Henry Lennox suffered as he had not suffered even during the horrors of war. For the first time in his life he felt fear. He lowered the unconscious man to the ground, and knew that he was dead, for he had looked on sudden death too often to feel in any doubt. Others, however, were not so ready to credit this, and after he hastened downstairs with his evil message, both Sir Walter and Masters found it hard to believe him.
When he descended, his uncle and May were standing at the dining room door, waiting for him and Peter Hardcastle. Mary had just joined them.
"He's dead!" was all the youth could say; then, thoroughly unnerved, he fell into a chair and buried his face in his hands.
Again through his agency had a dead man been discovered in the Grey Room. In each case his had been the eyes first to confront a tragedy, and his the voice to report it. The fact persisted in his mind with a dark obstinacy, as though some great personal tribulation had befallen him.
Mary stopped with her cousin and asked terrified questions, while Sir Walter, calling to Masters, hastened upstairs, followed by Septimus May. The clergyman was also agitated, yet in his concern there persisted a note almost of triumph.
"It is there!" he cried. "It is close to us, watching us, powerless to touch either you or me. But this unhappy sceptic proved an easy victim."
"Would to God I had listened to you yesterday," said Sir Walter. "Then this innocent man had not perhaps been snatched from life."
"You were directed not to listen. Your heart was hardened. His hour had come."
"I cannot believe it. We may restore him. It is impossible that he can be dead in a moment."
They stood over the detective, and Masters and Fred Caunter, with courage and presence of mind, carried him out into the corridor.
The butler spoke.
"Run for the brandy, Fred," he said. "We must get some down his neck if we can. I don't feel the gentleman's heart, but it may not have stopped. He's warm enough."
The footman obeyed, and Hardcastle was laid upon his back. Then Sir Walter directed Masters.
"Hold his head up. It may be better for him."
They waited, and, during the few moments before Caunter returned, Sir Walter spoke again. His mind wandered backward and seemed for the moment incapable of grasping the fact before him.
"Almost the last thing the man said was to ask me why ghosts haunted the night rather than the day."
"Poor fool—poor fool! He is answered," replied the priest.
All attempts to restore the vanished life proved useless, and they carried Hardcastle downstairs presently. Henry Lennox was already gone for the doctor, and when, within an hour, Mannering joined them, he could only pronounce that the man was dead. No sign of life rewarded their protracted efforts to restore circulation. How he had come by his end, how death had broken into his frame, it was impossible to determine. Not an unusual sign marked the body. It revealed neither wound nor outward evidence of shock. The case seemed parallel with that of Thomas May. Death had struck the man like a flash of lightning and dropped him, where he stood, making his notes by the fireplace.
Whereupon a complication faced Dr. Mannering. Mary came to him, where he spoke in the library with Sir Walter and Henry Lennox. She implored him to use his influence with her father-in-law; for they had forgotten Septimus May, while hastily deliberating as to what telegrams should be dispatched; but now they learned that Mr. May was in the Grey Boom and refused to leave it.
"He is very excited," she said. "He is walking up and down, speaking aloud, quoting texts from Scripture, addressing the spirit that he believes to be listening to him. It would be grotesque were it not so horrible. He must be made to come away."
"He is justified of his faith," declared Sir Walter. "I have withstood him until now, but I can do so no longer."
"Indeed you must. He is playing with death," said Mannering.
They sought Tom's father, to find him, as Mary had said, walking up and down, with fierce joy of battle on his thin, stern face and in his shining eyes.
"Now shall the powers of Light triumph and the will of God be done!" he said to them.
He made no demur, however, when they drew him away.
"The future is mine," he declared, and grew calm. "You cannot stand between me and my duty again, Sir Walter. You have gravely erred, and this is the result of your error. But you will not err a second time."
His excitation ceased, and it was he who proposed that they should return to their forgotten meal. In the matter of the man just dead, he revealed an indifference almost callous.
"His God will justly judge him according to his deserving," he declared. "If he sinned through ignorance and false teaching, his punishment will not be heavy; if he hardened his heart against truth and rejected the faith from pride—but even then the Father of Mercy may pardon him. He has failed, even as I knew he must, and paid a terrible penalty for failure."
Sir Walter, sorely stricken, hardly heard the other. He ate a little at Mary's entreaty, then, driven by some impulse to leave his fellow-creatures and court solitude, excused himself, begged Lennox and Mannering to bring him news when the telegram dispatched to Scotland Yard was answered, and prepared to leave them.
As he rose, he marked his old spaniel standing whimpering by his side.
"What is the matter with Prince?" he asked.
"He has not had his dinner," said Mary.
"Let him be fed at once," answered her father, and went out alone.
She rose to follow him immediately, but Mannering, who had stopped and was with them, begged her not to do so.
"Leave him to himself," he said. "This has shaken your father, as well it may. He's all right. Make him take his bromide to-night, and let nobody do anything to worry him."
The master of Chadlands meantime went afield, walked half a mile to a favorite spot, and sat down upon a seat that he had there erected. A storm was blowing up from the south-west, and the weather of his mind welcomed it. He alternated between bewilderment and indignation. His own life-long philosophy and trust in the ordered foundations of human existence threatened to fail him entirely before this second stroke. It seemed that the punctual universe was suddenly turned upside down, and had emptied a vial of horror upon his innocent head.
Reality was a thing of the past. A nightmare had taken its place, a nightmare from which there was no waking. He considered the stability of his days—a lifetime followed upon high principles and founded on religious convictions that had comforted his sorrows and countenanced his joys. It seemed a trial undeserved, that in his old age he should be thrust upon a pinnacle of publicity, forced into the public eye, robbed of dignity, denied the privacy he esteemed as the most precious privilege that wealth could command. Stability was destroyed; to count upon the morrow seemed impossible. His thought, strung to a new morbidity, unknown till now, ran on and pictured, with painful, vivid stroke upon stroke, the insufferable series of events that lay before him.
Life was become a bizarre and brutal business for a man of fine feeling. He would be thrust into the pitiless mouth of sensation-mongers, called to appear before tribunals, subjected to an inquisition of his fellow-men, made to endure a notoriety infinitely odious even in anticipation. Indeed, Sir Walter's simple intellect wallowed in anticipation, and so suffered much that, given exercise of restraint, he might have escaped altogether. He was brave enough, but personal bravery would not be called for. He sat now staring dumbly at an imaginary series of events abominable and unseemly in every particular to his order of mind. He was so concerned with what the future must hold in store for him that for a time the present quite escaped his thoughts.
He returned to it, however, and it was almost with the shock of a new surprise he remembered that Peter Hardcastle, a man of European repute, had just died in his house. But he could not in the least realize the new tragedy. He had as yet barely grasped the truth of his son-in-law's end, and still often found himself expecting Tom's footfall and his jolly voice. That such an abundant vitality was stilled, that such an infectious laugh would never sound again on mortal ear he yet sometimes found it hard to believe.
But now it seemed that the impact of this second blow rammed home the first. He brooded upon his dead son-in-law, and it was long before he returned to the event of that day. A thought struck him, and though elementary enough, it seemed to Sir Walter an important conclusion. There could be no shadow of doubt that Tom May and Peter Hardcastle had died by the same secret force. He felt that he must remember this.
Again he puzzled, and then decided with himself that, if he meant to keep sane, he must practice faith and trust in God. Septimus May had said that such unparalleled things sometimes happened in the world to try man's faith. Doubtless he was right.
Henceforth the old man determined to stand firmly on the side of the supernatural with the priest. He went further, and blamed his scepticism. It had cost the world a valuable life. He could not, indeed, be censured for that in any court of inquiry. Sceptical men would doubtless say that he had done rightly in refusing Mr. May his experiment. But Sir Walter now convinced himself that he had done wrongly. At such a time, with landmarks vanishing and all accepted laws of matter resolved into chaos, there remained only God to trust. Such a burden as this was not to be borne by any mortal, and Sir Walter determined that he would not bear it.
Were we not told to cast our tribulations before the Almighty? Here, if ever, was a situation beyond the power of human mind to approach, unless a man walked humbly with his hand in his Maker's. Septimus May had been emphatically right. Sir Walter repeated this conviction to himself again and again, like a child.
He descended to details presently. The hidden being, that it had been implicitly agreed could only operate by night in the Grey Room, proved equally potent under noonday sun. But why should it be otherwise? To limit its activities was to limit its powers, and the Almighty alone knew what powers had been granted to it. He shrank from further inquiries or investigations on any but a religious basis. He was now convinced that no natural explanation would exist for what had happened in the Grey Room, and he believed that only through the paths of Christian faith would peace return to him or his house.
Then the present dropped out of his thoughts. They wandered into the past, and he concerned himself with his wife. She it was who had taught him to care for foreign travel. Until his marriage he had hardly left England, save when yachting with friends, and an occasional glimpse of a Mediterranean port was all that Sir Walter knew of the earth outside his own country. But he remembered with gratitude the opportunities won from her. He had taken her round the world, and found himself much the richer in great memories for that experience.
He was still thinking when Mary found him, with his old dog asleep at his feet. She brought him a coat and umbrella, for the threatened storm advanced swiftly under clouds laden with rain. Reluctantly enough he returned to the present. A telegram had been received from London, directing Dr. Mannering to reach the nearest telephone and communicate direct. The doctor was gone to Newton Abbot, and nothing could be done until he came back. Not knowing what had occupied Sir Walter's mind, Mary urged him to leave Chadlands without delay.
"Put the place into the hands of the police and take me with you," she said. "Nothing can be gained by our stopping, and, after this, it is certain the authorities will not rest until they have made a far more searching examination than has ever yet been carried out. They will feel this disaster a challenge."
"Thankfully I would go," he answered. "Most thankfully I would avoid what is hanging over my head. It was terrible enough when your dear husband died; but now we shall be the centre of interest to half England. Every instinct cries to me to get out of it, but obviously that is impossible, even were I permitted to do so. It is the duty of the police to suspect every man and woman under my roof—myself with the rest. These appalling things have occurred in my home, and I must bear the brunt of them and stand up to all that they mean. No Lennox ever ran from his duty, however painful it might be. The death of this man—so eminent in his calling—will attract tremendous attention and be, as you say, a sort of direct challenge to the authorities for whom he worked. They will resent this second tragedy, and with good reason. The poor man, though I cannot pretend that I admired him, was a force for good in the world, and his peculiar genius was devoted to the detection of crime and punishment of criminals—a very worthy occupation, however painful to our ideas."
They sat in the library now, and Henry Lennox spoke to his uncle, with his eye on the window, waiting for the sight of the doctor's car.
"They'll want to tear the place down, very likely. They'll certainly have no mercy on the stones and mortar, any more than they will on us."
"They can spare themselves that trouble, and you your fears," declared Septimus May, who had joined them. "It is impossible that they will be here until to-morrow. Meantime—"
"It is easy to see what they will do," proceeded young Lennox, "and what they will think also. Nor can we prevent them, even if we wanted to. I image their theory will be this. They will suppose that Mr. Hardcastle, left in that room alone, was actually on the track of those responsible for Tom's death. They will guess that, in some way, or by some accident, he surprised the author of the tragedy, and the assassin, seeing his danger, resorted to the same unknown means of murder as before. They may imagine some hidden lunatic concealed here, whose presence is only known to some of us. They may suspect a homicidal maniac in me, or my uncle, or Masters, or anybody. Certainly they will seek a natural explanation and flout the idea of any other."
The clergyman protested, but Henry was not prepared to traverse the old ground again.
"I have as much right to my opinions as you to yours," he said. "And I am positive this is man's work."
Then Mary announced that Mannering's car was in sight. The library windows opened on the western side of the house and afforded a view of the main drive, along which the doctor's little hooded car came flying, like a dead leaf in a storm. But it was not alone. A hospital motor ambulance followed behind it.
They soon learned of curious things, and the house was first thrown into a great bustle and then restored to peace.
Mannering had spoken for half an hour with London, and received directions that puzzled him not a little by their implication. For a moment he seemed unwilling to speak before Mary. Then he begged her bluntly to leave them for a while.
"It's this way," he said when she was gone. "They're harboring a mad idea in London, though, of course, the facts will presently convince them to the contrary. Surely I must know death when I see it? But a divisional surgeon, or some other medical official, directs me to bring this poor fellow's body to London to-night. Every care must be taken, warmth and air applied, and so on. They've evidently got a notion that, since life appears to go so easily in the Grey Room, and leave no scratch or wound, either life has not gone at all, or that it may be within the power of science to bring it back again. In a sense this is a reflection upon me—as though it were possible that I could make any mistake between death and suspended animation; but I must do as I'm ordered. I travel to town with the dead man to-night, and if they find he is anything but dead as a doornail, I'll—"
The doctor was writing his reminiscences, "The Recollections of a Country Physician," and he could not fail to welcome these events, for they were destined to lend extraordinary attraction to a volume otherwise not destined to be much out of the common.
He spoke again.
"I should be very glad if you would accompany me, Lennox. I shall have a police inspector from Plymouth; but it would be a satisfaction if you could come. Moreover, you would help me in London."
"I'll come up, certainly. You don't mind, Uncle Walter?"
"Not if Mannering wishes it. We owe him more than we can ever repay. Anything that we can do to lessen his labors ought to be done."
"I should certainly welcome your company. A small saloon carriage is to be put on to the Plymouth train that leaves Newton for London before midnight. We shall be met at Paddington by some of their doctors. And as to Chadlands, four men arrive to-morrow morning by the same train that Peter Hardcastle came down in last night. We shall pass them on the way. They will take charge both of the Grey Room and the house as soon as they arrive."
"And they will be welcome. I would myself willingly pull down Chadlands to the foundations if by so doing I could discover the truth."
"It demands no such sacrifice," declared May, who had listened to these facts. "Bricks and mortar, stone and timber are innocent things. One might as soon dissect a thunder-cloud to find the lightning as destroy material substances to discover what is hidden in this house. The unknown being, about his Master's business here, will no more yield its secret to four detectives, or an army of them, than it did to one. 'What I do thou knowest not now.' It is all summed up in that."
He turned to Mannering and asked a sudden question.
"Why did you object to Mary hearing these facts? In what way should they distress her particularly?"
"Can you not see? Indeed, one might fairly have objected to your presence also. But you are a man. There is an implied horror of the darkest sort for poor Mary in the suggestion that Hardcastle may still live. If he can be brought back to life, then she would surely think that perhaps her husband and your son might have been. Imagine the agony of that. I speak plainly; indeed, there is no rational or sentimental reason why I should not, for the truth is, of course, that the signs of death were clearly evident on your poor boy before what we had to do was done. But the bare thought must have shocked Mary. We know emphatically that Hardcastle is dead, and we need not mention to her this fantastic theory from London."
"I appreciate your consideration," said Sir Walter; and the clergyman also acknowledged it.
"There can be no shadow of doubt concerning my son," he said; "nor is there any in the matter of this unfortunate man."
Henry Lennox went to prepare for the journey. Then, obeying the doctor's directions and treating the dead man as though he were merely unconscious, they carried him to the ambulance car. It was an unseemly farce in Mannering's opinion, and he only realized the painful nature of his task when he came to undertake it; but he carried it through in every particular as directed, conveyed the corpse to Newton after dark, and had the ambulance bed, in which it reposed, borne to the saloon carriage when the night mail arrived from Plymouth, between eleven and twelve. He was able to regulate the temperature with hot steam, and kept hot bottles to the feet and sides of the dead.
He felt impatient and resentful; he poured scorn on the superior authority for the benefit of the inspector and Henry Lennox, who accompanied him; but in secret he experienced emotions of undoubted satisfaction that life had broken from its customary monotonous round to furnish him with an adventure so unique. He pointed out a fact to the policeman before they had started.
"You will observe," he said, with satire, "that, despite the heat we are directed to apply to this unfortunate man, rigor mortis has set in. Whether the authority in London regards that as an evidence of death, of course I cannot pretend to say. Perhaps not. I may be behind the times."
Neither Mannering nor Lennox had spared much thought for those left behind them at Chadlands. The extraordinary character of the task put upon them sufficed to fill their minds, and it was not until the small hours, when they sat with their hands in their pockets and the train ran steadily through darkness and storm, that the younger spoke of his cousin.
"I hope those old men won't bully Mary to-night," he said. "I'd meant to ask you to give Uncle Walter a caution. May's not quite all there, in my opinion, and very likely, now you're out of the way, he'll get round Sir Walter about that infernal room."
Mannering became interested.
"D'you mean for an instant he wants to try his luck after what's happened?"
"You forget. Your day has been so full that you forget what did happen."
"I do not, Lennox. Mary begged me to tackle the man. I calmed him, and he came down to his luncheon. He must have thought over the matter since then, and seen that he was playing with death."
"Far from it, 'The future is mine!' That's what he said. And that means he'll try and be in the Grey Room alone to-night."
"I wish to Heaven you'd made this clear before we'd started. But surely we can trust Sir Walter; he knows what this means, even if that superstitious lunatic doesn't."
"I don't want to bother you," answered Henry; "but, looking back, I'm none so sure that we can trust my uncle. He's been pretty wild to-day, and who shall blame him? Things like this crashing into his life leave him guessing. He's very shaken, and has lost his mental grip, too. Reality's played him such ugly tricks that he may be tempted to fall back on unreality now."
"You don't mean he'll let May go into that room to-night?"
"I hope not. He was firm enough last night when the clergyman clamored to do so. In fact, he made me keep watch to see he didn't. But I think he's weakened a lot since Hardcastle came to grief in broad daylight. And I sha'n't be there to do anything."
"All this comes too late," answered the other. "If harm has happened—it has happened. We can only pray they've preserved some sanity among them."
"That's why I say I hope they're not bullying Mary," answered Lennox. "Of course, she'd be dead against her father-in-law's idea. But she won't count. She can't control him if Sir Walter goes over to his side."
"Let us not imagine anything so unreasonable. We'll telegraph to hear if all's well at the first moment we can."
The storm sent a heavy wash of rain against the side of the carriage. It was a famous tempest, that punished the South of England from Land's End to the North Foreland.
They were distracted from their thoughts by the terrific impact of the wind.
"Wonder we can stop on the rails," said Mannering. "This is a fifty-knot gale, or I'm mistaken."
"I'm thinking of the Chadlands trees," answered the other. "It's rum how, in the middle of such an awful business as this, the mind switches off to trifles. Does it on purpose, I suppose, to relieve the strain. Yes, the trees will catch it to-night. I expect I shall hear a grim tale of fallen timber from Sir Walter by the time I get back to-morrow."
"If nothing's fallen but timber, I sha'n't mind," answered Mannering; "but you've made me devilish uneasy now. If anything further went wrong—well, to put it mildly, they would say your uncle ought to have known a great deal better."
"He does know a great deal better. It's only that temporarily he's knocked off his balance. But I hardly feel as anxious as you do. There's Mary against May; and even if my uncle were for him, on a general, vague theory of something esoteric and outside nature, which you can't fairly call unreasonable any more, Mannering, seeing what's happened—even if Sir Walter felt tempted to let him have his way, I don't believe he'd really consent when it came to the point."
"I hope not—I hope not," answered the other. "Such a concession would take a lot of explanation if the result were another of these disasters. There ought to be an official guard over the room."
"After to-morrow there certainly will be," replied Henry. "You may be sure the police won't leave it again till they've satisfied themselves. All the same, I don't see how a dozen of them will be any safer than one—even if it's some material and physical thing that happens, as we must suppose. And for that matter, if it's really supernatural, why should a dozen be safer than one? Obviously they wouldn't. Whatever it is, it can strike as it likes and without being struck back."
But Dr. Mannering did not answer these questions. He was considering a little book in his pocket, which he would hand over to the police in London next morning.
"Poor chap—if he could have begun by taking the problem by the throat, as he has written here. But, instead, it took him by the throat!"
He took Hardcastle's notebook from his pocket and read again the last few pages.
"He was dreaming of his theories to the last, when he should surely have been girt up in every limb to face facts," said Lennox. "He never realized the horrible danger."
Perusal of the detective's data had revealed an interesting fact. It was known by his colleagues that he designed a book on the theory and practice of criminal investigations, and in many of his pocket-books, subsequently examined, were found memoranda and jottings, doubtless destined to be worked out at another time. It was clear that he had, for a few moments, drifted away from the Grey Room in thought when his death overtook him. Past events, not present problems, were apparently responsible for the reflections that occupied his mind. He was not concentrating on the material phenomena actually under his observation when he died, but following some private meditations provoked by his experiences.
"Elimination embraces the secret of success," he had written. "Exercise the full force of your intelligence and spare no pains to eliminate from every case all matter not bearing directly upon the actual problem. Nine times out of ten the issue is direct, and once permit side issues to draw their tracks across it, once admit metaphysical lines of reasoning, the result will be confusion and a problem increasing in complexity at every stage. Only in romances, where a plot is invented and then complicated by deliberate art, shall we find the truth ultimately permitted to appear in some subordinate incident, or individual, studiously kept in the background—that is the craft of telling detective stories. But, in truth, one needs to lay hold of the problem by the throat at the outset. Deception is too much the province of the criminal and too little the business of the investigator; and where it may be possible to creep, like a snake, into a case, unknown for what you truly are, then your opportunities and chances of success are enormously increased. It is, however, the exception when one can start without the knowledge of anybody involved, and the Scotland Yard of the future will pursue its business under very different circumstances from the present. The detective's work should be made easier and not more difficult. None should know who is working on a case. The law's representatives should be disguised and move among the characters surrounding the crime as something other than they really are. They will—"
Here Hardcastle's reflections came to an end. Some previous notes there were of superficial accidents in the Grey Room and a rough ground plan of it; but nothing more. He had evidently, for the time being, broken away from his environment and was merely thinking, with a pen on paper, when he died.
A succession of incidents, that must have perturbed the doctor and his companion in earnest, had followed upon their departure from Chadlands, and Mary soon discovered that she was faced with a terrible problem.
For one young woman had little chance of winning her way against an old man and the religious convictions that another had impressed upon him. Sir Walter and the priest were now at one, nor did the common sense of a fourth party to the argument convince them. At dinner Septimus May declared his purpose.
"We are happily free of any antagonistic and material influence," he said. "Providence has willed that those opposed to us should be taken elsewhere, and I am now able to do my duty without more opposition."
"Surely, father, you do not wish this?" asked Mary. "I thought you—"
But the elder was fretful.
"Let me eat my meal in peace," he answered. "I am not made of iron, and reason cuts both ways. It was reasonable to deny Mr. May before these events. It would be unreasonable to pretend that the death of Peter Hardcastle has not changed my opinions. To cleave to the possibility of a physical explanation any longer is mere folly and obstinacy. I believe him to be right."
"This is fearful for me—and fearful for everybody here. Don't you see what it would mean if anything happened to you, Mr. May? Even supposing there is a spirit hidden in the Grey Room with power and permission to destroy us—why, that being so, are you any safer than dear Tom was or this poor man?"
"Because I am armed, Mary, and they were defenseless. Unhappily youth is seldom clothed in the whole armor of righteousness. My dear son was a good and honorable man, but he was not a religious man. He had yet to learn the incomparable and vital value of the practice of Christian faith. Hardcastle invited his own doom. He admitted—he even appeared to pride himself upon a crude and pagan rationalism. It is not surprising that such a man should be called away to learn the lessons of which he stood so gravely in need."
"I know that our dear Tom was bidden to higher work—to labor in a higher cause than here, to purer knowledge of those things that matter most to the human soul," said Mary. "But that is not to say God chose to take him by a miracle. For what you believe amounts to a miracle. You know that I am bearing my loss in the same spirit as yourself, but, granted it had to be at God's will, that is no reason why we should suppose the means employed were outside nature."
"How can you pretend they are inside nature, as we know it?" asked her father.
"We know nothing at all yet, and I implore Mr. May to wait until we are at least assured that science cannot find a reason."
"Fear not for me, my child," answered Septimus May. "You forget certain details that have assisted to decide me. Remember that Hardcastle had openly denied and derided the possibility of supernatural peril. He had challenged this potent thing not an hour before he was brought face to face with it. Tom went to his death innocently; this man cannot be absolved so easily. In my case, with my knowledge and faith, the conditions are very different, and I oppose an impregnable barrier between myself and the secret being. I am an old priest, and I go knowing the nature of my task. My weapons are such that a good spirit would applaud them and an evil spirit be powerless against them. Do you not see that the Almighty could never permit one of His creatures—for even the devils also are His—to defeat His own minister or trample on the name of Christ? It would amount to that. So armed one might walk in safety through the lowermost hell, for hell can only believe and tremble before the truth."
Mary looked hopelessly at her father; but he offered her small comfort. Sir Walter still found himself conforming to the fierce piety and dogmatic assurance of the man of God. In this welter and upheaval his modest intellect found only a foothold here, and his judgment now firmly inclined to the confident assertions of religion. He was himself a devout and conventional believer, and he turned to the support of faith, and shared, with increasing conviction, the opinion of Septimus May, as uttered in a volume of confident words. He became blind to the physical danger. He even showed a measure of annoyance at Mary's obstinate entreaties. She strove to calm him, and told him he was not himself—an assertion that, by his inner consciousness of its truth, seemed to incense Sir Walter.
He begged her to be silent, and declared that her remarks savored of irreverence. Startled and bewildered by such a criticism, the woman was indeed silent for some time, while her father-in-law flowed on and uttered his conviction. Yet not all his intensity and asseverations could justify such extravagant assertion. At another time they might even have amused Mary; but in sight of the fact that her father was yielding, and that the end of the argument would mean the clergyman in the Grey Room, she could win nothing but frantic anxiety from the situation. Sir Walter was broken; he had lost his hold on reality, and she realized that. His unsettled intelligence had gone over to the opposition, and there was none, as it seemed, to argue on her side.
Septimus May had acted like a dangerous drug on Sir Walter; he appeared to be intoxicated in some degree. But only in mind, not in manner. He argued for his new attitude, and he was not as excited as the priest, but maintained his usual level tones.
"I agreed with Mannering and Henry yesterday, as you know, Mary," he said, "and at my desire Mr. May desisted from his wish. We see how mistaken I was, how right he must have been. I have thought it out this afternoon, calmly and logically. These unfortunate young men have died without a reason, for be sure no explanation of Peter Hardcastle's death will be forthcoming though the whole College of Surgeons examines his corpse. Then we must admit that life has been snatched out of these bodies by some force of which we have no conception. Were it natural, science would have discovered a reason for death; but it could not, because their lives flowed away as water out of a bottle, leaving the bottle unchanged in every particular. But life does not desert its physical habitation on these terms. It cannot quit a healthy, human body neither ruined nor rent. You must be honest with yourself, my child, as well as with your father-in-law and me. A physical cause being absolutely ruled out, what remains? To-night I emphatically support Mr. May, and my conscience, long in terrible concern, is now at rest again. And because it is at rest, I know that I have done well. I believe that what dear Tom's father desires to do—namely, to spend this night in the Grey Room—is now within his province and entirely proper to his profession, and I share his perfect faith and confidence."
"It is you who lack faith, Mary," continued Septimus May. "You lack faith, otherwise you would appreciate the unquestionable truth of what your father tells you. Listen," he continued, "and understand something of what this means from a larger outlook than our own selfish and immediate interests. Much may come of my action for the Faith at large. I may find an answer to those grave questions concerning the life beyond and the whole problem of spiritualism now convulsing the Church and casting us into opposing sections. It is untrodden and mysterious ground; but I am called upon to tread it. For my part, I am never prepared to flout inquirers if they approach these subjects in a reverent spirit. We must not revile good men because they think differently from ourselves. We must examine the assertions of such inquirers as Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan Doyle in a mood of reverence and sympathy. Some men drift away from the truth in vital particulars; but not so far that they cannot return if the road is made clear to them.
"We must remember that our conviction of a double existence rests on the revelation of God through His Son, not on a mere, vague desire toward a future life common to all sorts and conditions of men. They suspected and hoped; we know. Science may explain that general desire if it pleases; it cannot explain, or destroy, the triumphant certainty born of faith. Spiritualism has succeeded to the biblical record of 'possession,' and I, for my part, of course prefer what my Bible teaches. I do not myself find that the 'mediums' of modern spiritualism speak with tongues worthy of much respect up to the present, and it is certain that rogues abound; but the question is clamant. It demands to be discussed by our spiritual guides and the fathers of the Church. Already they recognize this fact and are beginning to approach it—some priests in a right spirit, some—as at the Church Congress last month—in a wrong spirit."
"A wrong spirit, May?" asked Sir Walter.
"In my opinion, a wrong spirit," answered the other. "There is much, even in a meeting of the Church Congress, that makes truly religious men mourn. They laughed when they should have learned. I refer to incidents and criticisms of last October. There the Dean of Manchester, who shows how those, who have apparently spoken to us from Beyond through the mouths of living persons, describe their different states and conditions. Stainton Moses gave us a vision of heaven such as an Oxford don and myself might be supposed to appreciate.
"Raymond describes a heaven wherein the average second lieutenant could find all that, for the moment, he needs. But why laugh at these things? If we make our own hells, shall we not make our own heavens? We must go into the next world more or less cloyed and clogged with the emotions and interests of this one. It is inevitable. We cannot instantly throw off a lifetime of interests, affections, and desires. We are still human and pass onward as human beings, not as angels of light.
"Therefore, we may reasonably suppose that the Almighty will temper the wind to the shorn lamb, nor impose too harsh and terrible a transformation upon the souls of the righteous departed, but lead one and all, by gradual stages and through not unfamiliar conditions, to the heaven of ultimate and absolute perfection that He has designed for His conscious creatures."
"Well spoken," said Sir Walter.
But Mr. May had not finished. He proceeded to the immediate point.
"Shall it be denied that devils have been cast out in the name of God?" he asked. "And if from human tenements, then why not from dwellings made with human hands also? May not a house be similarly cleansed as well as a soul? This unknown spirit—angel or fiend, or other sentient being—is permitted to challenge mankind and draw attention to its existence. A mystery, I grant, but its Maker has now willed that some measure of this mystery shall be revealed to us. We are called to play our part in this spirit's existence.
"It would seem that it has endured a sort of imprisonment in this particular room for more years than we know, and it may actually be the spirit of some departed human being condemned, for causes that humanity has forgotten, to remain within these walls. The nameless and unknown thing cries passionately to be liberated, and is permitted by its Maker to draw our terrified attention upon itself by the exercise of destructive functions transcending our reason.
"God, then, has willed that, through the agency of devout and living men, the unhappy phantom shall now be translated and moved from this environment for ever; and to me the appointed task is allotted. So I believe, as firmly as I believe in the death and resurrection of the Lord. Is that clear to you, Sir Walter?"
"It is. You have made it convincingly clear."
"So be it, then. I, too, Mary, am not dead to the meaning of science in its proper place. We may take an illustration of what I have told you from astronomy. As comets enter our system from realms of which we have no knowledge, dazzle us a little, awaken our speculations and then depart, so may certain immortal spirits also be supposed to act. We entangle them possibly in our gross air and detain them for centuries, or moments, until their Creator's purpose in sending them is accomplished. Then He takes the means to liberate them and set them on their eternal roads and to their eternal tasks once more."
The listening woman, almost against her reason, felt herself beginning to share these assumptions. But that they were fantastic, unsupported by any human knowledge, and would presently involve an experiment full of awful peril to the life of the man who uttered them, she also perceived. Yet her reasonable caution and conventional distrust began to give way a little under the priest's magnetic voice, his flaming eyes, his positive and triumphant certainty of truth. He burned with his inspiration, and she felt herself powerless to oppose any argument founded on facts against the mystic enthusiasm of such religious faith. His honesty and fervor could not, however, abate Mary's acute fear. Her father had entirely gone over to the side of the devotee and she knew it.
"It is well we have your opportunity to-night," he said, "for had the police arrived, out of their ignorance they might deny it to you."
Yet Mary fought on against them. In despair she appealed to Masters. He had been an officer's orderly in his day, and when he left the Army and came to Chadlands, he never departed again. He was an intelligent man, who occupied a good part of his leisure in reading. He set Sir Walter and Mary first in his affections; and that Mary should have won him so completely she always held to be a triumph, since Abraham Masters had no regard or admiration for women.
"Can't you help me, Masters?" she begged. "I'm sure you know as well as I do that this ought not to happen."
The butler eyed his master. He was handing coffee, but none took it.
"By all means speak," said Sir Walter. "You know how I rate your judgment, Masters. You have heard Mr. May upon this terrible subject, and should be convinced, as I am."
Masters was very guarded.
"It's not for me to pass an opinion, Sir Walter. But the reverend gentleman, no doubt, understands such things. Only there's the Witch of Endor, if I may mention the creature, she fetched up more than she bargained for. And I remember a proverb as I heard in India, from a Hindoo. I've forgot the lingo now, but I remember the sense. They Hindoos say that if you knock long enough at a closed door, the devil will open it—excuse my mentioning such a thing; but Hindoos are awful wise."
"And what then, Masters? I know not who may open the door of this mystery; but this I know, that, in the Name of the Most High God, I can face whatever opens it."
"I ain't particular frightened neither, your reverence," said Masters. "But I wouldn't chance it alone, being about average sinful and not near good enough to tackle that unknown horror hid up there single-handed. I'd chance it, though, in high company like yours. And that's something."
"It is, Masters, and much to your credit," declared Sir Walter. "For that matter, I would do the like. Indeed, I am willing to accompany Mr. May."
While Septimus May shook his head and Mary trembled, the butler spoke again.
"But there's nobody else in this house would. Not even Fred Caunter, who doesn't know the meaning of fear, as you can testify, Sir Walter. But he's fed up with the Grey Room, if I may say so, and so's the housekeeper, Mrs. Forbes, and so's Jane Bond. Not that they would desert the ship; but there's others that be going to do so. I may mention that four maids and Jackson intend to give notice to-morrow. Ann Maine, the second housemaid, has gone to-night. Her father fetched her. Excuse me mentioning it, but Mrs. Forbes will give you the particulars to-morrow, if you please."
"Hysteria," declared Sir Walter. "I don't blame them. It is natural. Everybody is free to go, if they desire to do so. But tell them what you have heard to-night, Masters. Tell them that no good Christian need fear to rest in peace. Explain that Mr. May will presently enter the Grey Room in the name of God; and bid them pray on their knees for him before they go to sleep."
Masters hesitated.
"All the same, I very much wish the reverend gentleman would give Scotland Yard a chance. If they fall, then he can wipe their eye after—excuse my language, Sir Walter. I've read a lot about the spirits, being terrible interested in 'em, as all human men must be; and I hear that running after 'em often brings trouble. I don't mean to your life, Sir Walter, but to your wits. People get cracked on 'em and have to be locked up. I stopped everybody frightening themselves into 'sterics at dinner to-day; but you could see how it took 'em; and, whether or no, I do beg Mr. May to be so kind as to let me sit up along with him to-night.
"You never hear of two people getting into trouble with these here customers, and while he was going for this blackguard ghost in the name of the Lord, I could keep my weather eye lifting for trouble. 'Tis a matter for common sense and keeping your nerve, in my opinion, and we don't want another death on our hands, I suppose. There'll be half the mountebanks and photograph men and newspaper men in the land here to-morrow, and 'twill take me all my time to keep 'em from over-running the house. Because if they could come in their scores for the late captain—poor gentleman!—what won't they try now this here famous detective has been done in?"
"Henry deplored the same thing," said Mary. "And I answer again, as I answered then," replied Septimus May. "You mean well, Sir Walter, and your butler means well; but you propose an act in direct opposition to the principle that inspires me."
"What do you expect to happen?" asked Mary. "Do you suppose you will see something, and that something will tell you what it is, and why it killed dear Tom?"
"That, at any rate, would be a very great blessing to the living," said her father.
"The least the creature could do, in my humble opinion," ventured Masters.
But Septimus May deprecated such curiosity.
"Hope for no such thing, and do not dwell upon what is to happen until I am able to tell you what does happen," he answered. "Allow no human weakness, no desire to learn the secrets of another world, to distract your thoughts. I am only concerned with what I know beyond possibility of doubt is my duty—to be entered upon as swiftly as possible. I hear my call in the very voice of the wind shouting round the house to-night. But beyond my duty I do not seek. Whether information awaits me, whether some manifestation indicating my success and valuable to humanity will be granted, I cannot say. I do not stop now to think about that.
"Alone I do this thing—yet not alone, for my hand is in my Maker's hand. Your part will not be to accompany me. Let each man and woman be informed of what I do, and let them lift a petition for me, that my work be crowned with success. But let them not assume that to-morrow I shall have anything to impart. The night may be one of peace within, though so stormy without. I may pray till dawn with no knowledge how my prayer prospers, or I may be called to face a being that no human eye has ever seen and lived. These things are hidden from us."
"You are wonderful, and it is heartening to meet with such mighty faith," replied Sir Walter. "You have no fear, no shadow of hesitation or doubt at the bottom of your mind?"
"None. Only an overmastering desire to obey the message that throbs in my heart. I will be honest with you, for I recognize that many might doubt whether you were in the right to let me face this ordeal. But I am driven by an overwhelming mandate. Did I fear, or feel one tremor of uncertainty, I would not proceed; for any wavering might be fatal and give me helpless into the power of this watchful spirit; but I am as certain of my duty as I am that salvation awaits the just man.
"I believe that I shall liberate this arrested being with cathartic prayer and cleansing petition to our common Maker. And have I not the spirit of my dead boy on my side? Could any living man, however well intentioned, watch with me and over me as he will? Fear nothing; go to your rest, and let all who would assist me do so on their knees before they sleep."
Even Masters echoed some of this fierce and absolute faith when he returned to the servants' hall.
"His eyes blaze," he said. "He's about the most steadfast man ever I saw inside a pulpit, or out of it. You feel if that man went to the window and told the rain to stop and the wind to go down, they would. No ghost that ever walked could best him anyway. They asked me to talk and say what I felt, and I did; but words are powerless against such an iron will as he's got.
"I doubted first, and Sir Walter said he doubted likewise; but he's dead sure now, and what's good enough for him is good enough for us. I'll bet Caunter, or any man, an even flyer that he's going to put the creature down and out and come off without a scratch himself. I offered to sit up with him, so did Sir Walter; but he wouldn't hear of it. So all we've got to do is to turn in and say our prayers. That's simple enough for God-fearing people, and we can't do no better than to obey orders."
It was none the less a nervous and highly strung household that presently went to bed, and no woman slept without another woman to keep her company. Sir Walter found himself worn out in mind and body. Mary made him take his bromide, and he slept without a dream, despite the din of the great "sou'-wester" and the distant, solemn crash of more than one great tree thrown upon the lap of mother earth at last.
Before he retired, however, something in the nature of a procession had escorted the priest to his ordeal. Mr. May donned biretta, surplice, and stole, for, as he explained, he was to hold a religious service as sacred and significant as any other rite.
"Lord send him no congregation then," thought Masters.
But, with Sir Walter and Mary, he followed the ministrant, and left him at the open door of the Grey Room. The electric light shone steadily; but the storm seemed to beat its fists at the windows, and the leaded panes shook and chattered. With no bell and candle, but his Bible alone, Septimus May entered the room, having first made the sign of the Cross before him; then he turned and bade good-night to all.
"Be of good faith!" were the last words he spoke to them.
Having done so he shut the door, and they heard his voice immediately uplifted in prayer. They waited a little, and the sound roiled steadily on. Sir Walter then bade Masters extinguish all the lights and send the household to bed, though the time was not more than ten o'clock.
As for Masters, the glamour and appeal of those strenuous words at the dinner-table had now passed, and presently, as he prepared to retire, he found himself far less confident and assured than his recent words had implied. He sank slowly from hope to fear, even pictured the worse, and asked himself what would follow if the worst happened. He believed that it might mean serious disaster for Sir Walter. If another life were sacrificed to this unknown peril, and it transpired that his master had sanctioned what would amount to suicide in the eyes of reason; then he began to fear that grave trouble must result. Already the burning words of Septimus May began to cool and sound unreal, and Masters suspected that, if they were repeated in other ears, which had not heard him utter them, or seen the fervor of religious earnestness and reverence in which they had been spoken, this feverish business of exorcising a ghost in the twentieth century might only awake derision and receive neither credence nor respect. His entire concern was for Sir Walter, not Mr. May. He could not sleep, lighted a pipe, considered whether it was in his power to do anything, felt a sudden impulse to take certain steps, yet hesitated—from no fear to himself, but doubt whether action might not endanger another. Mary did not sleep either, and she suffered more, for she had never approved, and now she blamed herself not a little for her weak opposition. A thousand arguments occurred to her while she lay awake. Then, for a time, she forgot present tribulations, and her own grief overwhelmed her, as it was wont to do by night. For while the events that had so swiftly followed each other since her husband's death banished him now and again, save from her subconscious mind, when alone he was swift to return and her sorrow made many a night sleepless. She was herself ill, but did not know it. The reaction had yet to come, and could not be long delayed, for her nervous energy was worn out now. She wept and lived days with the dead; then the present returned to her mind, and she fretted and prayed—for Septimus May and for daylight. She wondered why stormy nights were always the longest. She heard a thousand unfamiliar sounds, and presently leaped from her bed, put on a dressing-gown, and crept out into the house. To know that all was well with the watcher would hearten her. But then her feet dragged before she had left the threshold of her own room, and she stood still and shuddered a little. For how if all were not well? How if his voice no longer sounded?
She hesitated to make the experiment, and balanced the relief of reassurance against the horror of silence. She remembered a storm at sea, when through a long night, not lacking danger to a laboring steamer with weak engines, she had lain awake and felt her heart warm again when the watch shouted the hour.
She set out, then, determined to know if all prospered with her father-in-law. Nor would she give ear to misgiving or ask herself what she would do if no voice were steadily uplifted in the Grey Room.
The great wind seemed to play upon Chadlands like a harp. It roared and reverberated, now stilled a moment for another leap, now died away against the house, yet still sounded with a steady shout in the neighbor trees. At the casements it tugged and rattled; against them it flung the rain fiercely. Every bay and passage of the interior uttered its own voice, and overhead was creaking of old timbers, rattling of old slates, and rustling of mortar fragments dislodged by sudden vibrations.
Mary proceeded on her way, and then, to her astonishment, heard a footfall, and nearly ran into an invisible figure approaching from the direction of the Grey Room. Man and woman startled each other, but neither exclaimed, and Mrs. May spoke.
"Who is it?" she asked; and Masters answered:
"Oh, my gracious! Terrible sorry, ma'am! If I didn't think—"
"What on earth are you doing, Masters?"
"Much the same as you, I expect, ma'am. I thought just to creep along and see if the reverend gentleman was all right. And he is. The light's burning—you can see it under the door—and he's praying away, steady as a steam-threshing machine. I doubt he's keeping the evil creature at arm's length, and I'm a tidy lot more hopeful than what I was an hour ago. The thing ain't strong enough to touch a man praying to God like what he can. But if prayers keep it harmless, then it's got ears and it's alive!"
"Can you believe that, Masters?" she whispered.
"Got to, ma'am. If it was just a natural horror beyond the reach of prayer, it would have knocked his reverence out long before now, like other people. It settled the police officer in under an hour, and Mr. May's been up against it for three—nearly four hours, so far. He'll bolt it yet, I shouldn't wonder, like a ferret bolts a rat."
"You really feel more hopeful?"
"Yes, I do, ma'am; and if he can fire the creature and signal 'All's clear' for Chadlands, it will calm everybody and be a proper feather in his cap, and he did ought to be made a bishop, at the least. Not that Scotland Yard men will believe a word of it to-morrow, all the same. Ghosts are bang out of their line, and I never met even a common constable that believed in 'em, except Bob Parrett, and he had bats in the belfry, poor chap. No; they'll reckon it's somebody in the house, I expect, who wanted to kill t' others, but ain't got no quarrel with Mr. May. And you'd be wise to get back to bed, ma'am, and try to sleep, else you'll catch a cold. I'll look round again in an hour or to, if I don't go to sleep my self."
They parted, while the storm still ran high, and through the empty corridor, when it was lulled, a voice rolled steadily on from the Grey Boom.
When it suddenly ceased, an hour before dawn, the storm had already begun to sink, and through a rack of flying and breaking cloud the "Hunter" wheeled westerly to his setting.