to a stunning silence. “I think she’s coming to.”
The unconscious girl’s fingers fluttered briefly; her lips stirred; her whole body stirred a little. She turned once, twice, restlessly, and sank, with a little sigh, comfortably and trustingly into the American girl’s embrace. The trace of a sneer had vanished from her face, and her breast moved with her breathing.
“She’s sleeping now,” said Alberta Pendleton, and stooped beside the pair on the grass.
Miss Lebetwood whispered, “Dearest, do you hear me? Do you know me? It’s Paula. . . . Dearest, do you hear me?” She stroked the pale forehead free of its last furrow.
“Yes,” came like a shadow of a word from the sleeping girl.
“Dearest, Paula wants you to come with her.” Still she spoke, soothing, caressing, in the effort to woo her to awaken peacefully. And the eyes of Millicent Mertoun opened, revealing themselves to be of a deep blackness that rivalled her errant hair, opened to see only the smile of love on the face of the American girl bending over her; and the English girl smiled too.
“Your headache is all gone, isn’t it, dearest?”
“Yes . . . but where . . . is this?”
“Don’t be frightened, dear. It’s the lawn by the gate-house. Now we’re going inside.”
“But how? . . . I don’t understand . . . these people.”
Miss Lebetwood kissed her cheek, leaned her forehead against it. “Never mind, dearest. Everyone is a friend, you know. Can you walk? Here, now.”
The English girl was sitting up; she rubbed her eyes, and sent short, bewildered looks this way and that, far from comprehending her situation. Too many of the party were trying to explain everything to her, and she was beginning to look desperate and unhappy.
“Never mind the silly people,” said Miss Lebetwood sensibly. “See—we’re just a few steps away from the house—where we’ve been before, you know. Now we must go in. Sean, help me.”
The Irishman and the women at last began to support the strengthless girl into the Hall. It must have been a full quarter of an hour since we had poured out from that vaulted chamber into the enigmatic night and had heard the call from the gate-house. Now the servants were roused, summoned by someone, and lanterns were rushing across the lawn in our direction. I had commenced to go with the party about Miss Mertoun, desirous of casting a light before their feet. But Pendleton called me back somewhat peremptorily.
“Bright enough from the Hall for ’em not to stumble by.” Alone in the great mansion the Hall of the Moth sparkled forth, but the glare from its massive chandelier was a sure guiding light. “We need you here,” added our host; “there’s a good deal more of this needs looking at.”
At a phrase from him the lanterns began to swing hither and thither about the lawn, and we men of the party passed across the drawbridge under the resounding gate-house arch.
“Is this usually lowered?” I asked.
“Usually. Can be raised for the sport of it. It’s part of the main drive, you see. It must have been hereabout that they smelt—”
He had no need to say more.
“Great God, what an unholy stench!”
“Itisblood!”
“Bottles of it.”
Crofts Pendleton’s voice shook. “I hope—it’s not—anything serious.”
Just then nothing could have struck us as amusing. Lord Ludlow interjected, “Remember, sir, that there is a missing man—”
“Oh, Lord, look there! My boot!”
Belvoir lifted a foot for inspection, while I turned the eye of the torch upon it. The leather was stained with a fluid dark and thick.
“My God!” observed Pendleton.
“It’s jolly well begun to clot.”
“Look out, you chaps, you’ll mire yourselves.”
“Show us the place, Bannerlee.”
My torch exposed a patch of darkened grass only a foot or so each way. There was nothing else about nearby.
Pendleton, half aghast, kneeled on the edge of the patch and studied it.
“A lot of blood’s been spilled here. It must have soaked down, a goodish bit of it, but there’s quite a pool about the grass roots. This spot will have to be guarded to-night. Pity we’ve tramped about.”
A thick voice lifted in excitement from the north of us.
“Oh, Mister Crofts, sir, do come here.”
“What is it, Tenney? Let it stay, whatever it is.”
“Small fear I’ll touch it, sir. It’s one of them old fightin’ irons.”
“A weapon, by heaven!” exclaimed Lord Ludlow.
“Has it blood on it?”
“All sticky dried, sir.”
We were beside the quaking man-servant in a jiffy or two, staring curiously where lay a small battle-axe, with an inconsiderable curve of blade. It was a weapon of uncommon slightness. Both metal and wood were dark with the same viscous fluid, the handle being quite slobbered with it.
“From the armoury!” cried our host. “The foul devil’s actually been inside the house! Don’t touch it!”
“That weapon was on the wall at a quarter before eight,” said Lord Ludlow. (Ah, I knew why he could say that!) “I was passing through to the library for my glasses.” (There, to be sure, the old rascal prevaricated.)
“You don’t say!”
“This looks like a serious crime,” remarked his Lordship.
“Serious crime!” Pendleton snorted. “Ludlow, you surprise me. I thought it was child’s play.”
“I think that by a serious crime our noble friend means a particular crime—don’t you, Ludlow? Isn’t it the customary euphemism?” asked Belvoir.
“I mean murder, sir.”
“Should have said so in the first place,” growled Pendleton, and added, “No need to say it at all.”
“It’s jolly irregular, though,” declared Oxford. “All that blood in one spot, and this gory thing over here.”
“This was not done according to rule,” rejoined his Lordship.
“It was not carried out as planned,” declared Cosgrove, who had come out from the mansion again.
“And one, er, detail only needs to be filled in.” That was Belvoir from somewhere in the darkness behind us. “The, er,corpus delicti.”
“Gad, yes—scatter, now—search—all the way to Aidenn Water.”
The cluster of lanterns spread into kaleidoscopic figures again, although the men seemed none too happy to leave the protection of one another. But they did not discover any further traces of the marauder or a vestige of a victim who might have furnished all that blood. My own light picked up the last find of the night, a round, battered object on the grass even further north than the blood-stained axe.
“A hat!”
“Can it be Sir Brooke’s?”
Pendleton leaped ahead of us and snatched it from the ground, held it from him contemptuously.
“I doubt it.”
“I can tell you certainly that it is not Sir Brooke’s!”
One man, at least, jumped at the sound of a female voice among us. There was Eve Bartholomew, standing tall and tragic, clinging, I thought, to the last pinch of nerve she possessed.
“I couldn’t help being interested, you know,” she remarked ingenuously, and gave a little high-keyed laugh. “I just came from the Hall. But I can assure you that Sir Brooke has nothing to do with this affair. He would be mad to take any part in it. He would be mad to wear that rag of a disreputable hat.”
“Yes, Mrs. Bartholomew,” I agreed, “he would. I was about to say, before you identified the hat as not Sir Brooke’s, that it belongs to me. I wore it down the slopes of Aidenn Vale.”
“You did!”
“Yes—none too new when I set forth with it this morning, it has suffered a lifetime’s wear and tear with me to-day. That is the history of the hat.”
“But where did you see it last?” demanded Pendleton.
“I left it hanging in the entrance-hall. And I saw it on the rack as you and I came down the stairs before we went in to the Bidding Feast.”
“By gad, I remember it too,” he assented. “Then if—”
But he never finished that sentence, whose protases and apodoses might have filled an hour. Quick with surmise, we turned back to the house.
Millicent Mertoun and her retinue had by this time gone upstairs, but the Hall of the Moth was full of the women-servants of the house, arrayed in white as if risen from their graves in winding sheets. A small boy in a nightgown, scared half to death, was blubbering soulfully, as were some of the women. Blenkinson, the butler, the only man of them who had not got into clothes and gone forth, was quieting everyone with loud sibilance.
Pendleton confronted them somewhat nervously.
“There’s been too much racket about nothing,” he asserted. “Miss Mertoun walked a little in her sleep. That’s really all that’s happened. You’re all very silly, you see, to take on so. Now get to bed.”
But when they had departed he turned upon Eve Bartholomew with a face full of bale. “I can tell you one thing about Sir Brooke. If he doesn’t show up to-morrow and clear things up a bit, he’ll find no Bidding Feast when he gets here. I’ll invite ’em to clear out. I’m not going to have my guests hounded and threatened.”
Mrs. Bartholomew gasped. “Why, you can’t say that Sir Brooke has anything—”
“I don’t know,” scowled Pendleton, “but I want him—here!”
We are truly blissful marriage celebrators.
. . . . A thought had been germinating in my mind ever since the moment of my near-madness on the lawn, when the iniquity of Parson Lolly had so taken hold of me. When we were alone:
“Crofts, I want to prove I’m not crazy. Show me where you want me to sleep, and give me a book to write in. And keep it quiet, for heaven’s sake.”
“A book to write in?”
“I have many words within me craving to be penned. Give me a book to write in, and show me my room.”
Well, this is the room, and these some of the words.
Now to tell of the many things that happened to me to-day before these many things.