The Wolves of God, and Other Fey Stories

The Wolves of God, and Other Fey Stories
Author: Algernon Blackwood, Wilfred Wilson
Pages: 603,146 Pages
Audio Length: 8 hr 22 min
Languages: en

Summary

Play Sample

“It is time,” she said aloud.“The hour has come.My father climbs, and we must join him on the summit.Come!”

She took his hand and raised him to his feet, and together they began the rough ascent towards the Crag.As they passed along the shore of the Tarn of Blood, he saw the fire reflected in the ink-black waters; he made out, too, though dimly, a rough circle of big stones, with a larger flag-stone lying in the centre.Three small fires of bracken and wood, placed in a triangle with its apex towards the Standing Stone on the distant hill, burned briskly, the crackling material sending out sparks that pierced the columns of thick smoke.And in this smoke, peering, shifting, appearing and disappearing, it seemed he saw great faces moving.The flickering light and twirling smoke made clear sight difficult.His bliss, his lethargy were very deep.They left the tarn below them and hand in hand began to climb the final slope.

Whether the physical effort of climbing disturbed the deep pressure of the mood that numbed his senses, or whether the cold draught of wind they met upon the ridge restored some vital detail of To-day, Holt does not know.Something, at any rate, in him wavered suddenly, as though a centre of gravity had shifted slightly.There was a perceptible alteration in the balance of thought and feeling that had held invariable now for many hours.It seemed to him that something heavy lifted, or rather, began to lift—a weight, a shadow, something oppressive that obstructed light.A ray of light, as it were, struggled through the thick darkness that enveloped him.To him, as he paused on the ridge to recover his breath, came this vague suggestion of faint light breaking across the blackness.It was objective.

“See,” said the girl in a low voice, “the moon is rising. It lights the sacred island. The blood-red waters turn to silver.”

He saw, indeed, that a huge three-quarter moon now drove with almost visible movement above the distant line of hills; the little tarn gleamed as with silvery armour; the glow of the sacrificial fires showed red across it.He looked down with a shudder into the sheer depth that opened at his feet, then turned to look at his companion.He started and shrank back.Her face, lit by the moon and by the fire, shone pale as death; her black hair framed it with a terrible suggestiveness; the eyes, though brilliant as ever, had a film upon them.She stood in an attitude of both ecstasy and resignation, and one outstretched arm pointed towards the summit where her father stood.

Her lips parted, a marvellous smile broke over her features, her voice was suddenly unfamiliar: “He wears the collar,” she uttered.“Come.Our time is here at last, and we are ready.See, he waits for us!”

There rose for the first time struggle and opposition in him; he resisted the pressure of her hand that had seized his own and drew him forcibly along.Whence came the resistance and the opposition he could not tell, but though he followed her, he was aware that the refusal in him strengthened.The weight of darkness that oppressed him shifted a little more, an inner light increased; The same moment they reached the summit and stood beside—the priest.There was a curious sound of fluttering.The figure, he saw, was naked, save for a rough blanket tied loosely about the waist.

“The hour has come at last,” cried his deep booming voice that woke echoes from the dark hills about them.“We are alone now with our Gods.”And he broke then into a monotonous rhythmic chanting that rose and fell upon the wind, yet in a tongue that sounded strange; his erect figure swayed slightly with its cadences; his black beard swept his naked chest; and his face, turned skywards, shone in the mingled light of moon above and fire below, yet with an added light as well that burned within him rather than without. He was a weird, magnificent figure, a priest of ancient rites invoking his deathless deities upon the unchanging hills.

But upon Holt, too, as he stared in awed amazement, an inner light had broken suddenly.It came as with a dazzling blaze that at first paralysed thought and action.His mind cleared, but too abruptly for movement, either of tongue or hand, to be possible.Then, abruptly, the inner darkness rolled away completely.The light in the wild eyes of the great chanting, swaying figure, he now knew was the light of mania.

The faint fluttering sound increased, and the voice of the girl was oddly mingled with it.The priest had ceased his invocation.Holt, aware that he stood alone, saw the girl go past him carrying a big black bird that struggled with vainly beating wings.

“Behold the sacrifice,” she said, as she knelt before her father and held up the victim.“May the Gods accept it as presently They shall accept us too!”

The great figure stooped and took the offering, and with one blow of the knife he held, its head was severed from its body.The blood spattered on the white face of the kneeling girl.Holt was aware for the first time that she, too, was now unclothed; but for a loose blanket, her white body gleamed against the dark heather in the moonlight.At the same moment she rose to her feet, stood upright, turned towards him so that he saw the dark hair streaming across her naked shoulders, and, with a face of ecstasy, yet ever that strange film upon her eyes, her voice came to him on the wind:

“Farewell, yet not farewell!We shall meet, all three, in the underworld.The Gods accept us!”

Turning her face away, she stepped towards the ominous figure behind, and bared her ivory neck and breast to the knife.The eyes of the maniac were upon her own; she was as helpless and obedient as a lamb before his spell.

Then Holt’s horrible paralysis, if only just in time, was lifted.The priest had raised his arm, the bronze knife with its ragged edge gleamed in the air, with the other hand he had already gathered up the thick dark hair, so that the neck lay bare and open to the final blow.But it was two other details, Holt thinks, that set his muscles suddenly free, enabling him to act with the swift judgment which, being wholly unexpected, disconcerted both maniac and victim and frustrated the awful culmination.The dark spots of blood upon the face he loved, and the sudden final fluttering of the dead bird’s wings upon the ground—these two things, life actually touching death, released the held-back springs.

He leaped forward.He received the blow upon his left arm and hand.It was his right fist that sent the High Priest to earth with a blow that, luckily, felled him in the direction away from the dreadful brink, and it was his right arm and hand, he became aware some time afterwards only, that were chiefly of use in carrying the fainting girl and her unconscious father back to the shelter of the cottage, and to the best help and comfort he could provide....

It was several years afterwards, in a very different setting, that he found himself spelling out slowly to a little boy the lettering cut into a circlet of bronze the child found on his study table.To the child he told a fairy tale, then dismissed him to play with his mother in the garden.But, when alone, he rubbed away the verdigris with great care, for the circlet was thin and frail with age, as he examined again the little picture of a tripod from which smoke issued, incised neatly in the metal.Below it, almost as sharp as when the Roman craftsman cut it first, was the name Acella.He touched the letters tenderly with his left hand, from which two fingers were missing, then placed it in a drawer of his desk and turned the key.

“That curious name,” said a low voice behind his chair.His wife had come in and was looking over his shoulder.“You love it, and I dread it.”She sat on the desk beside him, her eyes troubled.“It was the name father used to call me in his illness.”

Her husband looked at her with passionate tenderness, but said no word.

“And this,” she went on, taking the broken hand in both her own, “is the price you paid to me for his life.I often wonder what strange good deity brought you upon the lonely moor that night, and just in the very nick of time.You remember...?”

“The deity who helps true lovers, of course,” he said with a smile, evading the question. The deeper memory, he knew, had closed absolutely in her since the moment of the attempted double crime. He kissed her, murmuring to himself as he did so, but too low for her to hear, “Acella! My Acella...!”


VI

THE VALLEY OF THE BEASTS

1

As they emerged suddenly from the dense forest the Indian halted, and Grimwood, his employer, stood beside him, gazing into the beautiful wooded valley that lay spread below them in the blaze of a golden sunset. Both men leaned upon their rifles, caught by the enchantment of the unexpected scene.

“We camp here,” said Tooshalli abruptly, after a careful survey.“To-morrow we make a plan.”

He spoke excellent English.The note of decision, almost of authority, in his voice was noticeable, but Grimwood set it down to the natural excitement of the moment.Every track they had followed during the last two days, but one track in particular as well, had headed straight for this remote and hidden valley, and the sport promised to be unusual.

“That’s so,” he replied, in the tone of one giving an order.“You can make camp ready at once.”And he sat down on a fallen hemlock to take off his moccasin boots and grease his feet that ached from the arduous day now drawing to a close.Though under ordinary circumstances he would have pushed on for another hour or two, he was not averse to a night here, for exhaustion had come upon him during the last bit of rough going, his eye and muscles were no longer steady, and it was doubtful if he could have shot straight enough to kill.He did not mean to miss a second time.

With his Canadian friend, Iredale, the latter’s half-breed, and his own Indian, Tooshalli, the party had set out three weeks ago to find the “wonderful big moose” the Indians reported were travelling in the Snow River country.They soon found that the tale was true; tracks were abundant; they saw fine animals nearly every day, but though carrying good heads, the hunters expected better still and left them alone.Pushing up the river to a chain of small lakes near its source, they then separated into two parties, each with its nine-foot bark canoe, and packed in for three days after the yet bigger animals the Indians agreed would be found in the deeper woods beyond.Excitement was keen, expectation keener still.The day before they separated, Iredale shot the biggest moose of his life, and its head, bigger even than the grand Alaskan heads, hangs in his house to-day.Grimwood’s hunting blood was fairly up.His blood was of the fiery, not to say ferocious, quality.It almost seemed he liked killing for its own sake.

Four days after the party broke into two he came upon a gigantic track, whose measurements and length of stride keyed every nerve he possessed to its highest tension.

Tooshalli examined the tracks for some minutes with care.“It is the biggest moose in the world,” he said at length, a new expression on his inscrutable red visage.

Following it all that day, they yet got no sight of the big fellow that seemed to be frequenting a little marshy dip of country, too small to be called valley, where willow and undergrowth abounded.He had not yet scented his pursuers.They were after him again at dawn.Towards the evening of the second day Grimwood caught a sudden glimpse of the monster among a thick clump of willows, and the sight of the magnificent head that easily beat all records set his heart beating like a hammer with excitement.He aimed and fired.But the moose, instead of crashing, went thundering away through the further scrub and disappeared, the sound of his plunging canter presently dying away. Grimwood had missed, even if he had wounded.

They camped, and all next day, leaving the canoe behind, they followed the huge track, but though finding signs of blood, these were not plentiful, and the shot had evidently only grazed the animal.The travelling was of the hardest.Towards evening, utterly exhausted, the spoor led them to the ridge they now stood upon, gazing down into the enchanting valley that opened at their feet.The giant moose had gone down into this valley.He would consider himself safe there.Grimwood agreed with the Indian’s judgment.They would camp for the night and continue at dawn the wild hunt after “the biggest moose in the world.”

Supper was over, the small fire used for cooking dying down, with Grimwood became first aware that the Indian was not behaving quite as usual.What particular detail drew his attention is hard to say.He was a slow-witted, heavy man, full-blooded, unobservant; a fact had to hurt him through his comfort, through his pleasure, before he noticed it.Yet anyone else must have observed the changed mood of the Redskin long ago.Tooshalli had made the fire, fried the bacon, served the tea, and was arranging the blankets, his own and his employer’s, before the latter remarked upon his—silence.Tooshalli had not uttered a word for over an hour and a half, since he had first set eyes upon the new valley, to be exact.And his employer now noticed the unaccustomed silence, because after food he liked to listen to wood talk and hunting lore.

“Tired out, aren’t you?”said big Grimwood, looking into the dark face across the firelight.He resented the absence of conversation, now that he noticed it.He was over-weary himself, he felt more irritable than usual, though his temper was always vile.

“Lost your tongue, eh?”he went on with a growl, as the Indian returned his stare with solemn, expressionless face. That dark inscrutable look got on his nerves a bit. “Speak up, man!” he exclaimed sharply. “What’s it all about?”

The Englishman had at last realized that there was something to “speak up” about.The discovery, in his present state, annoyed him further.Tooshalli stared gravely, but made no reply.The silence was prolonged almost into minutes.Presently the head turned sideways, as though the man listened.The other watched him very closely, anger growing in him.

But it was the way the Redskin turned his head, keeping his body rigid, that gave the jerk to Grimwood’s nerves, providing him with a sensation he had never known in his life before—it gave him what is generally called “the goose-flesh.”It seemed to jangle his entire system, yet at the same time made him cautious.He did not like it, this combination of emotions puzzled him.

“Say something, I tell you,” he repeated in a harsher tone, raising his voice.He sat up, drawing his great body closer to the fire.“Say something, damn it!”

His voice fell dead against the surrounding trees, making the silence of the forest unpleasantly noticeable.Very still the great woods stood about them; there was no wind, no stir of branches; only the crackle of a snapping twig was audible from time to time, as the night-life moved unwarily sometimes watching the humans round their little fire.The October air had a frosty touch that nipped.

The Redskin did not answer.No muscle of his neck nor of his stiffened body moved.He seemed all ears.

“Well?”repeated the Englishman, lowering his voice this time instinctively.“What d’you hear, God damn it!”The touch of odd nervousness that made his anger grow betrayed itself in his language.

Tooshalli slowly turned his head back again to its normal position, the body rigid as before.

“I hear nothing, Mr. Grimwood,” he said, gazing with quiet dignity into his employer’s eyes.

This was too much for the other, a man of savage temper at the best of times.He was the type of Englishman who held strong views as to the right way of treating “inferior” races.

“That’s a lie, Tooshalli, and I won’t have you lie to me.Now what was it?Tell me at once!”

“I hear nothing,” repeated the other.“I only think.”

“And what is it you’re pleased to think?”Impatience made a nasty expression round the mouth.

“I go not,” was the abrupt reply, unalterable decision in the voice.

The man’s rejoinder was so unexpected that Grimwood found nothing to say at first.For a moment he did not take its meaning; his mind, always slow, was confused by impatience, also by what he considered the foolishness of the little scene.Then in a flash he understood; but he also understood the immovable obstinacy of the race he had to deal with.Tooshalli was informing him that he refused to go into the valley where the big moose had vanished.And his astonishment was so great at first that he merely sat and stared.No words came to him.

“It is——” said the Indian, but used a native term.

“What’s that mean?”Grimwood found his tongue, but his quiet tone was ominous.

“Mr. Grimwood, it mean the ‘Valley of the Beasts,’” was the reply in a tone quieter still.

The Englishman made a great, a genuine effort at self-control.He was dealing, he forced himself to remember, with a superstitious Redskin.He knew the stubbornness of the type.If the man left him his sport was irretrievably spoilt, for he could not hunt in this wilderness alone, and even if he got the coveted head, he could never, never get it out alone.His native selfishness seconded his effort.Persuasion, if only he could keep back his rising anger, was his rôle to play.

“The Valley of the Beasts,” he said, a smile on his lips rather than in his darkening eyes; “but that’s just what we want. It’s beasts we’re after, isn’t it?” His voice had a false cheery ring that could not have deceived a child. “But what d’you mean, anyhow—the Valley of the Beasts?” He asked it with a dull attempt at sympathy.

“It belong to Ishtot, Mr. Grimwood.”The man looked him full in the face, no flinching in the eyes.

“My—our—big moose is there,” said the other, who recognized the name of the Indian Hunting God, and understanding better, felt confident he would soon persuade his man.Tooshalli, he remembered, too, was nominally a Christian.“We’ll follow him at dawn and get the biggest head the world has ever seen.You will be famous,” he added, his temper better in hand again.“Your tribe will honour you.And the white hunters will pay you much money.”

“He go there to save himself.I go not.”

The other’s anger revived with a leap at this stupid obstinacy.But, in spite of it, he noticed the odd choice of words.He began to realize that nothing now would move the man.At the same time he also realized that violence on his part must prove worse than useless.Yet violence was natural to his “dominant” type.“That brute Grimwood” was the way most men spoke of him.

“Back at the settlement you’re a Christian, remember,” he tried, in his clumsy way, another line.“And disobedience means hell-fire.You know that!”

“I a Christian—at the post,” was the reply, “but out here the Red God rule.Ishtot keep that valley for himself.No Indian hunt there.”It was as though a granite boulder spoke.

The savage temper of the Englishman, enforced by the long difficult suppression, rose wickedly into sudden flame.He stood up, kicking his blankets aside.He strode across the dying fire to the Indian’s side.Tooshalli also rose.They faced each other, two humans alone in the wilderness, watched by countless invisible forest eyes.

Tooshalli stood motionless, yet as though he expected violence from the foolish, ignorant white-face. “You go alone, Mr. Grimwood.” There was no fear in him.

Grimwood choked with rage.His words came forth with difficulty, though he roared them into the silence of the forest:

“I pay you, don’t I? You’ll do what I say, not what you say!” His voice woke the echoes.

The Indian, arms hanging by his side, gave the old reply.

“I go not,” he repeated firmly.

It stung the other into uncontrollable fury.

The beast then came uppermost; it came out.“You’ve said that once too often, Tooshalli!”and he struck him brutally in the face.The Indian fell, rose to his knees again, collapsed sideways beside the fire, then struggled back into a sitting position.He never once took his eyes from the white man’s face.

Beside himself with anger, Grimwood stood over him.“Is that enough?Will you obey me now?”he shouted.

“I go not,” came the thick reply, blood streaming from his mouth. The eyes had no flinching in them. “That valley Ishtot keep. Ishtot see us now. He see you.” The last words he uttered with strange, almost uncanny emphasis.

Grimwood, arm raised, fist clenched, about to repeat his terrible assault, paused suddenly. His arm sank to his side. What exactly stopped him he could never say. For one thing, he feared his own anger, feared that if he let himself go he would not stop till he had killed—committed murder. He knew his own fearful temper and stood afraid of it. Yet it was not only that. The calm firmness of the Redskin, his courage under pain, and something in the fixed and burning eyes arrested him. Was it also something in the words he had used—“Ishtot see you”—that stung him into a queer caution midway in his violence?

He could not say.He only knew that a momentary sense of awe came over him. He became unpleasantly aware of the enveloping forest, so still, listening in a kind of impenetrable, remorseless silence. This lonely wilderness, looking silently upon what might easily prove murder, laid a faint, inexplicable chill upon his raging blood. The hand dropped slowly to his side again, the fist unclenched itself, his breath came more evenly.

“Look you here,” he said, adopting without knowing it the local way of speech.“I ain’t a bad man, though your going-on do make a man damned tired.I’ll give you another chance.”His voice was sullen, but a new note in it surprised even himself.“I’ll do that.You can have the night to think it over, Tooshalli—see?Talk it over with your——”

He did not finish the sentence.Somehow the name of the Redskin God refused to pass his lips.He turned away, flung himself into his blankets, and in less than ten minutes, exhausted as much by his anger as by the day’s hard going, he was sound asleep.

The Indian, crouching beside the dying fire, had said nothing.

Night held the woods, the sky was thick with stars, the life of the forest went about its business quietly, with that wondrous skill which millions of years have perfected.The Redskin, so close to this skill that he instinctively used and borrowed from it, was silent, alert and wise, his outline as inconspicuous as though he merged, like his four-footed teachers, into the mass of the surrounding bush.

He moved perhaps, yet nothing knew he moved.His wisdom, derived from that eternal, ancient mother who from infinite experience makes no mistakes, did not fail him.His soft tread made no sound; his breathing, as his weight, was calculated.The stars observed him, but they did not tell; the light air knew his whereabouts, yet without betrayal....

The chill dawn gleamed at length between the trees, lighting the pale ashes of an extinguished fire, also of a bulky, obvious form beneath a blanket. The form moved clumsily. The cold was penetrating.

And that bulky form now moved because a dream had come to trouble it.A dark figure stole across its confused field of vision.The form started, but it did not wake.The figure spoke: “Take this,” it whispered, handing a little stick, curiously carved.“It is the totem of great Ishtot.In the valley all memory of the White Gods will leave you.Call upon Ishtot....Call on Him if you dare”; and the dark figure glided away out of the dream and out of all remembrance....

2

The first thing Grimwood noticed when he woke was that Tooshalli was not there.No fire burned, no tea was ready.He felt exceedingly annoyed.He glared about him, then got up with a curse to make the fire.His mind seemed confused and troubled.At first he only realized one thing clearly—his guide had left him in the night.

It was very cold.He lit the wood with difficulty and made his tea, and the actual world came gradually back to him.The Red Indian had gone; perhaps the blow, perhaps the superstitious terror, perhaps both, had driven him away.He was alone, that was the outstanding fact.For anything beyond outstanding facts, Grimwood felt little interest.Imaginative speculation was beyond his compass.Close to the brute creation, it seemed, his nature lay.

It was while packing his blankets—he did it automatically, a dull, vicious resentment in him—that his fingers struck a bit of wood that he was about to throw away when its unusual shape caught his attention suddenly.His odd dream came back then.But was it a dream?The bit of wood was undoubtedly a totem stick. He examined it. He paid it more attention than he meant to, wished to. Yes, it was unquestionably a totem stick. The dream, then, was not a dream. Tooshalli had quit, but, following with Redskin faithfulness some code of his own, had left him the means of safety. He chuckled sourly, but thrust the stick inside his belt. “One never knows,” he mumbled to himself.

He faced the situation squarely. He was alone in the wilderness. His capable, experienced woodsman had deserted him. The situation was serious. What should he do? A weakling would certainly retrace his steps, following the track they had made, afraid to be left alone in this vast hinterland of pathless forest. But Grimwood was of another build. Alarmed he might be, but he would not give in. He had the defects of his own qualities. The brutality of his nature argued force. He was determined and a sportsman. He would go on. And ten minutes after breakfast, having first made a cache of what provisions were left over, he was on his way—down across the ridge and into the mysterious valley, the Valley of the Beasts.

It looked, in the morning sunlight, entrancing.The trees closed in behind him, but he did not notice.It led him on....

He followed the track of the gigantic moose he meant to kill, and the sweet, delicious sunshine helped him.The air was like wine, the seductive spoor of the great beast, with here and there a faint splash of blood on leaves or ground, lay forever just before his eyes.He found the valley, though the actual word did not occur to him, enticing; more and more he noticed the beauty, the desolate grandeur of the mighty spruce and hemlock, the splendour of the granite bluffs which in places rose above the forest and caught the sun....The valley was deeper, vaster than he had imagined.He felt safe, at home in it, though, again these actual terms did not occur to him....Here he could hide for ever and find peace....He became aware of a new quality in the deep loneliness. The scenery for the first time in his life appealed to him, and the form of the appeal was curious—he felt the comfort of it.

For a man of his habit, this was odd, yet the new sensations stole over him so gently, their approach so gradual, that they were first recognized by his consciousness indirectly.They had already established themselves in him before he noticed them; and the indirectness took this form—that the passion of the chase gave place to an interest in the valley itself.The lust of the hunt, the fierce desire to find and kill, the keen wish, in a word, to see his quarry within range, to aim, to fire, to witness the natural consummation of the long expedition—these had all become measurably less, while the effect of the valley upon him had increased in strength.There was a welcome about it that he did not understand.

The change was singular, yet, oddly enough, it did not occur to him as singular; it was unnatural, yet it did not strike him so.To a dull mind of his unobservant, unanalytical type, a change had to be marked and dramatic before he noticed it; something in the nature of a shock must accompany it for him to recognize it had happened.And there had been no shock.The spoor of the great moose was much cleaner, now that he caught up with the animal that made it; the blood more frequent; he had noticed the spot where it had rested, its huge body leaving a marked imprint on the soft ground; where it had reached up to eat the leaves of saplings here and there was also visible; he had come undoubtedly very near to it, and any minute now might see its great bulk within range of an easy shot.Yet his ardour had somehow lessened.

He first realized this change in himself when it suddenly occurred to him that the animal itself had grown less cautious.It must scent him easily now, since a moose, its sight being indifferent, depends chiefly for its safety upon its unusually keen sense of smell, and the wind came from behind him. This now struck him as decidedly uncommon: the moose itself was obviously careless of his close approach. It felt no fear.

It was this inexplicable alteration in the animal’s behaviour that made him recognize, at last, the alteration in his own.He had followed it now for a couple of hours and had descended some eight hundred to a thousand feet; the trees were thinner and more sparsely placed; there were open, park-like places where silver birch, sumach and maple splashed their blazing colours; and a crystal stream, broken by many waterfalls, foamed past towards the bed of the great valley, yet another thousand feet below.By a quiet pool against some over-arching rocks, the moose had evidently paused to drink, paused at its leisure, moreover.Grimwood, rising from a close examination of the direction the creature had taken after drinking—the hoof-marks were fresh and very distinct in the marshy ground about the pool—looked suddenly straight into the great creature’s eyes.It was not twenty yards from where he stood, yet he had been standing on that spot for at least ten minutes, caught by the wonder and loneliness of the scene.The moose, therefore, had been close beside him all this time.It had been calmly drinking, undisturbed by his presence, unafraid.

The shock came now, the shock that woke his heavy nature into realization.For some seconds, probably for minutes, he stood rooted to the ground, motionless, hardly breathing.He stared as though he saw a vision.The animal’s head was lowered, but turned obliquely somewhat, so that the eyes, placed sideways in its great head, could see him properly; its immense proboscis hung as though stuffed upon an English wall; he saw the fore-feet planted wide apart, the slope of the enormous shoulders dropping back towards the fine hind-quarters and lean flanks.It was a magnificent bull.The horns and head justified his wildest expectations, they were superb, a record specimen, and a phrase—where had he heard it? —ran vaguely, as from far distance, through his mind: “the biggest moose in the world.”

There was the extraordinary fact, however, that he did not shoot; nor feel the wish to shoot.The familiar instinct, so strong hitherto in his blood, made no sign; the desire to kill apparently had left him.To raise his rifle, aim and fire had become suddenly an absolute impossibility.

He did not move.The animal and the human stared into each other’s eyes for a length of time whose interval he could not measure.Then came a soft noise close beside him: the rifle had slipped from his grasp and fallen with a thud into the mossy earth at his feet.And the moose, for the first time now, was moving.With slow, easy stride, its great weight causing a squelching sound as the feet drew out of the moist ground, it came towards him, the bulk of the shoulders giving it an appearance of swaying like a ship at sea.It reached his side, it almost touched him, the magnificent head bent low, the spread of the gigantic horns lay beneath his very eyes.He could have patted, stroked it.He saw, with a touch of pity, that blood trickled from a sore in its left shoulder, matting the thick hair.It sniffed the fallen rifle.

Then, lifting its head and shoulders again, it sniffed the air, this time with an audible sound that shook from Grimwood’s mind the last possibility that he witnessed a vision or dreamed a dream.One moment it gazed into his face, its big brown eyes shining and unafraid, then turned abruptly, and swung away at a speed ever rapidly increasing across the park-like spaces till it was lost finally among the dark tangle of undergrowth beyond.And the Englishman’s muscles turned to paper, his paralysis passed, his legs refused to support his weight, and he sank heavily to the ground....

3

It seems he slept, slept long and heavily; he sat up, stretched himself, yawned and rubbed his eyes.The sun had moved across the sky, for the shadows, he saw, now ran from west to east, and they were long shadows.He had slept evidently for hours, and evening was drawing in.He was aware that he felt hungry.In his pouchlike pockets, he had dried meat, sugar, matches, tea, and the little billy that never left him.He would make a fire, boil some tea and eat.

But he took no steps to carry out his purpose, he felt disinclined to move, he sat thinking, thinking....What was he thinking about?He did not know, he could not say exactly; it was more like fugitive pictures that passed across his mind.Who, and where, was he?This was the Valley of the Beasts, that he knew; he felt sure of nothing else.How long had he been here, and where had he come from, and why?The questions did not linger for their answers, almost as though his interest in them was merely automatic.He felt happy, peaceful, unafraid.

He looked about him, and the spell of this virgin forest came upon him like a charm; only the sound of falling water, the murmur of wind sighing among innumerable branches, broke the enveloping silence.Overhead, beyond the crests of the towering trees, a cloudless evening sky was paling into transparent orange, opal, mother of pearl.He saw buzzards soaring lazily.A scarlet tanager flashed by.Soon would the owls begin to call and the darkness fall like a sweet black veil and hide all detail, while the stars sparkled in their countless thousands....

A glint of something that shone upon the ground caught his eye—a smooth, polished strip of rounded metal: his rifle.And he started to his feet impulsively, yet not knowing exactly what he meant to do.At the sight of the weapon, something had leaped to life in him, then faded out, died down, and was gone again.

“I’m—I’m——” he began muttering to himself, but could not finish what he was about to say.His name had disappeared completely.“I’m in the Valley of the Beasts,” he repeated in place of what he sought but could not find.

This fact, that he was in the Valley of the Beasts, seemed the only positive item of knowledge that he had.About the name something known and familiar clung, though the sequence that led up to it he could not trace.Presently, nevertheless, he rose to his feet, advanced a few steps, stooped and picked up the shining metal thing, his rifle.He examined it a moment, a feeling of dread and loathing rising in him, a sensation of almost horror that made him tremble, then, with a convulsive movement that betrayed an intense reaction of some sort he could not comprehend, he flung the thing far from him into the foaming torrent.He saw the splash it made, he also saw that same instant a large grizzly bear swing heavily along the bank not a dozen yards from where he stood.It, too, heard the splash, for it started, turned, paused a second, then changed its direction and came towards him.It came up close.Its fur brushed his body.It examined him leisurely, as the moose had done, sniffed, half rose upon its terrible hind legs, opened its mouth so that red tongue and gleaming teeth were plainly visible, then flopped back upon all fours again with a deep growling that yet had no anger in it, and swung off at a quick trot back to the bank of the torrent.He had felt its hot breath upon his face, but he had felt no fear.The monster was puzzled but not hostile.It disappeared.

“They know not——” he sought for the word “man,” but could not find it.“They have never been hunted.”

The words ran through his mind, if perhaps he was not entirely certain of their meaning; they rose, as it were, automatically; a familiar sound lay in them somewhere.At the same time there rose feelings in him that were equally, though in another way, familiar and quite natural, feelings he had once known intimately but long since laid aside.

What were they?What was their origin?They seemed distant as the stars, yet were actually in his body, in his blood and nerves, part and parcel of his flesh.Long, long ago....Oh, how long, how long?

Thinking was difficult; feeling was what he most easily and naturally managed.He could not think for long; feeling rose up and drowned the effort quickly.

That huge and awful bear—not a nerve, not a muscle quivered in him as its acrid smell rose to his nostrils, its fur brushed down his legs.Yet he was aware that somewhere there was danger, though not here.Somewhere there was attack, hostility, wicked and calculated plans against him—as against that splendid, roaming animal that had sniffed, examined, then gone its own way, satisfied.Yes, active attack, hostility and careful, cruel plans against his safety, but—not here.Here he was safe, secure, at peace; here he was happy; here he could roam at will, no eye cast sideways into forest depths, no ear pricked high to catch sounds not explained, no nostrils quivering to scent alarm.He felt this, but he did not think it.He felt hungry, thirsty too.

Something prompted him now at last to act.His billy lay at his feet, and he picked it up; the matches—he carried them in a metal case whose screw top kept out all moisture—were in his hand.Gathering a few dry twigs, he stooped to light them, then suddenly drew back with the first touch of fear he had yet known.

Fire! What was fire? The idea was repugnant to him, it was impossible, he was afraid of fire. He flung the metal case after the rifle and saw it gleam in the last rays of sunset, then sink with a little splash beneath the water. Glancing down at his billy, he realized next that he could not make use of it either, nor of the dark dry dusty stuff he had meant to boil in water. He felt no repugnance, certainly no fear, in connexion with these things, only he could not handle them, he did not need them, he had forgotten, yes, “forgotten,” what they meant exactly. This strange forgetfulness was increasing in him rapidly, becoming more and more complete with every minute. Yet his thirst must be quenched.

The next moment he found himself at the water’s edge; he stooped to fill his billy; paused, hesitated, examined the rushing water, then abruptly moved a few feet higher up the stream, leaving the metal can behind him.His handling of it had been oddly clumsy, his gestures awkward, even unnatural.He now flung himself down with an easy, simple motion of his entire body, lowered his face to a quiet pool he had found, and drank his fill of the cool, refreshing liquid.But, though unaware of the fact, he did not drink.He lapped.

Then, crouching where he was, he ate the meat and sugar from his pockets, lapped more water, moved back a short distance again into the dry ground beneath the trees, but moved this time without rising to his feet, curled his body into a comfortable position and closed his eyes again to sleep....No single question now raised its head in him.He felt contentment, satisfaction only....

He stirred, shook himself, opened half an eye and saw, as he had felt already in slumber, that he was not alone.In the park-like spaces in front of him, as in the shadowed fringe of the trees at his back, there was sound and movement, the sound of stealthy feet, the movement of innumerable dark bodies.There was the pad and tread of animals, the stir of backs, of smooth and shaggy beasts, in countless numbers.Upon this host fell the light of a half moon sailing high in a cloudless sky; the gleam of stars, sparkling in the clear night air like diamonds, shone reflected in hundreds of ever-shifting eyes, most of them but a few feet above the ground.The whole valley was alive.

He sat upon his haunches, staring, staring, but staring in wonder, not in fear, though the foremost of the great host were so near that he could have stretched an arm and touched them. It was an ever-moving, ever-shifting throng he gazed at, spell-bound, in the pale light of moon and stars, now fading slowly towards the approaching dawn. And the smell of the forest itself was not sweeter to him in that moment than the mingled perfume, raw, pungent, acrid, of this furry host of beautiful wild animals that moved like a sea, with a strange murmuring, too, like sea, as the myriad feet and bodies passed to and fro together. Nor was the gleam of the starry, phosphorescent eyes less pleasantly friendly than those happy lamps that light home-lost wanderers to cosy rooms and safety. Through the wild army, in a word, poured to him the deep comfort of the entire valley, a comfort which held both the sweetness of invitation and the welcome of some magical home-coming.

No thoughts came to him, but feeling rose in a tide of wonder and acceptance.He was in his rightful place.His nature had come home.There was this dim, vague consciousness in him that after long, futile straying in another place where uncongenial conditions had forced him to be unnatural and therefore terrible, he had returned at last where he belonged.Here, in the Valley of the Beasts, he had found peace, security and happiness.He would be—he was at last—himself.

It was a marvellous, even a magical, scene he watched, his nerves at highest tension yet quite steady, his senses exquisitely alert, yet no uneasiness in the full, accurate reports they furnished.Strong as some deep flood-tide, yet dim, as with untold time and distance, rose over him the spell of long-forgotten memory of a state where he was content and happy, where he was natural.The outlines, as it were, of mighty, primitive pictures, flashed before him, yet were gone again before the detail was filled in.

He watched the great army of the animals, they were all about him now; he crouched upon his haunches in the centre of an ever-moving circle of wild forest life. Great timber wolves he saw pass to and fro, loping past him with long stride and graceful swing; their red tongues lolling out; they swarmed in hundreds. Behind, yet mingling freely with them, rolled the huge grizzlies, not clumsy as their uncouth bodies promised, but swiftly, lightly, easily, their half tumbling gait masking agility and speed. They gambolled, sometimes they rose and stood half upright, they were comely in their mass and power, they rolled past him so close that he could touch them. And the black bear and the brown went with them, bears beyond counting, monsters and little ones, a splendid multitude. Beyond them, yet only a little further back, where the park-like spaces made free movement easier, rose a sea of horns and antlers like a miniature forest in the silvery moonlight. The immense tribe of deer gathered in vast throngs beneath the starlit sky. Moose and caribou, he saw, the mighty wapiti, and the smaller deer in their crowding thousands. He heard the sound of meeting horns, the tread of innumerable hoofs, the occasional pawing of the ground as the bigger creatures manœuvred for more space about them. A wolf, he saw, was licking gently at the shoulder of a great bull-moose that had been injured. And the tide receded, advanced again, once more receded, rising and falling like a living sea whose waves were animal shapes, the inhabitants of the Valley of the Beasts.

Beneath the quiet moonlight they swayed to and fro before him.They watched him, knew him, recognized him.They made him welcome.

He was aware, moreover, of a world of smaller life that formed an under-sea, as it were, numerous under-currents rather, running in and out between the great upright legs of the larger creatures.These, though he could not see them clearly, covered the earth, he was aware, in enormous numbers, darting hither and thither, now hiding, now reappearing, too intent upon their busy purposes to pay him attention like their huger comrades, yet ever and anon tumbling against his back, cannoning from his sides, scampering across his legs even, then gone again with a scuttering sound of rapid little feet, and rushing back into the general host beyond. And with this smaller world also he felt at home.

How long he sat gazing, happy in himself, secure, satisfied, contented, natural, he could not say, but it was long enough for the desire to mingle with what he saw, to know closer contact, to become one with them all—long enough for this deep blind desire to assert itself, so that at length he began to move from his mossy seat towards them, to move, moreover, as they moved, and not upright on two feet.

The moon was lower now, just sinking behind a towering cedar whose ragged crest broke its light into silvery spray.The stars were a little paler too.A line of faint red was visible beyond the heights at the valley’s eastern end.

He paused and looked about him, as he advanced slowly, aware that the host already made an opening in their ranks and that the bear even nosed the earth in front, as though to show the way that was easiest for him to follow.Then, suddenly, a lynx leaped past him into the low branches of a hemlock, and he lifted his head to admire its perfect poise.He saw in the same instant the arrival of the birds, the army of the eagles, hawks and buzzards, birds of prey—the awakening flight that just precedes the dawn.He saw the flocks and streaming lines, hiding the whitening stars a moment as they passed with a prodigious whirr of wings.There came the hooting of an owl from the tree immediately overhead where the lynx now crouched, but not maliciously, along its branch.

He started.He half rose to an upright position.He knew not why he did so, knew not exactly why he started.But in the attempt to find his new, and, as it now seemed, his unaccustomed balance, one hand fell against his side and came in contact with a hard straight thing that projected awkwardly from his clothing. He pulled it out, feeling it all over with his fingers. It was a little stick. He raised it nearer to his eyes, examined it in the light of dawn now growing swiftly, remembered, or half remembered what it was—and stood stock still.

“The totem stick,” he mumbled to himself, yet audibly, finding his speech, and finding another thing—a glint of peering memory—for the first time since entering the valley.

A shock like fire ran through his body; he straightened himself, aware that a moment before he had been crawling upon his hands and knees; it seemed that something broke in his brain, lifting a veil, flinging a shutter free.And Memory peered dreadfully through the widening gap.

“I’m—I’m Grimwood,” his voice uttered, though below his breath.“Tooshalli’s left me.I’m alone...!”

He was aware of a sudden change in the animals surrounding him.A big, grey wolf sat three feet away, glaring into his face; at its side an enormous grizzly swayed itself from one foot to the other; behind it, as if looking over its shoulder, loomed a gigantic wapiti, its horns merged in the shadows of the drooping cedar boughs.But the northern dawn was nearer, the sun already close to the horizon.He saw details with sharp distinctness now.The great bear rose, balancing a moment on its massive hind-quarters, then took a step towards him, its front paws spread like arms. Its wicked head lolled horribly, as a huge bull-moose, lowering its horns as if about to charge, came up with a couple of long strides and joined it.A sudden excitement ran quivering over the entire host; the distant ranks moved in a new, unpleasant way; a thousand heads were lifted, ears were pricked, a forest of ugly muzzles pointed up to the wind.

And the Englishman, beside himself suddenly with a sense of ultimate terror that saw no possible escape, stiffened and stood rigid.The horror of his position petrified him. Motionless and silent he faced the awful army of his enemies, while the white light of breaking day added fresh ghastliness to the scene which was the setting for his cruel death in the Valley of the Beasts.

Above him crouched the hideous lynx, ready to spring the instant he sought safety in the tree; above it again, he was aware of a thousand talons of steel, fierce hooked beaks of iron, and the angry beating of prodigious wings.

He reeled, for the grizzly touched his body with its outstretched paw; the wolf crouched just before its deadly spring; in another second he would have been torn to pieces, crushed, devoured, when terror, operating naturally as ever, released the muscles of his throat and tongue.He shouted with what he believed was his last breath on earth.He called aloud in his frenzy.It was a prayer to whatever gods there be, it was an anguished cry for help to heaven.

“Ishtot!Great Ishtot, help me!”his voice rang out, while his hand still clutched the forgotten totem stick.

And the Red Heaven heard him.

Grimwood that same instant was aware of a presence that, but for his terror of the beasts, must have frightened him into sheer unconsciousness.A gigantic Red Indian stood before him.Yet, while the figure rose close in front of him, causing the birds to settle and the wild animals to crouch quietly where they stood, it rose also from a great distance, for it seemed to fill the entire valley with its influence, its power, its amazing majesty.In some way, moreover, that he could not understand, its vast appearance included the actual valley itself with all its trees, its running streams, its open spaces and its rocky bluffs.These marked its outline, as it were, the outline of a superhuman shape.There was a mighty bow, there was a quiver of enormous arrows, there was this Redskin figure to whom they belonged.

Yet the appearance, the outline, the face and figure too—these were the valley; and when the voice became audible, it was the valley itself that uttered the appalling words. It was the voice of trees and wind, and of running, falling water that woke the echoes in the Valley of the Beasts, as, in that same moment, the sun topped the ridge and filled the scene, the outline of the majestic figure too, with a flood of dazzling light:

“You have shed blood in this my valley.... I will not save...!”

The figure melted away into the sunlit forest, merging with the new-born day.But Grimwood saw close against his face the shining teeth, hot fetid breath passed over his cheeks, a power enveloped his whole body as though a mountain crushed him.He closed his eyes.He fell.A sharp, crackling sound passed through his brain, but already unconscious, he did not hear it.

 

His eyes opened again, and the first thing they took in was—fire.He shrank back instinctively.

“It’s all right, old man.We’ll bring you round.Nothing to be frightened about.”He saw the face of Iredale looking down into his own.Behind Iredale stood Tooshalli.His face was swollen.Grimwood remembered the blow.The big man began to cry.

“Painful still, is it?”Iredale said sympathetically.“Here, swallow a little more of this.It’ll set you right in no time.”

Grimwood gulped down the spirit.He made a violent effort to control himself, but was unable to keep the tears back.He felt no pain.It was his heart that ached, though why or wherefore, he had no idea.

“I’m all to pieces,” he mumbled, ashamed yet somehow not ashamed.“My nerves are rotten.What’s happened?”There was as yet no memory in him.

“You’ve been hugged by a bear, old man.But no bones broken.Tooshalli saved you.He fired in the nick of time—a brave shot, for he might easily have hit you instead of the brute.”

“The other brute,” whispered Grimwood, as the whisky worked in him and memory came slowly back.

“Where are we?”he asked presently, looking about him.

He saw a lake, canoes drawn up on the shore, two tents, and figures moving.Iredale explained matters briefly, then left him to sleep a bit.Tooshalli, it appeared, travelling without rest, had reached Iredale’s camping ground twenty-four hours after leaving his employer.He found it deserted, Iredale and his Indian being on the hunt.When they returned at nightfall, he had explained his presence in his brief native fashion: “He struck me and I quit.He hunt now alone in Ishtot’s Valley of the Beasts.He is dead, I think.I come to tell you.”

Iredale and his guide, with Tooshalli as leader, started off then and there, but Grimwood had covered a considerable distance, though leaving an easy track to follow.It was the moose tracks and the blood that chiefly guided them.They came up with him suddenly enough—in the grip of an enormous bear.

It was Tooshalli that fired.

 

The Indian lives now in easy circumstances, all his needs cared for, while Grimwood, his benefactor but no longer his employer, has given up hunting.He is a quiet, easy-tempered, almost gentle sort of fellow, and people wonder rather why he hasn’t married.“Just the fellow to make a good father,” is what they say; “so kind, good-natured and affectionate.”Among his pipes, in a glass case over the mantlepiece, hangs a totem stick.He declares it saved his soul, but what he means by the expression he has never quite explained.


VII

THE CALL

The incident—story it never was, perhaps—began tamely, almost meanly; it ended upon a note of strange, unearthly wonder that has haunted him ever since. In Headley’s memory, at any rate, it stands out as the loveliest, the most amazing thing he ever witnessed. Other emotions, too, contributed to the vividness of the picture. That he had felt jealousy towards his old pal, Arthur Deane, shocked him in the first place; it seemed impossible until it actually happened. But that the jealousy was proved afterwards to have been without a cause shocked him still more. He felt ashamed and miserable.

For him, the actual incident began when he received a note from Mrs. Blondin asking him to the Priory for a week-end, or for longer, if he could manage it.

Captain Arthur Deane, she mentioned, was staying with her at the moment, and a warm welcome awaited him.Iris she did not mention—Iris Manning, the interesting and beautiful girl for whom it was well known he had a considerable weakness.He found a good-sized house party; there was fishing in the little Sussex river, tennis, golf not far away, while two motor cars brought the remoter country across the downs into easy reach.Also there was a bit of duck shooting for those who cared to wake at 3 a.m.and paddle up-stream to the marshes where the birds were feeding.

“Have you brought your gun?”was the first thing Arthur said to him when he arrived.“Like a fool, I left mine in town.”

“I hope you haven’t,” put in Miss Manning; “because if you have I must get up one fine morning at three o’clock.” She laughed merrily, and there was an undernote of excitement in the laugh.

Captain Headley showed his surprise.“That you were a Diana had escaped my notice, I’m ashamed to say,” he replied lightly.“Yet I’ve known you some years, haven’t I?”He looked straight at her, and the soft yet searching eye, turning from his friend, met his own securely.She was appraising him, for the hundreth time, and he, for the hundreth time, was thinking how pretty she was, and wondering how long the prettiness would last after marriage.

“I’m not,” he heard her answer.“That’s just it.But I’ve promised.”

“Rather!”said Arthur gallantly.“And I shall hold you to it,” he added still more gallantly—too gallantly, Headley thought.“I couldn’t possibly get up at cockcrow without a very special inducement, could I, now?You know me, Dick!”

“Well, anyhow, I’ve brought my gun,” Headley replied evasively, “so you’ve no excuse, either of you.You’ll have to go.”And while they were laughing and chattering about it, Mrs. Blondin clinched the matter for them.Provisions were hard to come by; the larder really needed a brace or two of birds; it was the least they could do in return for what she called amusingly her “Armistice hospitality.”

“So I expect you to get up at three,” she chaffed them, “and return with your Victory birds.”

It was from this preliminary skirmish over the tea-table on the law five minutes after his arrival that Dick Headley realized easily enough the little game in progress.As a man of experience, just on the wrong side of forty, it was not difficult to see the cards each held.He sighed.Had he guessed an intrigue was on foot he would not have come, yet he might have known that wherever his hostess was, there were the vultures gathered together. Matchmaker by choice and instinct, Mrs. Blondin could not help herself. True to her name, she was always balancing on matrimonial tightropes—for others.

Her cards, at any rate, were obvious enough; she had laid them on the table for him. He easily read her hand. The next twenty-four hours confirmed this reading. Having made up her mind that Iris and Arthur were destined for each other, she had grown impatient; they had been ten days together, yet Iris was still free. They were good friends only. With calculation, she, therefore, took a step that must bring things further. She invited Dick Headley, whose weakness for the girl was common knowledge. The card was indicated; she played it. Arthur must come to the point or see another man carry her off. This, at least, she planned, little dreaming that the dark King of Spades would interfere.

Miss Manning’s hand also was fairly obvious, for both men were extremely eligible partisShe was getting on; one or other was to become her husband before the party broke up.This, in crude language, was certainly in her cards, though, being a nice and charming girl, she might camouflage it cleverly to herself and others.Her eyes, on each man in turn when the shooting expedition was being discussed, revealed her part in the little intrigue clearly enough.It was all, thus far, as commonplace as could be.

But there were two more hands Headley had to read—his own and his friend’s; and these, he admitted honestly, were not so easy.To take his own first.It was true he was fond of the girl and had often tried to make up his mind to ask her.Without being conceited, he had good reason to believe his affection was returned and that she would accept him.There was no ecstatic love on either side, for he was no longer a boy of twenty, nor was she unscathed by tempestuous love affairs that had scorched the first bloom from her face and heart.But they understood one another; they were an honest couple; she was tired of flirting; both wanted to marry and settle down. Unless a better man turned up she probably would say “Yes” without humbug or delay. It was this last reflection that brought him to the final hand he had to read.

Here he was puzzled.Arthur Deane’s rôle in the teacup strategy, for the first time since they had known one another, seemed strange, uncertain.Why?Because, though paying no attention to the girl openly, he met her clandestinely, unknown to the rest of the house-party, and above all without telling his intimate pal—at three o’clock in the morning.

The house-party was in full swing, with a touch of that wild, reckless gaiety which followed the end of the war: “Let us be happy before a worse thing comes upon us,” was in many hearts.After a crowded day they danced till early in the morning, while doubtful weather prevented the early shooting expedition after duck.The third night Headley contrived to disappear early to bed.He lay there thinking.He was puzzled over his friend’s rôle, over the clandestine meeting in particular.It was the morning before, waking very early, he had been drawn to the window by an unusual sound—the cry of a bird.Was it a bird?In all his experience he had never heard such a curious, half-singing call before.He listened a moment, thinking it must have been a dream, yet with the odd cry still ringing in his ears.It was repeated close beneath his open window, a long, low-pitched cry with three distinct following notes in it.

He sat up in bed and listened hard.No bird that he knew could make such sounds.But it was not repeated a third time, and out of sheer curiosity he went to the window and looked out.Dawn was creeping over the distant downs; he saw their outline in the grey pearly light; he saw the lawn below, stretching down to the little river at the bottom, where a curtain of faint mist hung in the air.And on this lawn he also saw Arthur Deane—with Iris Manning.

Of course, he reflected, they were going after the duck. He turned to look at his watch; it was three o’clock. The same glance, however, showed him his gun standing in the corner. So they were going without a gun. A sharp pang of unexpected jealousy shot through him. He was just going to shout out something or other, wishing them good luck, or asking if they had found another gun, perhaps, when a cold touch crept down his spine. The same instant his heart contracted. Deane had followed the girl into the summer-house, which stood on the right. It was not the shooting expedition at all. Arthur was meeting her for another purpose. The blood flowed back, filling his head. He felt an eavesdropper, a sneak, a detective; but, for all that, he felt also jealous. And his jealousy seemed chiefly because Arthur had not told him.

Of this, then, he lay thinking in bed on the third night.The following day he had said nothing, but had crossed the corridor and put the gun in his friend’s room.Arthur, for his part, had said nothing either.For the first time in their long, long friendship, there lay a secret between them.To Headley the unexpected revelation came with pain.

For something like a quarter of a century these two had been bosom friends; they had camped together, been in the army together, taken their pleasure together, each the full confidant of the other in all the things that go to make up men’s lives.Above all, Headley had been the one and only recipient of Arthur’s unhappy love story.He knew the girl, knew his friend’s deep passion, and also knew his terrible pain when she was lost at sea.Arthur was burnt out, finished, out of the running, so far as marriage was concerned.He was not a man to love a second time.It was a great and poignant tragedy.Headley, as confidant, knew all.But more than that—Arthur, on his side, knew his friend’s weakness for Iris Manning, knew that a marriage was still possible and likely between them.They were true as steel to one another, and each man, oddly enough, had once saved the other’s life, thus adding to the strength of a great natural tie.

Yet now one of them, feigning innocence by day, even indifference, secretly met his friend’s girl by night, and kept the matter to himself.It seemed incredible.With his own eyes Headley had seen him on the lawn, passing in the faint grey light through the mist into the summer-house, where the girl had just preceded him.He had not seen her face, but he had seen the skirt sweep round the corner of the wooden pillar.He had not waited to see them come out again.

So he now lay wondering what rôle his old friend was playing in this little intrigue that their hostess, Mrs. Blondin, helped to stage.And, oddly enough, one minor detail stayed in his mind with a curious vividness.As naturalist, hunter, nature-lover, the cry of that strange bird, with its three mournful notes, perplexed him exceedingly.

A knock came at his door, and the door pushed open before he had time to answer.Deane himself came in.

“Wise man,” he exclaimed in an easy tone, “got off to bed.Iris was asking where you were.”He sat down on the edge of the mattress, where Headley was lying with a cigarette and an open book he had not read.The old sense of intimacy and comradeship rose in the latter’s heart.Doubt and suspicion faded.He prized his great friendship.He met the familiar eyes.“Impossible,” he said to himself, “absolutely impossible!He’s not playing a game; he’s not a rotter!”He pushed over his cigarette case, and Arthur lighted one.

“Done in,” he remarked shortly, with the first puff.“Can’t stand it any more.I’m off to town to-morrow.”

Headley stared in amazement.“Fed up already?”he asked.“Why, I rather like it.It’s quite amusing.What’s wrong, old man?”

“This match-making,” said Deane bluntly.“Always throwing that girl at my head.If it’s not the duck-shooting stunt at 3 a. m. , it’s something else. She doesn’t care for me and I don’t care for her. Besides——”

He stopped, and the expression of his face changed suddenly.A sad, quiet look of tender yearning came into his clear brown eyes.

You know, Dick,” he went on in a low, half-reverent tone. “I don’t want to marry. I never can.”

Dick’s heart stirred within him.“Mary,” he said, understandingly.

The other nodded, as though the memories were still too much for him.“I’m still miserably lonely for her,” he said.“Can’t help it simply.I feel utterly lost without her.Her memory to me is everything.”He looked deep into his pal’s eyes.“I’m married to that,” he added very firmly.

They pulled their cigarettes a moment in silence.They belonged to the male type that conceals emotion behind schoolboy language.

“It’s hard luck,” said Headley gently, “rotten luck, old man, I understand.”Arthur’s head nodded several times in succession as he smoked.He made no remark for some minutes.Then presently he said, as though it had no particular importance—for thus old friends show frankness to each other—“Besides, anyhow, it’s you the girl’s dying for, not me.She’s blind as a bat, old Blondin.Even when I’m with her—thrust with her by that old matchmaker for my sins—it’s you she talks about.All the talk leads up to you and yours.She’s devilish fond of you.”He paused a moment and looked searchingly into his friend’s face.“I say, old man—are you—I mean, do you mean business there?Because—excuse me interfering—but you’d better be careful.She’s a good sort, you know, after all.”

“Yes, Arthur, I do like her a bit,” Dick told him frankly.“But I can’t make up my mind quite.You see, it’s like this——”

And they talked the matter over as old friends will, until finally Arthur chucked his cigarette into the grate and got up to go.“Dead to the world,” he said, with a yawn.“I’m off to bed.Give you a chance, too,” he added with a laugh.It was after midnight.

The other turned, as though something had suddenly occurred to him.

“By the bye, Arthur,” he said abruptly, “what bird makes this sound?I heard it the other morning.Most extraordinary cry.You know everything that flies.What is it?”And, to the best of his ability, he imitated the strange three-note cry he had heard in the dawn two mornings before.

To his amazement and keen distress, his friend, with a sound like a stifled groan, sat down upon the bed without a word.He seemed startled.His face was white.He stared.He passed a hand, as in pain, across his forehead.

“Do it again,” he whispered, in a hushed, nervous voice.“Once again—for me.”

And Headley, looking at him, repeated the queer notes, a sudden revulsion of feeling rising through him.“He’s fooling me after all,” ran in his heart, “my old, old pal——”

There was silence for a full minute. Then Arthur, stammering a bit, said lamely, a certain hush in his voice still: “Where in the world did you hear that—and when?”

Dick Headley sat up in bed.He was not going to lose this friendship, which, to him, was more than the love of woman.He must help.His pal was in distress and difficulty.There were circumstances, he realized, that might be too strong for the best man in the world—sometimes.No, by God, he would play the game and help him out!

“Arthur, old chap,” he said affectionately, almost tenderly.“I heard it two mornings ago—on the lawn below my window here. It woke me up. I—I went to look. Three in the morning, about.”

Arthur amazed him then.He first took another cigarette and lit it steadily.He looked round the room vaguely, avoiding, it seemed, the other’s eyes.Then he turned, pain in his face, and gazed straight at him.

“You saw—nothing?”he asked in a louder voice, but a voice that had something very real and true in it.It reminded Headley of the voice he heard when he was fainting from exhaustion, and Arthur had said, “Take it, I tell you.I’m all right,” and had passed over the flask, though his own throat and sight and heart were black with thirst.It was a voice that had command in it, a voice that did not lie because it could not—yet did lie and could lie—when occasion warranted.

Headley knew a second’s awful struggle.

“Nothing,” he answered quietly, after his little pause.“Why?”

For perhaps two minutes his friend hid his face.Then he looked up.

“Only,” he whispered, “because that was our secret lover’s cry.It seems so strange you heard it and not I.I’ve felt her so close of late—Mary!”

The white face held very steady, the firm lips did not tremble, but it was evident that the heart knew anguish that was deep and poignant.“We used it to call each other—in the old days.It was our private call.No one else in the world knew it but Mary and myself.”

Dick Headley was flabbergasted.He had no time to think, however.

“It’s odd you should hear it and not I,” his friend repeated.He looked hurt, bewildered, wounded.Then suddenly his face brightened.“I know,” he cried suddenly.“You and I are pretty good pals.There’s a tie between us and all that.Why, it’s tel—telepathy, or whatever they call it.That’s what it is.”

He got up abruptly.Dick could think of nothing to say but to repeat the other’s words. “Of course, of course. That’s it,” he said, “telepathy.” He stared—anywhere but at his pal.

“Night, night!”he heard from the door, and before he could do more than reply in similar vein Arthur was gone.

He lay for a long time, thinking, thinking.He found it all very strange.Arthur in this emotional state was new to him.He turned it over and over.Well, he had known good men behave queerly when wrought up.That recognition of the bird’s cry was strange, of course, but—he knew the cry of a bird when he heard it, though he might not know the actual bird.That was no human whistle.Arthur was—inventing.No, that was not possible.He was worked up, then, over something, a bit hysterical perhaps.It had happened before, though in a milder way, when his heart attacks came on.They affected his nerves and head a little, it seemed.He was a deep sort, Dick remembered.Thought turned and twisted in him, offering various solutions, some absurd, some likely.He was a nervous, high-strung fellow underneath, Arthur was.He remembered that.Also he remembered, anxiously again, that his heart was not quite sound, though what that had to do with the present tangle he did not see.

Yet it was hardly likely that he would bring in Mary as an invention, an excuse—Mary, the most sacred memory in his life, the deepest, truest, best.He had sworn, anyhow, that Iris Manning meant nothing to him.

Through all his speculations, behind every thought, ran this horrid working jealousy.It poisoned him.It twisted truth.It moved like a wicked snake through mind and heart.Arthur, gripped by his new, absorbing love for Iris Manning, lied.He couldn’t believe it, he didn’t believe it, he wouldn’t believe it—yet jealousy persisted in keeping the idea alive in him.It was a dreadful thought.He fell asleep on it.

But his sleep was uneasy with feverish, unpleasant dreams that rambled on in fragments without coming to conclusion.Then, suddenly, the cry of the strange bird came into his dream.He started, turned over, woke up.The cry still continued.It was not a dream.He jumped out of bed.

The room was grey with early morning, the air fresh and a little chill.The cry came floating over the lawn as before.He looked out, pain clutching at his heart.Two figures stood below, a man and a girl, and the man was Arthur Deane.Yet the light was so dim, the morning being overcast, that had he not expected to see his friend, he would scarcely have recognized the familiar form in that shadowy outline that stood close beside the girl.Nor could he, perhaps, have recognized Iris Manning.Their backs were to him.They moved away, disappearing again into the little summer-house, and this time—he saw it beyond question—the two were hand in hand.Vague and uncertain as the figures were in the early twilight, he was sure of that.

The first disagreeable sensation of surprise, disgust, anger that sickened him turned quickly, however, into one of another kind altogether.A curious feeling of superstitious dread crept over him, and a shiver ran again along his nerves.

“Hallo, Arthur!”he called from the window.There was no answer.His voice was certainly audible in the summer-house.But no one came.He repeated the call a little louder, waited in vain for thirty seconds, then came, the same moment, to a decision that even surprised himself, for the truth we he could no longer bear the suspense of waiting.He must see his friend at once and have it out with him.He turned and went deliberately down the corridor to Deane’s bedroom.He would wait there for his return and know the truth from his own lips.But also another thought had come—the gun.He had quite forgotten it—the safety-catch was out of order. He had not warned him.

He found the door closed but not locked; opening it cautiously, he went in.

But the unexpectedness of what he saw gave him a genuine shock.He could hardly suppress a cry.Everything in the room was neat and orderly, no sign of disturbance anywhere, and it was not empty.There, in bed, before his very eyes, was Arthur.The clothes were turned back a little; he saw the pyjamas open at the throat; he lay sound asleep, deeply, peacefully asleep.

So surprised, indeed, was Headley that, after staring a moment, almost unable to believe his sight, he then put out a hand and touched him gently, cautiously on the forehead.But Arthur did not stir or wake; his breathing remained deep and regular.He lay sleeping like a baby.

Headley glanced round the room, noticed the gun in the corner where he himself had put it the day before, and then went out, closing the door behind him softly.

Arthur Deane, however, did not leave for London as he had intended, because he felt unwell and kept to his room upstairs.It was only a slight attack, apparently, but he must lie quiet.There was no need to send for a doctor; he knew just what to do; these passing attacks were common enough.He would be up and about again very shortly.Headley kept him company, saying no single word of what had happened.He read aloud to him, chatted and cheered him up.He had no other visitors.Within twenty-four hours he was himself once more.He and his friend had planned to leave the following day.

But Headley, that last night in the house, felt an odd uneasiness and could not sleep.All night long he sat up reading, looking out of the window, smoking in a chair where he could see the stars and hear the wind and watch the huge shadow of the downs.The house lay very still as the hours passed.He dozed once or twice.Why did he sit up in this unnecessary way?Why did he leave his door ajar so that the slightest sound of another door opening, or of steps passing along the corridor, must reach him? Was he anxious for his friend? Was he suspicious? What was his motive, what his secret purpose?

Headley did not know, and could not even explain it to himself.He felt uneasy, that was all he knew.Not for worlds would he have let himself go to sleep or lose full consciousness that night.It was very odd; he could not understand himself.He merely obeyed a strange, deep instinct that bade him wait and watch.His nerves were jumpy; in his heart lay some unexplicable anxiety that was pain.

The dawn came slowly; the stars faded one by one; the line of the downs showed their grand bare curves against the sky; cool and cloudless the September morning broke above the little Sussex pleasure house.He sat and watched the east grow bright.The early wind brought a scent of marshes and the sea into his room.Then suddenly it brought a sound as well—the haunting cry of the bird with its three following notes.And this time there came an answer.

Headley knew then why he had sat up.A wave of emotion swept him as he heard—an emotion he could not attempt to explain.Dread, wonder, longing seized him.For some seconds he could not leave his chair because he did not dare to.The low-pitched cries of call and answer rang in his ears like some unearthly music.With an effort he started up, went to the window and looked out.

This time the light was sharp and clear.No mist hung in the air.He saw the crimsoning sky reflected like a band of shining metal in the reach of river beyond the lawn.He saw dew on the grass, a sheet of pallid silver.He saw the summer-house, empty of any passing figures.For this time the two figures stood plainly in view before his eyes upon the lawn.They stood there, hand in hand, sharply defined, unmistakable in form and outline, their faces, moreover, turned upwards to the window where he stood, staring down in pain and amazement at them—at Arthur Deane and Mary

They looked into his eyes.He tried to call, but no sound left his throat.They began to move across the dew-soaked lawn.They went, he saw, with a floating, undulating motion towards the river shining in the dawn.Their feet left no marks upon the grass.They reached the bank, but did not pause in their going.They rose a little, floating like silent birds across the river.Turning in mid-stream, they smiled towards him, waved their hands with a gesture of farewell, then, rising still higher into the opal dawn, their figures passed into the distance slowly, melting away against the sunlit marshes and the shadowing downs beyond.They disappeared.

Headley never quite remembers actually leaving the window, crossing the room, or going down the passage.Perhaps he went at once, perhaps he stood gazing into the air above the downs for a considerable time, unable to tear himself away.He was in some marvellous dream, it seemed.The next thing he remembers, at any rate, was that he was standing beside his friend’s bed, trying, in his distraught anguish of heart, to call him from that sleep which, on earth, knows no awakening.


VIII

EGYPTIAN SORCERY

1

Sanfield paused as he was about to leave the Underground station at Victoria, and cursed the weather. When he left the City it was fine; now it was pouring with rain, and he had neither overcoat nor umbrella. Not a taxi was discoverable in the dripping gloom. He would get soaked before he reached his rooms in Sloane Street.

He stood for some minutes, thinking how vile London was in February, and how depressing life was in general.He stood also, in that moment, though he knew it not, upon the edge of a singular adventure.Looking back upon it in later years, he often remembered this particularly wretched moment of a pouring wet February evening, when everything seemed wrong, and Fate had loaded the dice against him, even in the matter of weather and umbrellas.

Fate, however, without betraying her presence, was watching him through the rain and murk; and Fate, that night, had strange, mysterious eyes.Fantastic cards lay up her sleeve.The rain, his weariness and depression, his physical fatigue especially, seemed the conditions she required before she played these curious cards.Something new and wonderful fluttered close.Romance flashed by him across the driving rain and touched his cheek.He was too exasperated to be aware of it.

Things had gone badly that day at the office, where he was junior partner in a small firm of engineers.Threatened trouble at the works had come to a head.A strike seemed imminent. To add to his annoyance, a new client, whose custom was of supreme importance, had just complained bitterly of the delay in the delivery of his machinery. The senior partners had left the matter in Sanfield’s hands; he had not succeeded. The angry customer swore he would hold the firm to its contract. They could deliver or pay up—whichever suited them. The junior partner had made a mess of things.

The final words on the telephone still rang in his ears as he stood sheltering under the arcade, watching the downpour, and wondering whether he should make a dash for it or wait on the chance of its clearing up—when a further blow was dealt him as the rain-soaked poster of an evening paper caught his eye: “Riots in Egypt.Heavy Fall in Egyptian Securities,” he read with blank dismay.Buying a paper he turned feverishly to the City article—to find his worst fears confirmed.Delta Lands, in which nearly all his small capital was invested, had declined a quarter on the news, and would evidently decline further still.The riots were going on in the towns nearest to their property.Banks had been looted, crops destroyed; the trouble was deep-seated.

So grave was the situation that mere weather seemed suddenly of no account at all.He walked home doggedly in the drenching rain, paying less attention to it than if it had been Scotch mist.The water streamed from his hat, dripped down his back and neck, splashed him with mud and grime from head to foot.He was soaked to the skin.He hardly noticed it.His capital had depreciated by half, at least, and possibly was altogether lost; his position at the office was insecure.How could mere weather matter?

Sitting, eventually, before his fire in dry clothes, after an apology for a dinner he had no heart to eat, he reviewed the situation.He faced a possible total loss of his private capital.Next, the position of his firm caused him grave uneasiness, since, apart from his own mishandling of the new customer, the threatened strike might ruin it completely; a long strain on its limited finances was out of the question. George Sanfield certainly saw things at their worst. He was now thirty-five. A fresh start—the mere idea of it made him shudder—occurred as a possibility in the near future. Vitality, indeed, was at a low ebb, it seemed. Mental depression, great physical fatigue, weariness of life in general made his spirits droop alarmingly, so that almost he felt tired of living. His tie with existence, at any rate, just then was dangerously weak.

Thought turned next to the man on whose advice he had staked his all in Delta Lands.Morris had important Egyptian interests in various big companies and enterprises along the Nile.He had first come to the firm with a letter of introduction upon some business matter, which the junior partner had handled so successfully that acquaintance thus formed had ripened into a more personal tie.The two men had much in common; their temperaments were suited; understanding grew between them; they felt at home and comfortable with one another.They became friends; they felt a mutual confidence.When Morris paid his rare visits to England, they spent much time together; and it was on one of these occasions that the matter of the Egyptian shares was mentioned, Morris urgently advising their purchase.

Sanfield explained his own position clearly enough, but his friend was so confident and optimistic that the purchase eventually had been made.There had been, moreover, Sanfield now remembered, the flavour of a peculiarly intimate and personal kind about the deal.He had remarked it, with a touch of surprise, at the moment, though really it seemed natural enough.Morris was very earnest, holding his friend’s interest at heart; he was affectionate almost.

“I’d like to do you this good turn, old man,” he said.“I have the strong feeling, somehow, that I owe you this, though heaven alone knows why!”After a pause he added, half shyly: “It may be one of those old memories we hear about nowadays cropping up out of some previous life together.” Before the other could reply, he went on to explain that only three men were in the parent syndicate, the shares being unobtainable. “I’ll set some of my own aside for you—four thousand or so, if you like.”

They laughed together; Sanfield thanked him warmly; the deal was carried out.But the recipient of the favour had wondered a little at the sudden increase of intimacy even while he liked it and responded.

Had he been a fool, he now asked himself, to swallow the advice, putting all his eggs into a single basket?He knew very little about Morris after all....Yet, while reflection showed him that the advice was honest, and the present riots no fault of the adviser’s, he found his thoughts turning in a steady stream towards the man.The affairs of the firm took second place.It was Morris, with his deep-set eyes, his curious ways, his dark skin burnt brick-red by a fierce Eastern sun; it was Morris, looking almost like an Egyptian, who stood before him as he sat thinking gloomily over his dying fire.

He longed to talk with him, to ask him questions, to seek advice.He saw him very vividly against the screen of thought; Morris stood beside him now, gazing out across the limitless expanse of tawny sand.He had in his eyes the “distance” that sailors share with men whose life has been spent amid great trackless wastes.Morris, moreover, now he came to think of it, seemed always a little out of place in England.He had few relatives and, apparently, no friends; he was always intensely pleased when the time came to return to his beloved Nile.He had once mentioned casually a sister who kept house for him when duty detained him in Cairo, but, even here, he was something of an Oriental, rarely speaking of his women folk.Egypt, however, plainly drew him like a magnet.Resistance involved disturbance in his being, even ill-health. Egypt was “home” to him, and his friend, though he had never been there, felt himself its potent spell.

Another curious trait Sanfield remembered, too—his friend’s childish superstition; his belief, or half-belief, in magic and the supernatural. Sanfield, amused, had ascribed it to the long sojourn in a land where anything unusual is at once ascribed to spiritual agencies. Morris owed his entire fortune, if his tale could be believed, to the magical apparition of an unearthly kind in some lonely wadi among the Bedouins. A sand-diviner had influenced another successful speculation.... He was a picturesque figure, whichever way one took him: yet a successful business man into the bargain.

These reflections and memories, on the other hand, brought small comfort to the man who had tempted Fate by following his advice.It was only a little strange how Morris now dominated his thoughts, directing them towards himself.Morris was in Egypt at the moment.

He went to bed at length, filled with uneasy misgivings, but for a long time he could not sleep.He tossed restlessly, his mind still running on the subject of his long reflections.He ached with tiredness.He dropped off at last.Then came a nightmare dream, in which the firm’s works were sold for nearly nothing to an old Arab sheikh who wished to pay for them—in goats.He woke up in a cold perspiration.He had uneasy thoughts.His fancy was travelling.He could not rest.

To distract his mind, he turned on the light and tried to read, and, eventually, towards morning, fell into a sleep of sheer exhaustion.And his final thought—he knew not exactly why—was a sentence Morris had made use of long ago: “I feel I owe you a good turn; I’d like to do something for you....”

This was the memory in his mind as he slipped off into unconsciousness.

But what happens when the mind is unconscious and the tired body lies submerged in deep sleep, no man, they say, can really tell.

2

The next thing he knew he was walking along a sun-baked street in some foreign town that was familiar, although, at first, its name escaped him.Colour, softness, and warmth pervaded it; there was sparkle and lightness in the exhilarating air; it was an Eastern town.

Though early morning, a number of people were already stirring; strings of camels passed him, loaded with clover, bales of merchandise, and firewood.Gracefully-draped women went by silently, carrying water jars of burnt clay upon their heads.Rude wooden shutters were being taken down in the bazaars; the smoke of cooking-fires rose in the blue spirals through the quiet air.He felt strangely at home and happy.The light, the radiance stirred him.He passed a mosque from which the worshippers came pouring in a stream of colour.

Yet, though an Eastern town, it was not wholly Oriental, for he saw that many of the buildings were of semi-European design, and that the natives sometimes wore European dress, except for the fez upon the head.Among them were Europeans, too.Staring into the faces of the passers-by he found, to his vexation, that he could not focus sight as usual, and that the nearer he approached, the less clearly he discerned the features.The faces, upon close attention, at once grew shadowy, merged into each other, or, in some odd fashion, melted into the dazzling sunshine that was their background.All his attempts in this direction failed; impatience seized him; of surprise, however, he was not conscious.Yet this mingled vagueness and intensity seemed perfectly natural.

Filled with a stirring curiosity, he made a strong effort to concentrate his attention, only to discover that this vagueness, this difficulty of focus, lay in his own being, too.He wandered on, unaware exactly where he was going, yet not much perturbed, since there was an objective in view, he knew, and this objective must eventually be reached. Its nature, however, for the moment entirely eluded him.

The sense of familiarity, meanwhile, increased; he had been in this town before, although not quite within recoverable memory.It seemed, perhaps, the general atmosphere, rather than the actual streets, he knew; a certain perfume in the air, a tang of indefinable sweetness, a vitality in the radiant sunshine.The dark faces that he could not focus, he yet knew; the flowing garments of blue and red and yellow, the softly-slippered feet, the slouching camels, the burning human eyes that faded ere he fully caught them—the entire picture in this blazing sunlight lay half-hidden, half-revealed.And an extraordinary sense of happiness and well-being flooded him as he walked; he felt at home; comfort and bliss stole over him.Almost he knew his way about.This was a place he loved and knew.

The complete silence, moreover, did not strike him as peculiar until, suddenly, it was broken in a startling fashion.He heard his own name spoken.It sounded close beside his ear.

“George Sanfield!”The voice was familiar.Morris called him.He realized then the truth.He was, of course, in Cairo.

Yet, instead of turning to discover the speaker at his side, he hurried forward, as though he knew that the voice had come through distance.His consciousness cleared and lightened; he felt more alive; his eyes now focused the passers-by without difficulty.He was there to find Morris, and Morris was directing him.All was explained and natural again.He hastened.But, even while he hastened, he knew that his personal desire to speak with his friend about Egyptian shares and Delta Lands was not his single object.Behind it, further in among as yet unstirring shadows, lay another deeper purpose.Yet he did not trouble about it, nor make a conscious effort at discovery. Morris was doing him that “good turn I feel I owe you.” This conviction filled him overwhelmingly. The question of how and why did not once occur to him. A strange, great happiness rose in him.

Upon the outskirts of the town now, he found himself approaching a large building in the European style, with wide verandas and a cultivated garden filled with palm trees.A well-kept drive of yellow sand led to its chief entrance, and the man in khaki drill and riding-breeches walking along this drive, not ten yards in front of him, was—Morris.He overtook him, but his cry of welcome recognition was not answered.Morris, walking with bowed head and stooping shoulders, seemed intensely preoccupied; he had not heard the call.

“Here I am, old fellow!”exclaimed his friend, holding out a hand.“I’ve come, you see...!”then paused aghast before the altered face.Morris paid no attention.He walked straight on as though he had not heard.It was the distraught and anguished expression on the drawn and haggard features that impressed the other most.The silence he took without surprise.

It was the pain and suffering in his friend that occupied him.The dark rims beneath heavy eyes, the evidence of sleepless nights, of long anxiety and ceaseless dread, afflicted him with their too-plain story.The man was overwhelmed with some great sorrow.Sanfield forgot his personal trouble; this larger, deeper grief usurped its place entirely.

“Morris!Morris!”he cried yet more eagerly than before.“I’ve come, you see.Tell me what’s the matter.I believe—that I can—help you...!”

The other turned, looking past him through the air.He made no answer.The eyes went through him.He walked straight on, and Sanfield walked at his side in silence.Through the large door they passed together, Morris paying as little attention to him as though he were not there, and in the small chamber they now entered, evidently a waiting-room, an Egyptian servant approached, uttered some inaudible words, and then withdrew, leaving them alone together.

It seemed that time leaped forward, yet stood still; the passage of minutes, that is to say, was irregular, almost fanciful.Whether the interval was long or short, however, Morris spent it pacing up and down the little room, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his mind oblivious of all else but his absorbing anxiety and grief.To his friend, who watched him by the wall with intense desire to help, he paid no attention.The latter’s spoken words went by him, entirely unnoticed; he gave no sign of seeing him; his eyes, as he paced up and down, muttering inaudibly to himself, were fixed every few seconds on an inner door.Beyond that door, Sanfield now divined, lay someone who hesitated on the narrow frontier between life and death.

It opened suddenly and a man, in overall and rubber gloves, came out, his face grave yet with faint signs of hope about it—a doctor, clearly, straight from the operating table.Morris, standing rigid in his tracks, listened to something spoken, for the lips were in movement, though no words were audible.The operation, Sanfield divined, had been successful, though danger was still present.The two men passed out, then, into the hall and climbed a wide staircase to the floor above, Sanfield following noiselessly, though so close that he could touch them.Entering a large, airy room where French windows, carefully shaded with green blinds opened on to a veranda, they approached a bed.Two nurses bent over it.The occupant was at first invisible.

Events had moved with curious rapidity.All this had happened, it seemed, in a single moment, yet with the irregular effect already mentioned which made Sanfield feel it might, equally, have lasted hours.But, as he stood behind Morris and the surgeon at the bed, the deeps in him opened suddenly, and he trembled under a shock of intense emotion that he could not understand. As with a stroke of lightning some heavenly fire set his heart aflame with yearning. The very soul in him broke loose with passionate longing that must find satisfaction. It came to him in a single instant with the certain knowledge of an unconquerable conviction. Hidden, yet ever waiting, among the broken centuries, there now leaped upon him this flash of memory—the memory of some sweet and ancient love Time might veil yet could not kill.

He ran forward, past the surgeon and the nurses, past Morris who bent above the bed with a face ghastly from anxiety.He gazed down upon the fair girl lying there, her unbound hair streaming over the pillow.He saw, and he remembered.And an uncontrollable cry of recognition left his lips....

The irregularity of the passing minutes became so marked then, that he might well have passed outside their measure altogether, beyond what men call Time; duration, interval, both escaped.Alone and free with his eternal love, he was safe from all confinement, free, it seemed, either of time or space.His friend, however, was vaguely with him during the amazing instant.He felt acutely aware of the need each had, respectively, for the other, born of a heritage the Past had hidden over-long.Each, it was clear, could do the other a good turn....Sanfield, though unable to describe or disentangle later, knew, while it lasted, this joy of full, delicious understanding....

The strange, swift instant of recognition passed and disappeared.The cry, Sanfield realized, on coming back to the Present, had been soundless and inaudible as before.No one observed him; no one stirred.The girl, on that bed beside the opened windows, lay evidently dying.Her breath came in gasps, her chest heaved convulsively, each attempt at recovery was slower and more painful than the one before.She was unconscious.Sometimes her breathing seemed to stop.It grew weaker, as the pulse grew fainter. And Sanfield, transfixed as with paralysis, stood watching, waiting, an intolerable yearning in his heart to help. It seemed to him that he waited with a purpose.

This purpose suddenly became clear.He knew why he waited.There was help to be given.He was the one to give it.

The girl’s vitality and ebbing nerves, her entire physical organism now fading so quickly towards that final extinction which meant death—could these but be stimulated by a new tide of life, the danger-point now fast approaching might be passed, and recovery must follow.This impetus, he knew suddenly, he could supply.How, he could not tell.It flashed upon him from beyond the stars, as from ancient store of long-forgotten, long-neglected knowledge.It was enough that he felt confident and sure.His soul burned within him; the strength of an ancient and unconquerable love rose through his being.He would try.

The doctor, he saw, was in the act of giving his last aid in the form of a hypodermic injection, Morris and the nurses looking on.Sanfield observed the sharp quick rally, only too faint, too slight; he saw the collapse that followed.The doctor, shrugging his shoulders, turned with a look that could not express itself in words, and Morris, burying his face in his hands, knelt by the bed, shaken with convulsive sobbing.It was the end.

In which moment, precisely, the strange paralysis that had bound Sanfield momentarily, was lifted from his being, and an impelling force, obeying his immense desire, invaded him.He knew how to act.His will, taught long ago, yet long-forgotten, was set free.

“You have come back to me at last,” he cried in his anguish and his power, though the voice was, as ever, inaudible and soundless, “I shall not let you go!...

Drawn forward nearer and nearer to the bed, he leaned down, as if to kiss the pale lips and streaming hair.But his knowledge operated better than he knew. In the tremendous grip of that power which spins the stars and suns, while drawing souls into manifestation upon a dozen planets, he raced, he dived, he plunged, helpless, yet driven by the creative stress of love and sacrifice towards some eternal purpose. Caught in what seemed a vortex of amazing force, he sank away, as a straw is caught and sunk within the suction of a mighty whirlpool. His memory of Morris, of the doctor, of the girl herself, passed utterly. His entire personality became merged, lost, obliterated. He was aware of nothing; not even aware of nothingness. He lost consciousness....

3

The reappearance was as sudden as the obliteration.He emerged.There had been interval, duration, time.He was not aware of them.A spasm of blinding pain shot through him.He opened his eyes.His whole body was a single devouring pain.He felt cramped, confined, uncomfortable.He must escape.He thrashed about.Someone seized his arm and held it.With a snarl he easily wrenched it free.

He was in bed.How had he come to this?An accident?He saw the faces of nurse and doctor bending over him, eager, amazed, surprised, a trifle frightened.Vague memories floated to him.Who was he?Where had he come from?And where was ...where was ...someone ...who was dearer to him than life itself?He looked about him: the room, the faces, the French windows, the veranda, all seemed only half familiar.He looked, he searched for ...someone ...but in vain....

A spasm of violent pain burned through his body like a fire, and he shut his eyes.He groaned.A voice sounded just above him: “Take this, dear.Try and swallow a little.It will relieve you.Your brother will be back in a moment.You are much better already.”

He looked up at the nurse; he drank what she gave him.

“My brother!”he murmured.“I don’t understand.I have no brother.”Thirst came over him; he drained the glass.The nurse, wearing a startled look, moved away.He watched her go.He pointed at her with his hand, meaning to say something that he instantly forgot—as he saw his own bare arm.Its dreadful thinness shocked him.He must have been ill for months.The arm, wasted almost to nothing, showed the bone.He sank back exhausted, the sleeping draught began to take effect.The nurse returned quietly to a chair beside the bed, from which she watched him without ceasing as the long minutes passed....

He found it difficult to collect his thoughts, to keep them in his mind when caught.There floated before him a series of odd scenes like coloured pictures in an endless flow.He was unable to catch them.Morris was with him always.They were doing quite absurd, impossible things.They rode together across the desert in the dawn, they wandered through old massive temples, they saw the sun set behind mud villages mid wavering palms, they drifted down a river in a sailing boat of quaint design.It had an enormous single sail.Together they visited tombs cut in the solid rock, hot airless corridors, and huge, dim, vaulted chambers underground.There was an icy wind by night, fierce burning sun by day.They watched vast troops of stars pass down a stupendous sky....They knew delight and tasted wonder.Strange memories touched them....

“Nurse!”he called aloud, returning to himself again, and remembering that he must speak with his friend about something—he failed to recall exactly what.“Please ask Mr. Morris to come to me.”

“At once, dear.He’s only in the next room waiting for you to wake.”She went out quickly, and he heard her voice in the passage.It sank to a whisper as she came back with Morris, yet every syllable reached him distinctly:

“...and pay no attention if she wanders a little; just ignore it.She’s turned the corner, thank God, and that’s the chief thing.”Each word he heard with wonder and perplexity, with increasing irritability too.

“I’m a hell of a wreck,” he said, as Morris came, beaming, to the bedside.“Have I been ill long?It’s frightfully decent of you to come, old man.”

But Morris, staggered at this greeting, stopped abruptly, half turning to the nurse for guidance. He seemed unable to find words. Sanfield was extremely annoyed; he showed his feeling. “I’m not balmy, you old ass!” he shouted. “I’m all right again, though very weak. But I wanted to ask you—oh, I remember now—I wanted to ask you about my—er—Deltas.”

“My poor dear Maggie,” stammered Morris, fumbling with his voice. “Don’t worry about your few shares, darling. Deltas are all right—it’s you we——”

“Why, the devil, do you call me Maggie?” snapped the other viciously. “And ‘darling’!” He felt furious, exasperated. “Have you gone balmy, or have I? What in the world are you two up to?” His fury tired him. He lay back upon his pillows, fuming. Morris took a chair beside the bed; he put a hand gently on his wasted arm.

“My darling girl,” he said, in what was intended to be a soothing voice, though it stirred the sick man again to fury beyond expression, “you must really keep quiet for a bit.You’ve had a very severe operation”—his voice shook a little—“but, thank God, you’ve pulled through and are now on the way to recovery.You are my sister Maggie.It will all come back to you when you’re rested——”

“Maggie, indeed!”interrupted the other, trying to sit up again, but too weak to compass it.“Your sister!You bally idiot!Don’t you know me?I wish to God the nurse wouldn’t ‘dear’ me in that senseless way.And you, with your atrocious ‘darling,’ I’m not your precious sister Maggie. I’m—I’m George San——”

But even as he said it, there passed over him some dim lost fragment of a wild, delicious memory he could not seize.Intense pleasure lay in it, could he but recover it.He knew a sweet, forgotten joy.His broken, troubled mind lay searching frantically but without success.It dazzled him.It shook him with an indescribable emotion—of joy, of wonder, of deep sweet confusion.A rapt happiness rose in him, yet pain, like a black awful shutter, closed in upon the happiness at once.He remembered a girl.But he remembered, too, that he had seen her die.Who was she?Had he lost her ...again...!

“My dear fellow,” he faltered in a weaker voice to Morris, “my brain’s in a whirl.I’m sorry.I suppose I’ve had some blasted concussion—haven’t I?”

But the man beside his bed, he saw, was startled.An extraordinary look came into his face, though he tried to hide it with a smile.

“My shares!”cried Sanfield, with a half scream.“Four thousand of them!”

Whereupon Morris blanched.“George Sanfield!”he muttered, half to himself, half to the nurse who hurried up.“That voice!The very number too!”He looked white and terrified, as if he had seen a ghost.A whispered colloquy ensued between him and the nurse.It was inaudible.

“Now, dearest Maggie,” he said at length, making evidently a tremendous effort, “do try and lie quiet for a bit.Don’t bother about George Sanfield, my London friend.His shares are quite safe.You’ve heard me speak of him.It’s all right, my darling, quite all right.Oh, believe me!I’m your brother.”

“Maggie...!”whispered the man to himself upon the bed, whereupon Morris stooped, and, to his intense horror, kissed him on the cheek.But his horror seemed merged at once in another personality that surged through and over his entire being, drowning memory and recognition hopelessly. “Darling,” he murmured. He realized that he was mad, of course. It seemed he fainted....

The momentary unconsciousness soon passed, at any rate. He opened his eyes again. He saw a palm tree out of the window. He knew positively he was not mad, whatever else he might be. Dead perhaps? He felt the sheets, the mattress, the skin upon his face. No, he was alive all right. The dull pains where the tight bandages oppressed him were also real. He was among substantial, earthly things. The nurse, he noticed, regarded him anxiously. She was a pleasant-looking young woman. He smiled; and, with an expression of affectionate, even tender pleasure, she smiled back at him.

“You feel better now, a little stronger,” she said softly.“You’ve had a sleep, Miss Margaret.”She said “Miss Margaret” with a conscious effort.It was better, perhaps, than “dear”; but his anger rose at once.He was too tired, however, to express his feelings.There stole over him, besides, the afflicting consciousness of an alien personality that was familiar, and yet not his.It strove to dominate him.Only by a great effort could he continue to think his own thoughts.This other being kept trying to intrude, to oust him, to take full possession.It resented his presence with a kind of violence.

He sighed.So strong was the feeling of another personality trying to foist itself upon his own, upon his mind, his body, even upon his very face, that he turned instinctively to the nurse, though unaware exactly what he meant to ask her for.

“My hand-glass, please,” he heard himself saying—with horror. The phrase was not his own. Glass or mirror were the words he would have used.

A moment later he was staring with acute and ghastly terror at a reflection that was not his own.It was the face of the dead girl he saw within the silver-handled, woman’s hand-glass he held up.

*****

The dream with its amazing, vivid detail haunted him for days, even coming between him and his work.It seemed far more real, more vivid than the commonplace events of life that followed.The occurrences of the day were pale compared to its overpowering intensity.And a cable, received the very next afternoon, increased this sense of actual truth—of something that had really happened.

“Hold shares writing Morris.”

Its brevity added a convincing touch.He was aware of Egypt even in Throgmorton Street.Yet it was the face of the dead, or dying, girl that chiefly haunted him.She remained in his thoughts, alive and sweet and exquisite.Without her he felt incomplete, his life a failure.He thought of nothing else.

The affairs at the office, meanwhile, went well; unexpected success attended them; there was no strike; the angry customer was pacified.And when the promised letter came from Morris, Sanfield’s hands trembled so violently that he could hardly tear it open.Nor could he read it calmly.The assurance about his precious shares scarcely interested him.It was the final paragraph that set his heart beating against his ribs as though a hammer lay inside him:

“...I’ve had great trouble and anxiety, though, thank God, the danger is over now.I forget if I ever mentioned my sister, Margaret, to you.She keeps house for me in Cairo, when I’m there.She is my only tie in life.Well, a severe operation she had to undergo, all but finished her.To tell you the truth, she very nearly died, for the doctor gave her up.You’ll smile when I tell you that odd things happened—at the very last moment.I can’t explain it, nor can the doctor.It rather terrified me.But at the very moment when we thought her gone, something revived in her.She became full of unexpected life and vigor.She was even violent—whereas, a moment before, she had not the strength to speak, much less to move.It was rather wonderful, but it was terrible too.

“You don’t believe in these things, I know, but I must tell you, because, when she recovered consciousness, she began to babble about yourself, using your name, though she has rarely, if ever, heard it, and even speaking—you won’t believe this, of course! —of your shares in Deltas, giving the exact number that you hold. When you write, please tell me if you were very anxious about these? Also, whether your thoughts were directed particularly to me? I thought a good deal about you, knowing you might be uneasy, but my mind was pretty full, as you will understand, of her operation at the time. The climax, when all this happened, was about 11 a. m. on February 13th.

“Don’t fail to tell me this, as I’m particularly interested in what you may have to say.”

“And, now, I want to ask a great favor of you.The doctor forbids Margaret to stay here during the hot weather, so I’m sending her home to some cousins in Yorkshire, as soon as she is fit to travel.It would be most awfully kind—I know how women bore you—if you could manage to meet the boat and help her on her way through London.I’ll let you know dates and particulars later, when I hear that you will do this for me....”

Sanfield hardly read the remainder of the letter, which dealt with shares and business matters. But a month later he stood on the dock-pier at Tilbury, watching the approach of the tender from the Egyptian Mail

He saw it make fast; he saw the stream of passengers pour down the gangway; and he saw among them the tall, fair woman of his dream.With a beating heart he went to meet her....


IX

THE DECOY

It belonged to the category of unlovely houses about which an ugly superstition clings, one reason being, perhaps, its inability to inspire interest in itself without assistance. It seemed too ordinary to possess individuality, much less to exert an influence. Solid and ungainly, its huge bulk dwarfing the park timber, its best claim to notice was a negative one—it was unpretentious.

From the little hill its expressionless windows stared across the Kentish Weald, indifferent to weather, dreary in winter, bleak in spring, unblessed in summer.Some colossal hand had tossed it down, then let it starve to death, a country mansion that might well strain the adjectives of advertisers and find inheritors with difficulty.Its soul had fled, said some; it had committed suicide, thought others; and it was an inheritor, before he killed himself in the library, who thought this latter, yielding, apparently, to an hereditary taint in the family.For two other inheritors followed suit, with an interval of twenty years between them, and there was no clear reason to explain the three disasters.Only the first owner, indeed, lived permanently in the house, the others using it in the summer months and then deserting it with relief.Hence, when John Burley, present inheritor, assumed possession, he entered a house about which clung an ugly superstition, based, nevertheless, upon a series of undeniably ugly facts.

This century deals harshly with superstitious folk, deeming them fools or charlatans; but John Burley, robust, contemptuous of half lights, did not deal harshly with them, because he did not deal with them at all.He was hardly aware of their existence. He ignored them as he ignored, say, the Esquimaux, poets, and other human aspects that did not touch his scheme of life. A successful business man, he concentrated on what was real; he dealt with business people. His philanthropy, on a big scale, was also real; yet, though he would have denied it vehemently, he had his superstition as well. No man exists without some taint of superstition in his blood; the racial heritage is too rich to be escaped entirely. Burley’s took this form—that unless he gave his tithe to the poor he would not prosper. This ugly mansion, he decided, would make an ideal Convalescent Home.

“Only cowards or lunatics kill themselves,” he declared flatly, when his use of the house was criticized.“I’m neither one nor t’other.”He let out his gusty, boisterous laugh.In his invigorating atmosphere such weakness seemed contemptible, just as superstition in his presence seemed feeblest ignorance.Even its picturesqueness faded.“I can’t conceive,” he boomed, “can’t even imagine to myself,” he added emphatically, “the state of mind in which a man can think of suicide, much less do it.”He threw his chest out with a challenging air.“I tell you, Nancy, it’s either cowardice or mania.And I’ve no use for either.”

Yet he was easy-going and good-humoured in his denunciation.He admitted his limitations with a hearty laugh his wife called noisy.Thus he made allowances for the fairy fears of sailorfolk, and had even been known to mention haunted ships his companies owned.But he did so in the terms of tonnage and £ s.d.His scope was big; details were made for clerks.

His consent to pass a night in the mansion was the consent of a practical business man and philanthropist who dealt condescendingly with foolish human nature.It was based on the common-sense of tonnage and £ s.d.The local newspapers had revived the silly story of the suicides, calling attention to the effect of the superstition upon the fortunes of the house, and so, possibly, upon the fortunes of its present owner. But the mansion, otherwise a white elephant, was precisely ideal for his purpose, and so trivial a matter as spending a night in it should not stand in the way. “We must take people as we find them, Nancy.”

His young wife had her motive, of course, in making the proposal, and, if she was amused by what she called “spook-hunting,” he saw no reason to refuse her the indulgence.He loved her, and took her as he found her—late in life.To allay the superstitions of prospective staff and patients and supporters, all, in fact, whose goodwill was necessary to success, he faced this boredom of a night in the building before its opening was announced.“You see, John, if you, the owner, do this, it will nip damaging talk in the bud.If anything went wrong later it would only be put down to this suicide idea, this haunting influence.The Home will have a bad name from the start.There’ll be endless trouble.It will be a failure.”

“You think my spending a night there will stop the nonsense?”he inquired.

“According to the old legend it breaks the spell,” she replied.“That’s the condition, anyhow.”

“But somebody’s sure to die there sooner or later,” he objected.“We can’t prevent that.”

“We can prevent people whispering that they died unnaturally.”She explained the working of the public mind.

“I see,” he replied, his lip curling, yet quick to gauge the truth of what she told him about collective instinct.

“Unless you take poison in the hall,” she added laughingly, “or elect to hang yourself with your braces from the hat peg.”

“I’ll do it,” he agreed, after a moment’s thought.“I’ll sit up with you.It will be like a honeymoon over again, you and I on the spree—eh?”He was even interested now; the boyish side of him was touched perhaps; but his enthusiasm was less when she explained that three was a better number than two on such an expedition.

“I’ve often done it before, John.We were always three.”

“Who?”he asked bluntly.He looked wonderingly at her, but she answered that if anything went wrong a party of three provided a better margin for help.It was sufficiently obvious.He listened and agreed.“I’ll get young Mortimer,” he suggested.“Will he do?”

She hesitated.“Well—he’s cheery; he’ll be interested, too.Yes, he’s as good as another.”She seemed indifferent.

“And he’ll make the time pass with his stories,” added her husband.

So Captain Mortimer, late officer on a T.B.D., a “cheery lad,” afraid of nothing, cousin of Mrs. Burley, and now filling a good post in the company’s London offices, was engaged as third hand in the expedition.But Captain Mortimer was young and ardent, and Mrs. Burley was young and pretty and ill-mated, and John Burley was a neglectful, and self-satisfied husband.

Fate laid the trap with cunning, and John Burley, blind-eyed, careless of detail, floundered into it.He also floundered out again, though in a fashion none could have expected of him.

The night agreed upon eventually was as near to the shortest in the year as John Burley could contrive—June 18th—when the sun set at 8:18 and rose about a quarter to four.There would be barely three hours of true darkness.“You’re the expert,” he admitted, as she explained that sitting through the actual darkness only was required, not necessarily from sunset to sunrise.“We’ll do the thing properly.Mortimer’s not very keen, he had a dance or something,” he added, noticing the look of annoyance that flashed swiftly in her eyes; “but he got out of it.He’s coming.”The pouting expression of the spoilt woman amused him.“Oh, no, he didn’t need much persuading really,” he assured her.“Some girl or other, of course. He’s young, remember.” To which no comment was forthcoming, though the implied comparison made her flush.

They motored from South Audley Street after an early tea, in due course passing Sevenoaks and entering the Kentish Weald; and, in order that the necessary advertisement should be given, the chauffeur, warned strictly to keep their purpose quiet, was to put up at the country inn and fetch them an hour after sunrise; they would breakfast in London.“He’ll tell everybody,” said his practical and cynical master; “the local newspaper will have it all next day.A few hours’ discomfort is worth while if it ends the nonsense.We’ll read and smoke, and Mortimer shall tell us yarns about the sea.”He went with the driver into the house to superintend the arrangement of the room, the lights, the hampers of food, and so forth, leaving the pair upon the lawn.

“Four hours isn’t much, but it’s something,” whispered Mortimer, alone with her for the first time since they started.“It’s simply ripping of you to have got me in.You look divine to-night.You’re the most wonderful woman in the world.”His blue eyes shone with the hungry desire he mistook for love.He looked as if he had blown in from the sea, for his skin was tanned and his light hair bleached a little by the sun.He took her hand, drawing her out of the slanting sunlight towards the rhododendrons.

“I didn’t, you silly boy.It was John suggested your coming.”She released her hand with an affected effort.“Besides, you overdid it—pretending you had a dance.”

“You could have objected,” he said eagerly, “and didn’t.Oh, you’re too lovely, you’re delicious!”He kissed her suddenly with passion.There was a tiny struggle, in which she yielded too easily, he thought.

“Harry, you’re an idiot!”she cried breathlessly, when he let her go.“I really don’t know how you dare!And John’s your friend.Besides, you know”—she glanced round quickly—“it isn’t safe here.”Her eyes shone happily, her cheeks were flaming.She looked what she was, a pretty, young, lustful animal, false to ideals, true to selfish passion only. “Luckily,” she added, “he trusts me too fully to think anything.”

The young man, worship in his eyes, laughed gaily.“There’s no harm in a kiss,” he said.“You’re a child to him, he never thinks of you as a woman.Anyhow, his head’s full of ships and kings and sealing-wax,” he comforted her, while respecting her sudden instinct which warned him not to touch her again, “and he never sees anything.Why, even at ten yards——”

From twenty yards away a big voice interrupted him, as John Burley came round a corner of the house and across the lawn towards them.The chauffeur, he announced, had left the hampers in the room on the first floor and gone back to the inn.“Let’s take a walk round,” he added, joining them, “and see the garden.Five minutes before sunset we’ll go in and feed.”He laughed.“We must do the thing faithfully, you know, mustn’t we, Nancy?Dark to dark, remember.Come on, Mortimer”—he took the young man’s arm—“a last look round before we go in and hang ourselves from adjoining hooks in the matron’s room!”He reached out his free hand towards his wife.

“Oh, hush, John!”she said quickly.“I don’t like—especially now the dusk is coming.”She shivered, as though it were a genuine little shiver, pursing her lips deliciously as she did so; whereupon he drew her forcibly to him, saying he was sorry, and kissed her exactly where she had been kissed two minutes before, while young Mortimer looked on.“We’ll take care of you between us,” he said.Behind a broad back the pair exchanged a swift but meaning glance, for there was that in his tone which enjoined wariness, and perhaps after all he was not so blind as he appeared.They had their code, these two.“All’s well,” was signalled; “but another time be more careful!”

There still remained some minutes’ sunlight before the huge red ball of fire would sink behind the wooded hills, and the trio, talking idly, a flutter of excitement in two hearts certainly, walked among the roses. It was a perfect evening, windless, perfumed, warm. Headless shadows preceded them gigantically across the lawn as they moved, and one side of the great building lay already dark; bats were flitting, moths darted to and fro above the azalea and rhododendron clumps. The talk turned chiefly on the uses of the mansion as a Convalescent Home, its probable running cost, suitable staff, and so forth.

“Come along,” John Burley said presently, breaking off and turning abruptly, “we must be inside, actually inside, before the sun’s gone.We must fulfil the conditions faithfully,” he repeated, as though fond of the phrase.He was in earnest over everything in life, big or little, once he set his hand to it.

They entered, this incongruous trio of ghost-hunters, no one of them really intent upon the business in hand, and went slowly upstairs to the great room where the hampers lay.Already in the hall it was dark enough for three electric torches to flash usefully and help their steps as they moved with caution, lighting one corner after another.The air inside was chill and damp.“Like an unused museum,” said Mortimer.“I can smell the specimens.”They looked about them, sniffing.“That’s humanity,” declared his host, employer, friend, “with cement and whitewash to flavour it”; and all three laughed as Mrs. Burley said she wished they had picked some roses and brought them in.Her husband was again in front on the broad staircase, Mortimer just behind him, when she called out.“I don’t like being last,” she exclaimed.It’s so black behind me in the hall.I’ll come between you two,” and the sailor took her outstretched hand, squeezing it, as he passed her up.“There’s a figure, remember,” she said hurriedly, turning to gain her husband’s attention, as when she touched wood at home.“A figure is seen; that’s part of the story.The figure of a man.”She gave a tiny shiver of pleasurable, half-imagined alarm as she took his arm.

“I hope we shall see it,” he mentioned prosaically.

“I hope we shan’t,” she replied with emphasis.“It’s only seen before—something happens.”Her husband said nothing, while Mortimer remarked facetiously that it would be a pity if they had their trouble for nothing.“Something can hardly happen to all three of us,” he said lightly, as they entered a large room where the paper-hangers had conveniently left a rough table of bare planks.Mrs. Burley, busy with her own thoughts, began to unpack the sandwiches and wine.Her husband strolled over to the window.He seemed restless.

“So this,” his deep voice startled her, “is where one of us”—he looked round him—“is to——”

“John!”She stopped him sharply, with impatience.“Several times already I’ve begged you.”Her voice rang rather shrill and querulous in the empty room, a new note in it.She was beginning to feel the atmosphere of the place, perhaps.On the sunny lawn it had not touched her, but now, with the fall of night, she was aware of it, as shadow called to shadow and the kingdom of darkness gathered power.Like a great whispering gallery, the whole house listened.

“Upon my word, Nancy,” he said with contrition, as he came and sat down beside her, “I quite forgot again.Only I cannot take it seriously.It’s so utterly unthinkable to me that a man——”

“But why evoke the idea at all?”she insisted in a lowered voice, that snapped despite its faintness.“Men, after all, don’t do such things for nothing.”

“We don’t know everything in the universe, do we?”Mortimer put in, trying clumsily to support her.“All I know just now is that I’m famished and this veal and ham pie is delicious.”He was very busy with his knife and fork.His foot rested lightly on her own beneath the table; he could not keep his eyes off her face; he was continually passing new edibles to her.

“No,” agreed John Burley, “not everything.You’re right there.”

She kicked the younger man gently, flashing a warning with her eyes as well, while her husband, emptying his glass, his head thrown back, looked straight at them over the rim, apparently seeing nothing.They smoked their cigarettes round the table, Burley lighting a big cigar.“Tell us about the figure, Nancy?”he inquired.“At least there’s no harm in that.It’s new to me.I hadn’t heard about a figure.”And she did so willingly, turning her chair sideways from the dangerous, reckless feet.Mortimer could now no longer touch her.“I know very little,” she confessed; “only what the paper said.It’s a man....And he changes.”

“How changes?”asked her husband.“Clothes, you mean, or what?”

Mrs. Burley laughed, as though she was glad to laugh.Then she answered: “According to the story, he shows himself each time to the man——”

“The man who——?”

“Yes, yes, of course.He appears to the man who dies—as himself.”

“H’m,” grunted her husband, naturally puzzled.He stared at her.

“Each time the chap saw his own double”—Mortimer came this time usefully to the rescue—“before he did it.”

Considerable explanation followed, involving much psychic jargon from Mrs. Burley, which fascinated and impressed the sailor, who thought her as wonderful as she was lovely, showing it in his eyes for all to see.John Burley’s attention wandered.He moved over to the window, leaving them to finish the discussion between them; he took no part in it, made no comment even, merely listening idly and watching them with an air of absent-mindedness through the cloud of cigar smoke round his head.He moved from window to window, ensconcing himself in turn in each deep embrasure, examining the fastenings, measuring the thickness of the stonework with his handkerchief. He seemed restless, bored, obviously out of place in this ridiculous expedition. On his big massive face lay a quiet, resigned expression his wife had never seen before. She noticed it now as, the discussion ended, the pair tidied away the débris of dinner, lit the spirit lamp for coffee and laid out a supper which would be very welcome with the dawn. A draught passed through the room, making the papers flutter on the table. Mortimer turned down the smoking lamps with care.

“Wind’s getting up a bit—from the south,” observed Burley from his niche, closing one-half of the casement window as he said it.To do this, he turned his back a moment, fumbling for several seconds with the latch, while Mortimer, noting it, seized his sudden opportunity with the foolish abandon of his age and temperament.Neither he nor his victim perceived that, against the outside darkness, the interior of the room was plainly reflected in the window-pane.One reckless, the other terrified, they snatched the fearful joy, which might, after all, have been lengthened by another full half-minute, for the head they feared, followed by the shoulders, pushed through the side of the casement still open, and remained outside, taking in the night.

“A grand air,” said his deep voice, as the head drew in again, “I’d like to be at sea a night like this.”He left the casement open and came across the room towards them.“Now,” he said cheerfully, arranging a seat for himself, “let’s get comfortable for the night.Mortimer, we expect stories from you without ceasing, until dawn or the ghost arrives.Horrible stories of chains and headless men, remember.Make it a night we shan’t forget in a hurry.”He produced his gust of laughter.

They arranged their chairs, with other chairs to put their feet on, and Mortimer contrived a footstool by means of a hamper for the smallest feet; the air grew thick with tobacco smoke; eyes flashed and answered, watched perhaps as well; ears listened and perhaps grew wise; occasionally, as a window shook, they started and looked round; there were sounds about the house from time to time, when the entering wind, using broken or open windows, set loose objects rattling.

But Mrs. Burley vetoed horrible stories with decision.A big, empty mansion, lonely in the country, and even with the comfort of John Burley and a lover in it, has its atmosphere.Furnished rooms are far less ghostly.This atmosphere now came creeping everywhere, through spacious halls and sighing corridors, silent, invisible, but all-pervading, John Burley alone impervious to it, unaware of its soft attack upon the nerves.It entered possibly with the summer night wind, but possibly it was always there....And Mrs. Burley looked often at her husband, sitting near her at an angle; the light fell on his fine strong face; she felt that, though apparently so calm and quiet, he was really very restless; something about him was a little different; she could not define it; his mouth seemed set as with an effort; he looked, she thought curiously to herself, patient and very dignified; he was rather a dear after all.Why did she think the face inscrutable?Her thoughts wandered vaguely, unease, discomfort among them somewhere, while the heated blood—she had taken her share of wine—seethed in her.

Burley turned to the sailor for more stories.“Sea and wind in them,” he asked.“No horrors, remember!”and Mortimer told a tale about the shortage of rooms at a Welsh seaside place where spare rooms fetched fabulous prices, and one man alone refused to let—a retired captain of a South Seas trader, very poor, a bit crazy apparently.He had two furnished rooms in his house worth twenty guineas a week.The rooms faced south; he kept them full of flowers; but he would not let.An explanation of his unworldly obstinacy was not forthcoming until Mortimer—they fished together—gained his confidence. “The South Wind lives in them,” the old fellow told him. “I keep them free for her.”

“For her?”

“It was on the South Wind my love came to me,” said the other softly; “and it was on the South Wind that she left——”

It was an odd tale to tell in such company, but he told it well.

“Beautiful,” thought Mrs. Burley.Aloud she said a quiet, “Thank you.By ‘left,’ I suppose he meant she died or ran away?”

John Burley looked up with a certain surprise.“We ask for a story,” he said, “and you give us a poem.”He laughed.“You’re in love, Mortimer,” he informed him, “and with my wife probably.”

“Of course I am, sir,” replied the young man gallantly.“A sailor’s heart, you know,” while the face of the woman turned pink, then white.She knew her husband more intimately than Mortimer did, and there was something in his tone, his eyes, his words, she did not like.Harry was an idiot to choose such a tale.An irritated annoyance stirred in her, close upon dislike.“Anyhow, it’s better than horrors,” she said hurriedly.

“Well,” put in her husband, letting forth a minor gust of laughter, “it’s possible, at any rate.Though one’s as crazy as the other.”His meaning was not wholly clear.“If a man really loved,” he added in his blunt fashion, “and was tricked by her, I could almost conceive his——”

“Oh, don’t preach, John, for Heaven’s sake.You’re so dull in the pulpit.”But the interruption only served to emphasize the sentence which, otherwise, might have been passed over.

“Could conceive his finding life so worthless,” persisted the other, “that——” He hesitated.“But there, now, I promised I wouldn’t,” he went on, laughing good-humouredly.Then, suddenly, as though in spite of himself, driven it seemed: “Still, under such conditions, he might show his contempt for human nature and for life by——”

It was a tiny stifled scream that stopped him this time.

“John, I hate, I loathe you, when you talk like that.And you’ve broken your word again.”She was more than petulant; a nervous anger sounded in her voice.It was the way he had said it, looking from them towards the window, that made her quiver.She felt him suddenly as a man; she felt afraid of him.

Her husband made no reply; he rose and looked at his watch, leaning sideways towards the lamp, so that the expression of his face was shaded.“Two o’clock,” he remarked.“I think I’ll take a turn through the house.I may find a workman asleep or something.Anyhow, the light will soon come now.”He laughed; the expression of his face, his tone of voice, relieved her momentarily.He went out.They heard his heavy tread echoing down the carpetless long corridor.

Mortimer began at once. “Did he mean anything?” he asked breathlessly. “He doesn’t love you the least little bit, anyhow. He never did. I do. You’re wasted on him. You belong to me.” The words poured out. He covered her face with kisses. “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” he caught between the kisses.

The sailor released her, staring.“What then?”he whispered.“Do you think he saw us on the lawn?”He paused a moment, as she made no reply.The steps were audible in the distance still.“I know!”he exclaimed suddenly.“It’s the blessed house he feels.That’s what it is.He doesn’t like it.”

A wind sighed through the room, making the papers flutter; something rattled; and Mrs. Burley started.A loose end of rope swinging from the paperhanger’s ladder caught her eye.She shivered slightly.

“He’s different,” she replied in a low voice, nestling very close again, “and so restless.Didn’t you notice what he said just now—that under certain conditions he could understand a man”—she hesitated—“doing it,” she concluded, a sudden drop in her voice. “Harry,” she looked full into his eyes, “that’s not like him. He didn’t say that for nothing.”

“Nonsense! He’s bored to tears, that’s all. And the house is getting on your nerves, too.” He kissed her tenderly. Then, as she responded, he drew her nearer still and held her passionately, mumbling incoherent words, among which “nothing to be afraid of” was distinguishable. Meanwhile, the steps were coming nearer. She pushed him away. “You must behave yourself. I insist. You shall, Harry,” then buried herself in his arms, her face hidden against his neck—only to disentangle herself the next instant and stand clear of him. “I hate you, Harry,” she exclaimed sharply, a look of angry annoyance flashing across her face. “And I hate myself. Why do you treat me——?” She broke off as the steps came closer, patted her hair straight, and stalked over to the open window.

“I believe after all you’re only playing with me,” he said viciously.He stared in surprised disappointment, watching her.“It’s him you really love,” he added jealously.He looked and spoke like a petulant spoilt boy.

She did not turn her head.“He’s always been fair to me, kind and generous.He never blames me for anything.Give me a cigarette and don’t play the stage hero.My nerves are on edge, to tell you the truth.”Her voice jarred harshly, and as he lit her cigarette he noticed that her lips were trembling; his own hand trembled too.He was still holding the match, standing beside her at the window-sill, when the steps crossed the threshold and John Burley came into the room.He went straight up to the table and turned the lamp down.“It was smoking,” he remarked.“Didn’t you see?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” and Mortimer sprang forward, too late to help him.“It was the draught as you pushed the door open.”The big man said, “Ah!”and drew a chair over, facing them. “It’s just the very house,” he told them. “I’ve been through every room on this floor. It will make a splendid Home, with very little alteration, too.” He turned round in his creaking wicker chair and looked up at his wife, who sat swinging her legs and smoking in the window embrasure. “Lives will be saved inside these old walls. It’s a good investment,” he went on, talking rather to himself it seemed. “People will die here, too——”

“Hark!”Mrs. Burley interrupted him.“That noise—what is it?”A faint thudding sound in the corridor or in the adjoining room was audible, making all three look round quickly, listening for a repetition, which did not come.The papers fluttered on the table, the lamps smoked an instant.

“Wind,” observed Burley calmly, “our little friend, the South Wind.Something blown over again, that’s all.”But, curiously, the three of them stood up.“I’ll go and see,” he continued.“Doors and windows are all open to let the paint dry.”Yet he did not move; he stood there watching a white moth that dashed round and round the lamp, flopping heavily now and again upon the bare deal table.

“Let me go, sir,” put in Mortimer eagerly.He was glad of the chance; for the first time he, too, felt uncomfortable.But there was another who, apparently, suffered a discomfort greater than his own and was accordingly even more glad to get away.“I’ll go,” Mrs. Burley announced, with decision.“I’d like to.I haven’t been out of this room since we came.I’m not an atom afraid.”

It was strange that for a moment she did not make a move either; it seemed as if she waited for something.For perhaps fifteen seconds no one stirred or spoke.She knew by the look in her lover’s eyes that he had now become aware of the slight, indefinite change in her husband’s manner, and was alarmed by it.The fear in him woke her contempt; she suddenly despised the youth, and was conscious of a new, strange yearning towards her husband; against her worked nameless pressures, troubling her being. There was an alteration in the room, she thought; something had come in. The trio stood listening to the gentle wind outside, waiting for the sound to be repeated; two careless, passionate young lovers and a man stood waiting, listening, watching in that room; yet it seemed there were five persons altogether and not three, for two guilty consciences stood apart and separate from their owners. John Burley broke the silence.

“Yes, you go, Nancy.Nothing to be afraid of—there.It’s only wind.”He spoke as though he meant it.

Mortimer bit his lips.“I’ll come with you,” he said instantly.He was confused.“Let’s all three go.I don’t think we ought to be separated.”But Mrs. Burley was already at the door.“I insist,” she said, with a forced laugh.“I’ll call if I’m frightened,” while her husband, saying nothing, watched her from the table.

“Take this,” said the sailor, flashing his electric torch as he went over to her.“Two are better than one.”He saw her figure exquisitely silhouetted against the black corridor beyond; it was clear she wanted to go; any nervousness in her was mastered by a stronger emotion still; she was glad to be out of their presence for a bit.He had hoped to snatch a word of explanation in the corridor, but her manner stopped him.Something else stopped him, too.

“First door on the left,” he called out, his voice echoing down the empty length.“That’s the room where the noise came from.Shout if you want us.”

He watched her moving away, the light held steadily in front of her, but she made no answer, and he turned back to see John Burley lighting his cigar at the lamp chimney, his face thrust forward as he did so.He stood a second, watching him, as the lips sucked hard at the cigar to make it draw; the strength of the features was emphasized to sternness.He had meant to stand by the door and listen for the least sound from the adjoining room, but now found his whole attention focused on the face above the lamp. In that minute he realized that Burley had wished—had meant—his wife to go. In that minute also he forgot his love, his shameless, selfish little mistress, his worthless, caddish little self. For John Burley looked up. He straightened slowly, puffing hard and quickly to make sure his cigar was lit, and faced him. Mortimer moved forward into the room, self-conscious, embarrassed, cold.

“Of course it was only wind,” he said lightly, his one desire being to fill the interval while they were alone with commonplaces.He did not wish the other to speak, “Dawn wind, probably.”He glanced at his wrist-watch.“It’s half-past two already, and the sun gets up at a quarter to four.It’s light by now, I expect.The shortest night is never quite dark.”He rambled on confusedly, for the other’s steady, silent stare embarrassed him.A faint sound of Mrs. Burley moving in the next room made him stop a moment.He turned instinctively to the door, eager for an excuse to go.

“That’s nothing,” said Burley, speaking at last and in a firm quiet voice.“Only my wife, glad to be alone—my young and pretty wife.She’s all right.I know her better than you do.Come in and shut the door.”

Mortimer obeyed.He closed the door and came close to the table, facing the other, who at once continued.

“If I thought,” he said, in that quiet deep voice, “that you two were serious”—he uttered his words very slowly, with emphasis, with intense severity—“do you know what I should do?I will tell you, Mortimer.I should like one of us two—you or myself—to remain in this house, dead.”

His teeth gripped his cigar tightly; his hands were clenched; he went on through a half-closed mouth.His eyes blazed steadily.

“I trust her so absolutely—understand me?—that my belief in women, in human beings, would go. And with it the desire to live. Understand me?”

Each word to the young careless fool was a blow in the face, yet it was the softest blow, the flash of a big deep heart, that hurt the most.A dozen answers—denial, explanation, confession, taking all guilt upon himself—crowded his mind, only to be dismissed.He stood motionless and silent, staring hard into the other’s eyes.No word passed his lips; there was no time in any case.It was in this position that Mrs. Burley, entering at that moment, found them.She saw her husband’s face; the other man stood with his back to her.She came in with a little nervous laugh.“A bell-rope swinging in the wind and hitting a sheet of metal before the fireplace,” she informed them.And all three laughed together then, though each laugh had a different sound.“But I hate this house,” she added.“I wish we had never come.”

“The moment there’s light in the sky,” remarked her husband quietly, “we can leave.That’s the contract; let’s see it through.Another half-hour will do it.Sit down, Nancy, and have a bite of something.”He got up and placed a chair for her.“I think I’ll take another look round.”He moved slowly to the door.“I may go out on to the lawn a bit and see what the sky is doing.”

It did not take half a minute to say the words, yet to Mortimer it seemed as though the voice would never end.His mind was confused and troubled.He loathed himself, he loathed the woman through whom he had got into this awkward mess.

The situation had suddenly become extremely painful; he had never imagined such a thing; the man he had thought blind had after all seen everything—known it all along, watched them, waited.And the woman, he was now certain, loved her husband; she had fooled him, Mortimer, all along, amusing herself.

“I’ll come with you, sir.Do let me,” he said suddenly.Mrs. Burley stood pale and uncertain between them.She looked scared. What has happened, she was clearly wondering.

“No, no, Harry”—he called him “Harry” for the first time—“I’ll be back in five minutes at most.My wife mustn’t be alone either.”And he went out.

The young man waited till the footsteps sounded some distance down the corridor, then turned, but he did not move forward; for the first time he let pass unused what he called “an opportunity.”His passion had left him; his love, as he once thought it, was gone.He looked at the pretty woman near him, wondering blankly what he had ever seen there to attract him so wildly.He wished to Heaven he was out of it all.He wished he were dead.John Burley’s words suddenly appalled him.

One thing he saw plainly—she was frightened.This opened his lips.

“What’s the matter?”he asked, and his hushed voice shirked the familiar Christian name.“Did you see anything?”He nodded his head in the direction of the adjoining room.It was the sound of his own voice addressing her coldly that made him abruptly see himself as he really was, but it was her reply, honestly given, in a faint even voice, that told him she saw her own self too with similar clarity.God, he thought, how revealing a tone, a single word can be!

“I saw—nothing.Only I feel uneasy—dear.”That “dear” was a call for help.

“Look here,” he cried, so loud that she held up a warning finger, “I’m—I’ve been a damned fool, a cad!I’m most frightfully ashamed.I’ll do anything—anything to get it right.” He felt cold, naked, his worthlessness laid bare; she felt, he knew, the same. Each revolted suddenly from the other. Yet he knew not quite how or wherefore this great change had thus abruptly come about, especially on her side. He felt that a bigger, deeper emotion than he could understand was working on them, making mere physical relationships seem empty, trivial, cheap and vulgar. His cold increased in face of this utter ignorance.

“Uneasy?”he repeated, perhaps hardly knowing exactly why he said it.“Good Lord, but he can take care of himself——”

“Oh, he is a man,” she interrupted; “yes.”

Steps were heard, firm, heavy steps, coming back along the corridor.It seemed to Mortimer that he had listened to this sound of steps all night, and would listen to them till he died.He crossed to the lamp and lit a cigarette, carefully this time, turning the wick down afterwards.Mrs. Burley also rose, moving over towards the door, away from him.They listened a moment to these firm and heavy steps, the tread of a man, John Burley.A man ...and a philanderer, flashed across Mortimer’s brain like fire, contrasting the two with fierce contempt for himself.The tread became less audible.There was distance in it.It had turned in somewhere.

“There!”she exclaimed in a hushed tone.“He’s gone in.”

“Nonsense!It passed us.He’s going out on to the lawn.”

The pair listened breathlessly for a moment, when the sound of steps came distinctly from the adjoining room, walking across the boards, apparently towards the window.

“There!”she repeated.“He did go in.”Silence of perhaps a minute followed, in which they heard each other’s breathing.“I don’t like his being alone—in there,” Mrs. Burley said in a thin faltering voice, and moved as though to go out.Her hand was already on the knob of the door, when Mortimer stopped her with a violent gesture.

“Don’t!For God’s sake, don’t!”he cried, before she could turn it.He darted forward.As he laid a hand upon her arm a thud was audible through the wall.It was a heavy sound, and this time there was no wind to cause it.

“It’s only that loose swinging thing,” he whispered thickly, a dreadful confusion blotting out clear thought and speech.

“There was no loose swaying thing at all,” she said in a failing voice, then reeled and swayed against him.“I invented that.There was nothing.”As he caught her, staring helplessly, it seemed to him that a face with lifted lids rushed up at him.He saw two terrified eyes in a patch of ghastly white.Her whisper followed, as she sank into his arms. “It’s John.He’s——”

At which instant, with terror at its climax, the sound of steps suddenly became audible once more—the firm and heavy tread of John Burley coming out again into the corridor.Such was their amazement and relief that they neither moved nor spoke.The steps drew nearer.The pair seemed petrified; Mortimer did not remove his arms, nor did Mrs. Burley attempt to release herself.They stared at the door and waited.It was pushed wider the next second, and John Burley stood beside them.He was so close he almost touched them—there in each other’s arms.

“Jack, dear!”cried his wife, with a searching tenderness that made her voice seem strange.

He gazed a second at each in turn.“I’m going out on to the lawn for a moment,” he said quietly.There was no expression on his face; he did not smile, he did not frown; he showed no feeling, no emotion—just looked into their eyes, and then withdrew round the edge of the door before either could utter a word in answer.The door swung to behind him.He was gone.

“He’s going to the lawn.He said so.”It was Mortimer speaking, but his voice shook and stammered.Mrs. Burley had released herself.She stood now by the table, silent, gazing with fixed eyes at nothing, her lips parted, her expression vacant.Again she was aware of an alteration in the room; something had gone out....He watched her a second, uncertain what to say or do.It was the face of a drowned person, occurred to him. Something intangible, yet almost visible stood between them in that narrow space. Something had ended, there before his eyes, definitely ended. The barrier between them rose higher, denser. Through this barrier her words came to him with an odd whispering remoteness.

“Harry....You saw?You noticed?”

“What d’you mean?”he said gruffly.He tried to feel angry, contemptuous, but his breath caught absurdly.

“Harry—he was different.The eyes, the hair, the”—her face grew like death—“the twist in his face——”

“What on earth are you saying?Pull yourself together.”He saw that she was trembling down the whole length of her body, as she leaned against the table for support.His own legs shook.He stared hard at her.

“Altered, Harry ...altered.”Her horrified whisper came at him like a knife.For it was true.He, too, had noticed something about the husband’s appearance that was not quite normal.Yet, even while they talked, they heard him going down the carpetless stairs; the sounds ceased as he crossed the hall; then came the noise of the front door banging, the reverberation even shaking the room a little where they stood.

Mortimer went over to her side.He walked unevenly.

“My dear!For God’s sake—this is sheer nonsense.Don’t let yourself go like this.I’ll put it straight with him—it’s all my fault.”He saw by her face that she did not understand his words; he was saying the wrong thing altogether; her mind was utterly elsewhere.“He’s all right,” he went on hurriedly.“He’s out on the lawn now——”

He broke off at the sight of her.The horror that fastened on her brain plastered her face with deathly whiteness.

“That was not John at all!”she cried, a wail of misery and terror in her voice.She rushed to the window and he followed.To his immense relief a figure moving below was plainly visible. It was John Burley. They saw him in the faint grey of the dawn, as he crossed the lawn, going away from the house. He disappeared.

“There you are!See?”whispered Mortimer reassuringly.“He’ll be back in——” when a sound in the adjoining room, heavier, louder than before, cut appallingly across his words, and Mrs. Burley, with that wailing scream, fell back into his arms. He caught her only just in time, for she stiffened into ice, daft with the uncomprehended terror of it all, and helpless as a child.

“Darling, my darling—oh, God!”He bent, kissing her face wildly.He was utterly distraught.

“Harry!Jack—oh, oh!”she wailed in her anguish.“It took on his likeness.It deceived us ...to give him time.He’s done it.”

She sat up suddenly.“Go,” she said, pointing to the room beyond, then sank fainting, a dead weight in his arms.

He carried her unconscious body to a chair, then entering the adjoining room he flashed his torch upon the body of her husband hanging from a bracket in the wall.He cut it down five minutes too late.


X

THE MAN WHO FOUND OUT
(A NIGHTMARE)

1

Professor Mark Ebor, the scientist, led a double life, and the only persons who knew it were his assistant, Dr. Laidlaw, and his publishers.But a double life need not always be a bad one, and, as Dr. Laidlaw and the gratified publishers well knew, the parallel lives of this particular man were equally good, and indefinitely produced would certainly have ended in a heaven somewhere that can suitably contain such strangely opposite characteristics as his remarkable personality combined.

For Mark Ebor, F.R.S., etc., etc., was that unique combination hardly ever met with in actual life, a man of science and a mystic.

As the first, his name stood in the gallery of the great, and as the second—but there came the mystery!For under the pseudonym of “Pilgrim” (the author of that brilliant series of books that appealed to so many), his identity was as well concealed as that of the anonymous writer of the weather reports in a daily newspaper.Thousands read the sanguine, optimistic, stimulating little books that issued annually from the pen of “Pilgrim,” and thousands bore their daily burdens better for having read; while the Press generally agreed that the author, besides being an incorrigible enthusiast and optimist, was also—a woman; but no one ever succeeded in penetrating the veil of anonymity and discovering that “Pilgrim” and the biologist were one and the same person.

Mark Ebor, as Dr. Laidlaw knew him in his laboratory, was one man; but Mark Ebor, as he sometimes saw him after work was over, with rapt eyes and ecstatic face, discussing the possibilities of “union with God” and the future of the human race, was quite another.

“I have always held, as you know,” he was saying one evening as he sat in the little study beyond the laboratory with his assistant and intimate, “that Vision should play a large part in the life of the awakened man—not to be regarded as infallible, of course, but to be observed and made use of as a guide-post to possibilities——”

“I am aware of your peculiar views, sir,” the young doctor put in deferentially, yet with a certain impatience.

“For Visions come from a region of the consciousness where observation and experiment are out of the question,” pursued the other with enthusiasm, not noticing the interruption, “and, while they should be checked by reason afterwards, they should not be laughed at or ignored.All inspiration, I hold, is of the nature of interior Vision, and all our best knowledge has come—such is my confirmed belief—as a sudden revelation to the brain prepared to receive it——”

“Prepared by hard work first, by concentration, by the closest possible study of ordinary phenomena,” Dr. Laidlaw allowed himself to observe.

“Perhaps,” sighed the other; “but by a process, none the less, of spiritual illumination.The best match in the world will not light a candle unless the wick be first suitably prepared.”

It was Laidlaw’s turn to sigh.He knew so well the impossibility of arguing with his chief when he was in the regions of the mystic, but at the same time the respect he felt for his tremendous attainments was so sincere that he always listened with attention and deference, wondering how far the great man would go and to what end this curious combination of logic and “illumination” would eventually lead him.

“Only last night,” continued the elder man, a sort of light coming into his rugged features, “the vision came to me again—the one that has haunted me at intervals ever since my youth, and that will not be denied.”

Dr. Laidlaw fidgeted in his chair.

“About the Tablets of the Gods, you mean—and that they lie somewhere hidden in the sands,” he said patiently.A sudden gleam of interest came into his face as he turned to catch the professor’s reply.

“And that I am to be the one to find them, to decipher them, and to give the great knowledge to the world——”

“Who will not believe,” laughed Laidlaw shortly, yet interested in spite of his thinly-veiled contempt.

“Because even the keenest minds, in the right sense of the word, are hopelessly—unscientific,” replied the other gently, his face positively aglow with the memory of his vision.“Yet what is more likely,” he continued after a moment’s pause, peering into space with rapt eyes that saw things too wonderful for exact language to describe, “than that there should have been given to man in the first ages of the world some record of the purpose and problem that had been set him to solve?In a word,” he cried, fixing his shining eyes upon the face of his perplexed assistant, “that God’s messengers in the far-off ages should have given to His creatures some full statement of the secret of the world, of the secret of the soul, of the meaning of life and death—the explanation of our being here, and to what great end we are destined in the ultimate fullness of things?”

Dr. Laidlaw sat speechless.These outbursts of mystical enthusiasm he had witnessed before.With any other man he would not have listened to a single sentence, but to Professor Ebor, man of knowledge and profound investigator, he listened with respect, because he regarded this condition as temporary and pathological, and in some sense a reaction from the intense strain of the prolonged mental concentration of many days.

He smiled, with something between sympathy and resignation as he met the other’s rapt gaze.

“But you have said, sir, at other times, that you consider the ultimate secrets to be screened from all possible——”

“The ultimate secrets, yes,” came the unperturbed reply; “but that there lies buried somewhere an indestructible record of the secret meaning of life, originally known to men in the days of their pristine innocence, I am convinced. And, by this strange vision so often vouchsafed to me, I am equally sure that one day it shall be given to me to announce to a weary world this glorious and terrific message.”

And he continued at great length and in glowing language to describe the species of vivid dream that had come to him at intervals since earliest childhood, showing in detail how he discovered these very Tablets of the Gods, and proclaimed their splendid contents—whose precise nature was always, however, withheld from him in the vision—to a patient and suffering humanity.

“The Scrutator, sir, well described ‘Pilgrim’ as the Apostle of Hope,” said the young doctor gently, when he had finished; “and now, if that reviewer could hear you speak and realize from what strange depths comes your simple faith——”

The professor held up his hand, and the smile of a little child broke over his face like sunshine in the morning.

“Half the good my books do would be instantly destroyed,” he said sadly; “they would say that I wrote with my tongue in my cheek.But wait,” he added significantly; “wait till I find these Tablets of the Gods!Wait till I hold the solutions of the old world-problems in my hands!Wait till the light of this new revelation breaks upon confused humanity, and it wakes to find its bravest hopes justified!Ah, then, my dear Laidlaw——”

He broke off suddenly; but the doctor, cleverly guessing the thought in his mind, caught him up immediately.

“Perhaps this very summer,” he said, trying hard to make the suggestion keep pace with honesty; “in your explorations in Assyria—your digging in the remote civilization of what was once Chaldea, you may find—what you dream of——”

The professor held up his hand, and the smile of a fine old face.

“Perhaps,” he murmured softly, “perhaps!”

And the young doctor, thanking the gods of science that his leader’s aberrations were of so harmless a character, went home strong in the certitude of his knowledge of externals, proud that he was able to refer his visions to self-suggestion, and wondering complaisantly whether in his old age he might not after all suffer himself from visitations of the very kind that afflicted his respected chief.

And as he got into bed and thought again of his master’s rugged face, and finely shaped head, and the deep lines traced by years of work and self-discipline, he turned over on his pillow and fell asleep with a sigh that was half of wonder, half of regret.

2

It was in February, nine months later, when Dr. Laidlaw made his way to Charing Cross to meet his chief after his long absence of travel and exploration.The vision about the so-called Tablets of the Gods had meanwhile passed almost entirely from his memory.

There were few people in the train, for the stream of traffic was now running the other way, and he had no difficulty in finding the man he had come to meet.The shock of white hair beneath the low-crowned felt hat was alone enough to distinguish him by easily.

“Here I am at last!”exclaimed the professor, somewhat wearily, clasping his friend’s hand as he listened to the young doctor’s warm greetings and questions. “Here I am—a little older, and much dirtier than when you last saw me!” He glanced down laughingly at his travel-stained garments.

“And much wiser,” said Laidlaw, with a smile, as he bustled about the platform for porters and gave his chief the latest scientific news.

At last they came down to practical considerations.

“And your luggage—where is that?You must have tons of it, I suppose?”said Laidlaw.

“Hardly anything,” Professor Ebor answered.“Nothing, in fact, but what you see.”

“Nothing but this hand-bag?”laughed the other, thinking he was joking.

“And a small portmanteau in the van,” was the quiet reply.“I have no other luggage.”

“You have no other luggage?”repeated Laidlaw, turning sharply to see if he were in earnest.

“Why should I need more?”the professor added simply.

Something in the man’s face, or voice, or manner—the doctor hardly knew which—suddenly struck him as strange.There was a change in him, a change so profound—so little on the surface, that is—that at first he had not become aware of it.For a moment it was as though an utterly alien personality stood before him in that noisy, bustling throng.Here, in all the homely, friendly turmoil of a Charing Cross crowd, a curious feeling of cold passed over his heart, touching his life with icy finger, so that he actually trembled and felt afraid.

He looked up quickly at his friend, his mind working with startled and unwelcome thoughts.

“Only this?”he repeated, indicating the bag.“But where’s all the stuff you went away with?And—have you brought nothing home—no treasures?”

“This is all I have,” the other said briefly.The pale smile that went with the words caused the doctor a second indescribable sensation of uneasiness.Something was very wrong, something was very queer; he wondered now that he had not noticed it sooner.

“The rest follows, of course, by slow freight,” he added tactfully, and as naturally as possible.“But come, sir, you must be tired and in want of food after your long journey.I’ll get a taxi at once, and we can see about the other luggage afterwards.”

It seemed to him he hardly knew quite what he was saying; the change in his friend had come upon him so suddenly and now grew upon him more and more distressingly.Yet he could not make out exactly in what it consisted.A terrible suspicion began to take shape in his mind, troubling him dreadfully.

“I am neither very tired, nor in need of food, thank you,” the professor said quietly.“And this is all I have.There is no luggage to follow.I have brought home nothing—nothing but what you see.”

His words conveyed finality.They got into a taxi, tipped the porter, who had been staring in amazement at the venerable figure of the scientist, and were conveyed slowly and noisily to the house in the north of London where the laboratory was, the scene of their labours of years.

And the whole way Professor Ebor uttered no word, nor did Dr. Laidlaw find the courage to ask a single question.

It was only late that night, before he took his departure, as the two men were standing before the fire in the study—that study where they had discussed so many problems of vital and absorbing interest—that Dr. Laidlaw at last found strength to come to the point with direct questions.The professor had been giving him a superficial and desultory account of his travels, of his journeys by camel, of his encampments among the mountains and in the desert, and of his explorations among the buried temples, and, deeper, into the waste of the pre-historic sands, when suddenly the doctor came to the desired point with a kind of nervous rush, almost like a frightened boy.

“And you found——” he began stammering, looking hard at the other’s dreadfully altered face, from which every line of hope and cheerfulness seemed to have been obliterated as a sponge wipes markings from a slate—“you found——”

“I found,” replied the other, in a solemn voice, and it was the voice of the mystic rather than the man of science—“I found what I went to seek.The vision never once failed me.It led me straight to the place like a star in the heavens.I found—the Tablets of the Gods.”

Dr. Laidlaw caught his breath, and steadied himself on the back of a chair.The words fell like particles of ice upon his heart.For the first time the professor had uttered the well-known phrase without the glow of light and wonder in his face that always accompanied it.

“You have—brought them?”he faltered.

“I have brought them home,” said the other, in a voice with a ring like iron; “and I have—deciphered them.”

Profound despair, the bloom of outer darkness, the dead sound of a hopeless soul freezing in the utter cold of space seemed to fill in the pauses between the brief sentences.A silence followed, during which Dr. Laidlaw saw nothing but the white face before him alternately fade and return.And it was like the face of a dead man.

“They are, alas, indestructible,” he heard the voice continue, with its even, metallic ring.

“Indestructible,” Laidlaw repeated mechanically, hardly knowing what he was saying.

Again a silence of several minutes passed, during which, with a creeping cold about his heart, he stood and stared into the eyes of the man he had known and loved so long—aye, and worshipped, too; the man who had first opened his own eyes when they were blind, and had led him to the gates of knowledge, and no little distance along the difficult path beyond; the man who, in another direction, had passed on the strength of his faith into the hearts of thousands by his books.

“I may see them?”he asked at last, in a low voice he hardly recognized as his own.“You will let me know—their message?”

Professor Ebor kept his eyes fixedly upon his assistant’s face as he answered, with a smile that was more like the grin of death than a living human smile.

“When I am gone,” he whispered; “when I have passed away.Then you shall find them and read the translation I have made.And then, too, in your turn, you must try, with the latest resources of science at your disposal to aid you, to compass their utter destruction.”He paused a moment, and his face grew pale as the face of a corpse.“Until that time,” he added presently, without looking up, “I must ask you not to refer to the subject again—and to keep my confidence meanwhile—ab—so—lute—ly.”

3

A year passed slowly by, and at the end of it Dr. Laidlaw had found it necessary to sever his working connexion with his friend and one-time leader.Professor Ebor was no longer the same man.The light had gone out of his life; the laboratory was closed; he no longer put pen to paper or applied his mind to a single problem.In the short space of a few months he had passed from a hale and hearty man of late middle life to the condition of old age—a man collapsed and on the edge of dissolution.Death, it was plain, lay waiting for him in the shadows of any day—and he knew it.

To describe faithfully the nature of this profound alteration in his character and temperament is not easy, but Dr. Laidlaw summed it up to himself in three words: Loss of HopeThe splendid mental powers remained indeed undimmed, but the incentive to use them—to use them for the help of others—had gone.The character still held to its fine and unselfish habits of years, but the far goal to which they had been the leading strings had faded away. The desire for knowledge—knowledge for its own sake—had died, and the passionate hope which hitherto had animated with tireless energy the heart and brain of this splendidly equipped intellect had suffered total eclipse. The central fires had gone out. Nothing was worth doing, thinking, working for. There was nothing to work for any longer!

The professor’s first step was to recall as many of his books as possible; his second to close his laboratory and stop all research.He gave no explanation, he invited no questions.His whole personality crumbled away, so to speak, till his daily life became a mere mechanical process of clothing the body, feeding the body, keeping it in good health so as to avoid physical discomfort, and, above all, doing nothing that could interfere with sleep.The professor did everything he could to lengthen the hours of sleep, and therefore of forgetfulness.

It was all clear enough to Dr. Laidlaw.A weaker man, he knew, would have sought to lose himself in one form or another of sensual indulgence—sleeping-draughts, drink, the first pleasures that came to hand.Self-destruction would have been the method of a little bolder type; and deliberate evil-doing, poisoning with his awful knowledge all he could, the means of still another kind of man.Mark Ebor was none of these.He held himself under fine control, facing silently and without complaint the terrible facts he honestly believed himself to have been unfortunate enough to discover.Even to his intimate friend and assistant, Dr. Laidlaw, he vouchsafed no word of true explanation or lament.He went straight forward to the end, knowing well that the end was not very far away.

And death came very quietly one day to him, as he was sitting in the arm-chair of the study, directly facing the doors of the laboratory—the doors that no longer opened.Dr. Laidlaw, by happy chance, was with him at the time, and just able to reach his side in response to the sudden painful efforts for breath; just in time, too, to catch the murmured words that fell from the pallid lips like a message from the other side of the grave.

“Read them, if you must; and, if you can—destroy.But”—his voice sank so low that Dr. Laidlaw only just caught the dying syllables—“but—never, never—give them to the world.”

And like a grey bundle of dust loosely gathered up in an old garment the professor sank back into his chair and expired.

But this was only the death of the body.His spirit had died two years before.

4

The estate of the dead man was small and uncomplicated, and Dr. Laidlaw, as sole executor and residuary legatee, had no difficulty in settling it up.A month after the funeral he was sitting alone in his upstairs library, the last sad duties completed, and his mind full of poignant memories and regrets for the loss of a friend he had revered and loved, and to whom his debt was so incalculably great.The last two years, indeed, had been for him terrible.To watch the swift decay of the greatest combination of heart and brain he had ever known, and to realize he was powerless to help, was a source of profound grief to him that would remain to the end of his days.

At the same time an insatiable curiosity possessed him.The study of dementia was, of course, outside his special province as a specialist, but he knew enough of it to understand how small a matter might be the actual cause of how great an illusion, and he had been devoured from the very beginning by a ceaseless and increasing anxiety to know what the professor had found in the sands of “Chaldea,” what these precious Tablets of the Gods might be, and particularly—for this was the real cause that had sapped the man’s sanity and hope—what the inscription was that he had believed to have deciphered thereon.

The curious feature of it all to his own mind was, that whereas his friend had dreamed of finding a message of glorious hope and comfort, he had apparently found (so far as he had found anything intelligible at all, and not invented the whole thing in his dementia) that the secret of the world, and the meaning of life and death, was of so terrible a nature that it robbed the heart of courage and the soul of hope.What, then, could be the contents of the little brown parcel the professor had bequeathed to him with his pregnant dying sentences?

Actually his hand was trembling as he turned to the writing-table and began slowly to unfasten a small old-fashioned desk on which the small gilt initials “M.E.”stood forth as a melancholy memento.He put the key into the lock and half turned it.Then, suddenly, he stopped and looked about him.Was that a sound at the back of the room?It was just as though someone had laughed and then tried to smother the laugh with a cough.A slight shiver ran over him as he stood listening.

“This is absurd,” he said aloud; “too absurd for belief—that I should be so nervous!It’s the effect of curiosity unduly prolonged.”He smiled a little sadly and his eyes wandered to the blue summer sky and the plane trees swaying in the wind below his window.“It’s the reaction,” he continued.“The curiosity of two years to be quenched in a single moment!The nervous tension, of course, must be considerable.”

He turned back to the brown desk and opened it without further delay.His hand was firm now, and he took out the paper parcel that lay inside without a tremor.It was heavy.A moment later there lay on the table before him a couple of weather-worn plaques of grey stone—they looked like stone, although they felt like metal—on which he saw markings of a curious character that might have been the mere tracings of natural forces through the ages, or, equally well, the half-obliterated hieroglyphics cut upon their surface in past centuries by the more or less untutored hand of a common scribe.

He lifted each stone in turn and examined it carefully.It seemed to him that a faint glow of heat passed from the substance into his skin, and he put them down again suddenly, as with a gesture of uneasiness.

“A very clever, or a very imaginative man,” he said to himself, “who could squeeze the secrets of life and death from such broken lines as those!”

Then he turned to a yellow envelope lying beside them in the desk, with the single word on the outside in the writing of the professor—the word Translation

“Now,” he thought, taking it up with a sudden violence to conceal his nervousness, “now for the great solution.Now to learn the meaning of the worlds, and why mankind was made, and why discipline is worth while, and sacrifice and pain the true law of advancement.”

There was the shadow of a sneer in his voice, and yet something in him shivered at the same time.He held the envelope as though weighing it in his hand, his mind pondering many things.Then curiosity won the day, and he suddenly tore it open with the gesture of an actor who tears open a letter on the stage, knowing there is no real writing inside at all.

A page of finely written script in the late scientist’s handwriting lay before him.He read it through from beginning to end, missing no word, uttering each syllable distinctly under his breath as he read.

The pallor of his face grew ghastly as he neared the end.He began to shake all over as with ague.His breath came heavily in gasps.He still gripped the sheet of paper, however, and deliberately, as by an intense effort of will, read it through a second time from beginning to end.And this time, as the last syllable dropped from his lips, the whole face of the man flamed with a sudden and terrible anger.His skin became deep, deep red, and he clenched his teeth. With all the strength of his vigorous soul he was struggling to keep control of himself.

For perhaps five minutes he stood there beside the table without stirring a muscle.He might have been carved out of stone.His eyes were shut, and only the heaving of the chest betrayed the fact that he was a living being.Then, with a strange quietness, he lit a match and applied it to the sheet of paper he held in his hand.The ashes fell slowly about him, piece by piece, and he blew them from the window-sill into the air, his eyes following them as they floated away on the summer wind that breathed so warmly over the world.

He turned back slowly into the room.Although his actions and movements were absolutely steady and controlled, it was clear that he was on the edge of violent action.A hurricane might burst upon the still room any moment.His muscles were tense and rigid.Then, suddenly, he whitened, collapsed, and sank backwards into a chair, like a tumbled bundle of inert matter.He had fainted.

In less than half an hour he recovered consciousness and sat up.As before, he made no sound.Not a syllable passed his lips.He rose quietly and looked about the room.

Then he did a curious thing.

Taking a heavy stick from the rack in the corner he approached the mantlepiece, and with a heavy shattering blow he smashed the clock to pieces.The glass fell in shivering atoms.

“Cease your lying voice for ever,” he said, in a curiously still, even tone. “There is no such thing as time!”

He took the watch from his pocket, swung it round several times by the long gold chain, smashed it into smithereens against the wall with a single blow, and then walked into his laboratory next door, and hung its broken body on the bones of the skeleton in the corner of the room.

“Let one damned mockery hang upon another,” he said smiling oddly. “Delusions, both of you, and cruel as false!”

He slowly moved back to the front room.He stopped opposite the bookcase where stood in a row the “Scriptures of the World,” choicely bound and exquisitely printed, the late professor’s most treasured possession, and next to them several books signed “Pilgrim.”

One by one he took them from the shelf and hurled them through the open window.

“A devil’s dreams!A devil’s foolish dreams!”he cried, with a vicious laugh.

Presently he stopped from sheer exhaustion.He turned his eyes slowly to the wall opposite, where hung a weird array of Eastern swords and daggers, scimitars and spears, the collections of many journeys.He crossed the room and ran his finger along the edge.His mind seemed to waver.

“No,” he muttered presently; “not that way.There are easier and better ways than that.”

He took his hat and passed downstairs into the street.

5

It was five o’clock, and the June sun lay hot upon the pavement.He felt the metal door-knob burn the palm of his hand.

“Ah, Laidlaw, this is well met,” cried a voice at his elbow; “I was in the act of coming to see you.I’ve a case that will interest you, and besides, I remembered that you flavoured your tea with orange leaves!—and I admit——”

It was Alexis Stephen, the great hypnotic doctor.

“I’ve had no tea to-day,” Laidlaw said, in a dazed manner, after staring for a moment as though the other had struck him in the face.A new idea had entered his mind.

“What’s the matter?”asked Dr. Stephen quickly.“Something’s wrong with you.It’s this sudden heat, or overwork.Come, man, let’s go inside.”

A sudden light broke upon the face of the younger man, the light of a heaven-sent inspiration.He looked into his friend’s face, and told a direct lie.

“Odd,” he said, “I myself was just coming to see you. I have something of great importance to test your confidence with. But in your house, please,” as Stephen urged him towards his own door—“in your house. It’s only round the corner, and I—I cannot go back there—to my rooms—till I have told you.”

“I’m your patient—for the moment,” he added stammeringly as soon as they were seated in the privacy of the hypnotist’s sanctum, “and I want—er——”

“My dear Laidlaw,” interrupted the other, in that soothing voice of command which had suggested to many a suffering soul that the cure for its pain lay in the powers of its own reawakened will, “I am always at your service, as you know.You have only to tell me what I can do for you, and I will do it.”He showed every desire to help him out.His manner was indescribably tactful and direct.

Dr. Laidlaw looked up into his face.

“I surrender my will to you,” he said, already calmed by the other’s healing presence, “and I want you to treat me hypnotically—and at once.I want you to suggest to me”—his voice became very tense—“that I shall forget—forget till I die—everything that has occurred to me during the last two hours; till I die, mind,” he added, with solemn emphasis, “till I die.”

He floundered and stammered like a frightened boy.Alexis Stephen looked at him fixedly without speaking.

“And further,” Laidlaw continued, “I want you to ask me no questions. I wish to forget for ever something I have recently discovered—something so terrible and yet so obvious that I can hardly understand why it is not patent to every mind in the world—for I have had a moment of absolute clear vision—of merciless clairvoyance.But I want no one else in the whole world to know what it is—least of all, old friend, yourself.”

He talked in utter confusion, and hardly knew what he was saying.But the pain on his face and the anguish in his voice were an instant passport to the other’s heart.

“Nothing is easier,” replied Dr. Stephen, after a hesitation so slight that the other probably did not even notice it.“Come into my other room where we shall not be disturbed.I can heal you.Your memory of the last two hours shall be wiped out as though it had never been.You can trust me absolutely.”

“I know I can,” Laidlaw said simply, as he followed him in.

6

An hour later they passed back into the front room again.The sun was already behind the houses opposite, and the shadows began to gather.

“I went off easily?”Laidlaw asked.

“You were a little obstinate at first.But though you came in like a lion, you went out like a lamb.I let you sleep a bit afterwards.”

Dr. Stephen kept his eyes rather steadily upon his friend’s face.

“What were you doing by the fire before you came here?”he asked, pausing, in a casual tone, as he lit a cigarette and handed the case to his patient.

“I?Let me see.Oh, I know; I was worrying my way through poor old Ebor’s papers and things.I’m his executor, you know.Then I got weary and came out for a whiff of air.”He spoke lightly and with perfect naturalness.Obviously he was telling the truth.“I prefer specimens to papers,” he laughed cheerily.

“I know, I know,” said Dr. Stephen, holding a lighted match for the cigarette.His face wore an expression of content.The experiment had been a complete success. The memory of the last two hours was wiped out utterly. Laidlaw was already chatting gaily and easily about a dozen other things that interested him. Together they went out into the street, and at his door Dr. Stephen left him with a joke and a wry face that made his friend laugh heartily.

“Don’t dine on the professor’s old papers by mistake,” he cried, as he vanished down the street.

Dr. Laidlaw went up to his study at the top of the house.Half way down he met his housekeeper, Mrs. Fewings.She was flustered and excited, and her face was very red and perspiring.

“There’ve been burglars here,” she cried excitedly, “or something funny!All your things is just anyhow, sir.I found everything all about everywhere!”She was very confused.In this orderly and very precise establishment it was unusual to find a thing out of place.

“Oh, my specimens!”cried the doctor, dashing up the rest of the stairs at top speed.“Have they been touched or——”

He flew to the door of the laboratory.Mrs. Fewings panted up heavily behind him.

“The labatry ain’t been touched,” she explained, breathlessly, “but they smashed the libry clock and they’ve ’ung your gold watch, sir, on the skelinton’s hands.And the books that weren’t no value they flung out er the window just like so much rubbish.They must have been wild drunk, Dr. Laidlaw, sir!”

The young scientist made a hurried examination of the rooms. Nothing of value was missing.He began to wonder what kind of burglars they were.He looked up sharply at Mrs. Fewings standing in the doorway.For a moment he seemed to cast about in his mind for something.

“Odd,” he said at length.“I only left here an hour ago and everything was all right then.”

“Was it, sir?Yes, sir.”She glanced sharply at him. Her room looked out upon the courtyard, and she must have seen the books come crashing down, and also have heard her master leave the house a few minutes later.

“And what’s this rubbish the brutes have left?”he cried, taking up two slabs of worn gray stone, on the writing-table.“Bath brick, or something, I do declare.”

He looked very sharply again at the confused and troubled housekeeper.

“Throw them on the dust heap, Mrs. Fewings, and—and let me know if anything is missing in the house, and I will notify the police this evening.”

When she left the room he went into the laboratory and took his watch off the skeleton’s fingers.His face wore a troubled expression, but after a moment’s thought it cleared again.His memory was a complete blank.

“I suppose I left it on the writing-table when I went out to take the air,” he said.And there was no one present to contradict him.

He crossed to the window and blew carelessly some ashes of burned paper from the sill, and stood watching them as they floated away lazily over the tops of the trees.