PART 2: THE APPEARANCE
Harrison and Fell were within a few yards of the plantation, when the vague pillar of illusive whiteness that flitted in the shadow of the trees moved towards them, and, after the slight hesitation of one who dreads to plunge, stepped into the moonlight. But having thus dared the shock of immersion, it seemed that for the moment her strength could carry her no further. She stood motionless and with an effect of strained effort, on the shadow, her eyes downcast and her crossed hands grasping the ends of the tulle scarf that draped her head and shoulders.
In that stiff pose, with the rigid lines of her figure delivered milk-white against the sullen background of the yews, she looked less like a human being than the rather conventional image of some idealised virgin, the expression of a dream, modelled none too definitely in wax by an artist whose recollection of his vision was already fading.
Harrison stopped short and laid his hand on Fell’s arm. “Who is it?” he asked him. It was manifestly an absurd question to put to his companion, a stranger in Long Orton; but in the first agitation of the discovery Harrison clutched at the nearest support.
“No idea!” Fell replied. He was suddenly disappointed and downcast. This girl, whoever she might be, was certainly not Phyllis, and all the furious expectations and fine resolves that had wonderfully lighted him had been quenched with an abruptness that left him listless and momentarily devoid of curiosity.
“Who is it?” repeated Greatorex, who had been only a pace or two behind them. He spoke in the tone a man might use while surreptitiously addressing his neighbour during a church-service. This echo of his own question seemed to annoy Harrison. He shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and turning round addressed his wife in a voice that was unnecessarily strident.
“Here’s a mysterious lady come to call upon us, Emma,” he said.
And then Mrs. Harrison, giggling nervously, put the essential but manifestly hopeless question for the third time.
“Who is she?” she asked, in an undertone.
Harrison may have hoped that the shock of his voice, and, perhaps, of his determinedly sceptical attitude, would have exorcised the phantom that was assuredly, so he had already decided, the creation of a moment’s excited imagination. But when he turned back to face the plantation, the pale figure still stood in the same attitude, and seemed now, moreover, to have attained a sharper definition of outline; to be altogether more human and solid.
“By Jove, you know, itissomeone, after all,” Harrison murmured.
“Oh! itissomeone, right enough,” Fell said, at present concerned only with the fact that it was not the right someone.
“Oh! Well!” Harrison softly ejaculated, as one who braces himself to an encounter.
He stepped forward a couple of paces with a slightly grotesque air of greeting. “Hm! hm! I don’t quite know ...” he said; “that is, might I ask whom we have the pleasure of—of meeting so unexpectedly?”
The frozen intensity of the silence that appeared to follow his question may have been due to the fact that each member of the party was holding his or her breath in the expectation of the moment.
The figure moved. Slowly and with an almost painful deliberation she released the ends of the tulle scarf that was about her head and shoulders, and let her hands fall to her sides. Her mouth opened, but she did not speak; and after what might have been another effort to reply—a just perceptible movement of the head—she took a careful step backward, entering again the shadow of the yews.
“But, I say, you know....” Harrison began.
She interrupted him with a gesture, raising her hand and pointing with an unmistakable certainty at Lady Ulrica. And the hand and forearm that by this gesture she once more plunged into the moonlight had something the appearance of opalescent glass.
Harrison, standing with his back to the house-party, did not understand this indication and turned his head to see who or what had been selected for peculiar notice; but Lady Ulrica responded with a fine dignity. She came forward past Harrison right up to the edge of the yews, and said in a voice that did credit to her breeding:
“My dear, what is it? Can I help you in any way?”
And then, no doubt to the infinite relief of the Harrisons, the unknown replied. She had a little husky voice when she first spoke, a voice that suggested the last sleepy clutter of roosting birds; and her speech came with an appearance of effort.
“Presently,” she said rather indistinctly, and added something that sounded like “more strength.”
Lady Ulrica was painfully short-sighted. She had those large, protuberant brown eyes, almost devoid of expression, that are sometimes indicative of heart trouble. And as she answered, she was fumbling at her breast for the impressive, handled lorgnette that was discovered later on the coffee table under the cedar.
“We weren’t quite sure, you know,” she said in her authoritative contralto; “whether you were an apparition or not, and so we came to see. But, of course, now we have seen you and heard you speak, we shall be delighted to help you if you want help, or—if you’d prefer it—to go away.”
“Stay near me,” the stranger said in a clearer voice, and striking a lower pitch than when she had spoken first. “Till I get more strength.”
The rest of the party had paused in a little knot, some six or seven feet away, while this brief conversation had gone forward, listening staring with an absorption that in other circumstancesmight have been judged as slightly lacking in good taste. But now, some kind of realisation of their attitude seemed to come to them, and they diverted their attention by a manifest effort from the two people on the edge of the plantation and began to talk in low voices among themselves.
Mrs. Harrison, moving across to her husband, looked at him with raised eyebrows, silently asking the obvious question.
“Fraud,” he said in a careful undertone, and added rather more viciously, “Hoax of some kind.”
Mrs. Harrison, however, was not to be rebuffed so easily. “But, Charles,” she said with a slight urgency, as if she would persuade him to be reasonable; “don’t you think there is something veryoddabout her? As if she were not quite sane? That pose of the Virgin Mary when she was in the moonlight as we came up? And did you notice that she’s wearing quite the commonest sort of tulle scarf?”
“Yes, I’d noticed that,” he began, and then their attention was snatched back to their strange visitor by the sound of a laugh. It was a clear, high laugh, but just too near the edge of emotion for a person under suspicion of madness.
“I must see to this,” Harrison murmured to his wife, and took a few steps towards Lady Ulrica and the mysterious visitor. He was a connoisseur of feminine beauty, and he had been struck by what he mentally termed the “exquisite accuracy” of the profile presented to him. It had come clear and sharp against the background of the plantation, white and vivid in the moonlight; a forehead in a vertical line over the delicately rounded chin, a perfectly curved aquiline nose and the suggestion of a fine, sensitive mouth. Harrison saw it as the considered and patient modelling of some idealised profile in a cameo. It was a type that he very greatly admired; and this sight of her beauty perhaps softened the asperity of the cross-examination he had intended.
He came within a few feet of her as he began to speak, but she was still within the black shadow of the trees and hecould no longer distinguish her features.
“We—we are rather at a loss, my dear young lady,” he said. “You understand, I hope, that if you find yourself in any perplexity, my wife will be delighted to offer you our hospitality.”
Instead of answering him she put out her hand towards Lady Ulrica, but when that lady made a responsive movement, the stranger shrank away again.
“They don’t help me,” she murmured. An undercurrent of agitation was coming into her speech, and began to dominate it as she continued, more hurriedly; “I can’t help it, if they won’t believe me. They’re antag—antago—tell them to be still—in their thoughts—in their....”
Her voice died out, fluttering down through the original quality of huskiness that had first distinguished it, to a hoarse, diminishing whisper. And it seemed at the same moment as if she also were stealthily retreating, sliding away from them.
“Look out! She’s going!” Harrison cried out. “We mustn’t let her get away like this. She’s—she’s not safe to be left alone. We must catch her.”
But already the stranger was nearly out of sight. For an instant they saw her through the darkness, as an illusive pillar of faint light gleaming among the profound shadows of the yews; a pale uncertain form that vanished even as they started in pursuit.
“I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” Harrison announced with determination as he led the search.
Yet, from the very outset, that search was the most perfunctory and futile affair. The members of the party, two of whom stayed behind, exhibited a marked inclination not to separate. Outside, in the security of the moonlight and each other’s society, they had suffered mystification, wonder, perhaps an occasional thrill of apprehension, but not that peculiar quality of fear that lay in wait for them the moment they entered the gloom of the plantation.
Even Greatorex felt that influence. He had followed his host, in advance of the other three, but lost sight of him directly as he entered the cover of the trees. He started violently when a twig brushed his face, and then, with a just perceptible note of alarm in his voice, called out:
“Hallo, Harrison! You there? It’s so infernally dark!”
Harrison answered him with a remarkable promptitude.
“Hallo, G.!” he said. “That you? I’m close here! I’ll wait for you.”
They were as a matter of fact separated only by the spread of a single yew.
“Don’t see that we stand much chance of catching the lady in a place like this, Harrison,” Greatorex remarked when they had joined company. “You might hide a platoon under these trees in this light, what?”
“Only a narrow belt of it,” Harrison replied. “We’ll be through on to the shore of the lake in ten yards. We can see her then for half a mile if she’s come out.”
“All right,” Greatorex agreed, and added in a mood of sudden confidence; “Beastly weird sort of place, this, but it’s been a weird sort of affair altogether.”
“Mad woman,” commented Harrison with a touch of vehemence.
“Queer, certainly,” Greatorex agreed. “But why did you say hoax, just now? You don’t think that...?”
They had been talking in interrupted snatches as they pressed their way, keeping close together, through the stubborn resistance of the yews, but as Greatorex’s sentence trailed away with a suggestion of cutting off his own suspicions, they came out on to the long grass that bordered the lake.
Harrison stopped, and gave a sigh that may have indicated his relief at getting clear from the intriguing opposition of the plantation.
Before them was spread the placid deep of the black water,so calm and rigid that it looked like a sheet of unsoiled and faintly lustrous ice. To the right and left of them the bank ran in a flat curve, in full sight for a quarter of a mile each way, save that it was bordered by an uneven selvage of impenetrable black shadow. But nowhere was there any sign of a flitting white shape, escaping from the charges of hoax or insanity that had been brought against it.
“Either got away or hiding in the plantation,” remarked Greatorex, after a pause during which with a suggestion of breathless eagerness the two men had searched the moonlit distances. The wreath of cirrus had cleared away now, and the moon had reached the perfect gold of its ultimate splendour.
“Hm!” Harrison replied thoughtfully. “Not much good searching the plantation.”
“Might as well hunt for a louse in a woodstack,” Greatorex thought.
“What did you make of it, G.?” Harrison asked suddenly.
“Mighty queer business altogether,” Greatorex replied. And then with a sudden drop in his voice, he added on a note of alarm, “What the devil is that you’ve got on your back, Harrison?”
“Eh? What? What d’you mean?” Harrison asked nervously.
Greatorex took a step towards him, and after a moment’s pause in which he hesitated as if afraid to touch some uncanny thing, laid hold of a long wisp of drapery and stripped it from his host’s back and shoulders. It seemed to Greatorex that the flimsy thing clung slightly to the smooth cloth of the dinner jacket.
“What is it? What is it?” asked Harrison impatiently.
“Looks like that scarf the apparition was wearing,” Greatorex remarked, displaying it.
Harrison clutched at it eagerly.
“By Jove, so it is!” he said; “tangible proof, this, G., of the lady’s substantiality. Good, solid evidence of fact. Theymust all have seen it. Emma even mentioned it to me as being of rather common material.” As he spoke he was fingering the stuff of the scarf; running it through his hands, as if he found an almost sensual pleasure in the reassuring quality of its undoubted substance.
“Why, of course,” Greatorex answered, little less relieved than his companion; but anxious, now, to prove that he had never for one instant been under any delusion as to the nature of the apparition. “You never thought, did you, that the lady was a ghost?” His laugh as he asked the question had a slightly insincere ring, but Harrison was too preoccupied with his own thoughts to notice that.
“A ghost! My dear G.!” he said. “The ghost of what, in Heaven’s name? No, no, she was solid enough. But what’s puzzling me is whether she was insane, or whether, as seems to me more probable, the whole thing was a hoax of some kind.”
“You don’t suggest that Vernon, or Lady Ulrica....” Greatorex began, but Harrison cut him short.
“No, certainly not,” he said. “They would not be so silly. It was just a coincidence that we should have been discussing all this foolishness beforehand. No, there are thousands of deluded idiots about, of one sort or another, who have gone mad on this spiritualism business, and I think the most probable explanation is that some week-end visitor at the hotel—we’ve got quite a decent hotel in the village, you know, kept by a fellow called Messenger—some woman or other, a little cracked on this subject, came out here and was tempted to try a little experiment on us. Probably she didn’t mean to go quite so far, in the first instance. Just showed herself in the moonlight, playing at being an apparition for our benefit. She’d be able to see us on the lawn from here. And then when we caught her, she had to play up to the part. No doubt, she recognised Lady Ulrica’s credulity. Recognised her as the kind of woman that makes the fortune of the ordinary medium. And all that nonsensical talk of hers—not badly done, in a way, by the by—wasjust the sort of stuff they spew up at a séance. Eh? Don’t you agree? What we’ve got to do now is to find out who it was. We’ll go down and talk to Messenger tomorrow morning, and get the truth about it. He’s got an uncommonly pretty daughter, by the way; and I don’t think we’ll take Fell. He showed signs of being a trifle épris in that quarter, when he was down here last.”
Harrison’s confidence grew as he spoke, and before he had finished he had warmed to quite a glow of certainty. His excitement had something the quality of that displayed by one who finds himself unhurt after a nasty accident.
“Expect you’re right,” Greatorex agreed calmly.
“Well, we’d better get back to the others—with our—our evidence.” Harrison looked down at the scarf in his hands, and began automatically to fold it as he spoke. “There’s a path through the plantation, a few yards further up,” he continued. “No need for us to tear ourselves to pieces among the shrubs. As you said, we haven’t the least chance of finding the lady by this light, and the only decent thing we can do is to clear off, and let her find her way back to the hotel.”
“If your theory is the right one,” Greatorex commented, as they began to walk up the bank of the lake.
“Have you a better?” snapped Harrison.
“No—no,” Greatorex admitted. “Can’t say I have. And anyway, yours is susceptible of proof. All we have to do is to find the lady.”
“Quite so,” Harrison said without conviction. He foresaw, with a little qualm of uneasiness, that his failure to produce the lady might prove a difficulty in any controversy that might follow with Vernon and Lady Ulrica. If he definitely committed himself to a theory that could be upheld or discredited by the investigation of verifiable facts, he would be at an immense disadvantage should the facts go against him—as, he was ready to admit to himself, they very possibly might. He realised that in his excitement he had been too hasty.
“Of course, G.,” he said on a faintly expostulating note, “of course, I may have been rather premature in assuming that this—er—visitor of ours was staying at the hotel. I—I don’t in any way insist on that. It’s our first chance and perhaps our best one; but there are other alternatives. We can begin with this scarf. That’s our solid ground of evidence. What we have to do is to trace the owner.”
“Exactly,” Greatorex agreed thoughtfully.
Harrison noticed the sound of a qualification in his friend’s reply.
“Well, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes, oh yes; that’s all right,” Greatorex agreed. “I was only wondering why, after all, we should bother any more about it?”
Harrison was too clever a man to attempt evasions. He saw quite clearly that if he pretended some more or less plausible excuse such as being annoyed by the trespass, Greatorex would see through him. And he would not risk that. Instead, he took what seemed a perfectly safe line.
“To be quite honest, G.,” he said, “I am fully anticipating that Vernon will claim this—this experience, as being a spiritualistic phenomenon. And—and—well, I’ll admit that that attitude annoys me. It’s so childish. This seems to me a—a perfectly fair instance of the sort of thing that these credulous people take hold of and transform into what they call proof. Properly garbled, as no doubt it will be, this silly little incident will presently be figuring in the Proceedings of the S.P.R. as ‘new evidence.’ Vernon could dress it up to look as circumstantial as the evidence in a police-court—give all our names and addresses, and make out affidavits for us to sign—affidavits that would not contain a single mis-statement of fact so far as we can see, but taken altogether would have an entirely false significance. You know how the....” He broke off suddenly in the middle of his sentence. “What the devil’s that?” he asked sharply.
He had paused in his walk, as was his habit when he wished to elaborate an argument, and they had not yet left the bank of the lake for the path through the plantation. What had so abruptly diverted his attention was the beginning of a sound in that airless night, a sound that, as they waited and listened, waxed from the first insistent whispering with which it had begun, to a fierce rustling that seemed to swell almost to a roar, before it died again to the hushed sibilance of the outset.
“What the devil is it?” Greatorex muttered.
Harrison gave a little scream of half-hysterical laughter.
“Our—our nerves must have been very thoroughly upset, G.,” he said in a strained voice, “if—if you and I can be startled by the sound of wind in the poplars. They’re on the island there, a big clump of them. Now I think of it, that’s one of the things that made this place so confoundedly unfamiliar to-night. It’s the first time I’ve ever been here when it has been so still that the poplars weren’t talking.”
“Wind!” ejaculated Greatorex. “There is no wind.”
“There has been,” Harrison said, and pointed to the lake whose level surface was now flawed here and there by a tiny ripple that flashed an occasional reflected sparkle from the high moon.
“Queer!” Greatorex ejaculated, and shivered as if he were suddenly cold.
“But, after all, why queer, G.,?” Harrison expostulated, although there was still a note of uneasiness in his voice. “I—I mean, there are always, on the stillest night, these slight movements of the air. We happen to notice it because it’s so particularly still.”
“Uncannily still,” Greatorex murmured.
“Oh! damn it, G.,” Harrison expostulated; “if you’re going to get superstitious about meteorological conditions....”
“It’s no use pretending, Harrison,” Greatorex returned. “Thereissomething uncanny about this place to-night. I’m not a superstitious man, as you know, but I don’t mind confessingthat I’ve got the creeps.” He shivered again, and then added, “Come along, let’s get back to your familiar house. I’ve had enough of this.”
Harrison’s only reply at the moment was a grunt of annoyance, but after they had turned into the path between the yews he began to talk again. “Admitting,” he said, “that my nerves, too, are a trifle on edge, what does that prove, unless it is that we still retain something of the emotional fear of the savage?”
“What a chap you are for proving things this evening,” Greatorex returned. “That argument with Vernon has upset you.”
“They lay such stress on all these subjective reactions,” Harrison grumbled, evidently continuing his own line of thought. “A normal psychology....”
But at this point they came out of the plantation into the clear spaces of the meadow and were instantly hailed by Fell and Mrs. Greatorex, who came forward to meet them.
“The others have gone on,” Fell explained. “Lady Ulrica had a kind of faint, and Mrs. Harrison and Vernon have taken her back to the house. What a time you’ve been!”
“I suppose you didn’t find anyone?” Mrs. Greatorex asked.
“No, no, we didn’t,” Harrison replied. “Only a part of the lady’s apparel.” And he exhibited the tulle scarf with the air of one prepared to explain a conjuring trick.
“Where did you find it?” Fell asked.
“On Harrison’s back,” Greatorex said.
“On his back?” ejaculated Fell.
“Simple enough, simple enough,” Harrison explained. “We’d been dodging and skirmishing about the plantation, and, no doubt, I unknowingly scraped the thing off one of the trees. Greatorex saw it when we came out into the light by the lake.”
“Yes,” Greatorex commented, “and it was spread out over his coat as neatly as you please—might have been arranged there as a kind of joke.”
“Herbert!” his wife ejaculated. “Do you mean that the woman was playing tricks on you; behind your back, as it were?”
Harrison clicked his tongue, as if he were facetiously reproving a child.
“Not you too, Mrs. Greatorex,” he said. “I—I give you credit for more sense. The truth is that your good husband has brought with him into this life some of the old fears and superstitions that used to rule him when he plundered and murdered on the high seas. Yes—yes—in effect that’s the truth, though we may find a biological explanation for the phenomenon without accepting any theory of reincarnation. It’s—it’s a case of latent cell memory, and to-night it has come out very—very strongly. He can find no explanation but the supernatural. I—I assure you, when a little bit of a breeze sprang up just now and set the poplars whispering, he was absolutely terrified. It only needed another touch to set him crossing himself and calling on his patron saint.”
“Oh, Herbert!” Mrs. Greatorex expostulated. “You don’t really believe it was a spirit, do you?”
Everyone knew that Greatorex had married beneath him, but his wife’s usual method in company was to maintain a thoughtful silence that covered a multitude of faults. That method was one of her own devising. Her husband had never attempted to correct her. Nor did he now show the least impatience either with her unusual loquacity or her failure to appreciate Harrison’s persiflage.
“No, my dear, as a matter of fact, I don’t,” he said; “but if you ask me, our host is almost painfully anxious to prove that the strange lady was of like substance to ourselves, of very flesh and bone subsisting; I forget just how the quotation goes.”
“Well, of course she was,” his wife replied with an air of assurance. “What else could she be?”
“Er—er—by the way, Mrs. Greatorex,” Harrison put in. “Did you—er—see her plainly? Could you by any chancedescribe her for—for the purposes of identification?”
“Yes, I think I could,” Mrs. Greatorex said cheerfully. “She was wearing a rather dowdy—old-fashioned, at least—white dress, more like a négligée than anything. I thought it funny she should come out in the garden in a thing like that. But I didn’t make out quite what the material was. It looked like a rather fine linen tulle worn over a white linen petticoat, I thought. And she had a common scarf—but of course you’ve got that in your hand now....”
“Hm! yes,” Harrison interrupted. “But her face, eh? Did you happen to catch her in profile, by any chance?”
“I don’t know that Ididnotice her face very particularly,” Mrs. Greatorex said. “She seemed quite an ordinary sort of young woman, I thought.”
They had been retracing their way across the field as they talked, and now having reached the sunk fence, filed up the little flight of stone steps to the garden. Before them, across the width of the lawn the lighted windows of the drawing-room shone artificially yellow against the whiteness of the moonlight. They had returned to the influences of their own world; even the garden planned and formalised was a man-made thing. But as they crossed the short, well-kept turf, some common impulse made them pause, and with a movement that seemed to be concerted, turn back to look down over the meadow to the plantation and the solemn stretches of the lake—back to that other world, vague, mysterious and enormously still, into which they had so carelessly penetrated.
No one spoke until Harrison, with an impatient sigh, remarked suddenly: “Oh, come along! let’s get back to sanity.”
“Hm! Yes,” Greatorex agreed.
“About time we went to bed,” Harrison went on. “We’ll be wiser in the morning.”
“I suppose,” Fell began as they resumed their walk to the house, but Harrison cut short his speculations.
“Here’s Emma coming to reprove us,” he interrupted.“She’ll probably insist on our all taking something hot to ward off the evil effects of miasma.”
Mrs. Harrison was, in fact, coming quickly to meet them with a brisk air of urgency, and as though she would shorten the little distance that still divided them, she called to her husband while she was still some few yards away, on a note that held the suggestion of a faint asperity.
“Charles. I want to speak to you,” she said.
“Are we in the way?” Fell asked as they hurried to meet her.
Mrs. Harrison looked at him for a moment as if she had been unexpectedly reminded of the fact of his existence, and then, taking no notice of his question, continued:
“That man Messenger, from the hotel, is here, Charles, with the police sergeant. They want to see you at once.”
Harrison’s quick mind leapt at once to a possible explanation.
“Ha! Now we shall hear something about the lady of the lake, no doubt,” he said.
“It’s about Messenger’s daughter,” Mrs. Harrison replied. “She’s—she has disappeared. They are looking for her; and Messenger wants to know if they can go down to the plantation. He has apparently got some idea that she may be there.”
“Oh!” commented Harrison on a falling note, and exchanged a glance of understanding with his wife. Then they both turned and looked at Fell.
He had almost forgotten the resolutions he had made an hour earlier, and was quite unprepared to meet the silent accusation that was now levelled at him.
“I—Idon’t know anything about it,” he stammered.
“Oh, well,” Harrison said. “Let’s go and hear what Messenger and the Sergeant have to tell us. I suppose this means that we shall have to make another pilgrimage to the lake.”
Greatorex, in the rear of the procession, was heard to remark that he was damned if he could make head or tail of it.