The public bar of the Wheatsheaf Inn was the scene this evening of a
lively discussion. Some thought the old gentleman, arrived that day
from London, to be a new kind of commercial traveler, with designs
upon the gardens of the gentry; others that he was a sort of
scientific collector; others, again, that he was a private detective;
and since there was no evidence at all, good or bad, in support of any
one of these suggestions, a very pretty debate became possible.
A silence fell when his step was heard to pass down the stairs and out
into the street, and another half an hour later when he returned. Then
once more the discussion began.
At ten o'clock the majority of the men moved out into the moonlight to
disperse homewards, as the landlord began to put away the glasses and
glance at the clock. Overhead the lighted blind showed where the
mysterious stranger still kept vigil; and over the way, beyond the
still leafless trees, towered up the twisted chimneys of Mrs. Baxter's
house. No word had been spoken connecting the two, yet one or two of
the men glanced across the way in vague surmise.
Nearly a couple of hours later the landlord himself came to the door
to give the great Mr. Nugent himself, with whom he had been sitting in
the inner parlor, a last good-night, and he too noticed that the
bedroom window was still lighted up. He jerked his finger in the
direction of it.
"A late old party," he said in an undertone.
Mr. Nugent nodded. He was still a little flushed with whisky and with
his previous recountings of what would have happened if his poor
daughter had lived to marry the young squire, of his (Mr. Nugent's)
swift social advancement and its outward evidences, and of the
hobnobbing with the gentry that would have taken place. He looked
reflectively across at the silhouette of the big house, all grey and
silver in the full moon. The landlord followed the direction of his
eyes; and for some reason unknown to them both, the two stood there
silent for a full half-minute. Yet there was nothing exceptional to be
seen.
Immediately before them, across the road, rose the high oak paling
that enclosed the lawn on this side, and the immense limes that
towered, untrimmed and undipped, in delicate soaring filigree against
the peacock sky of night. Behind them showed the chimneys, above the
dusky front of red-brick and the parapet. The moon was not yet full
upon the house, and the windows glimmered only here and there, in
lines and sudden patches where they caught the reflected light.
Yet the two looked at it in silence. They had seen such a sight fifty
times before, for the landlord and the other at least twice a week
spent such an evening together, and usually parted at the door. But
they stood here on this evening and looked.
All was as still as a spring night can be. Unseen and unheard the life
of the earth streamed upwards in twig and blade and leaf, pushing on
to the miracle of the prophet Jonas, to be revealed in wealth of color
and scent and sound a fortnight later. The wind had fallen; the last
doors were shut, and the two figures standing here were as still as
all else. To neither of them occurred even the thinnest shadow of a
suspicion as to the cause that held them here--two plain men--in
silence, staring at an old house--not a thought of any hidden life
beyond that of matter, that life by which most men reckon existence.
For them this was but one more night such as they had known for half a
century. There was a moon. It was fine. That was Mrs. Baxter's house.
This was the village street:--that was the sum of the situation....
Mr. Nugent moved off presently with a brisk air, bidding his friend
good night, and the landlord, after another look, went in. There came
the sound of bolts and bars, the light in the window of the parlor
beside the bar suddenly went out, footsteps creaked upstairs; a door
shut, and all was silence.
Half an hour later a shadow moved across the blind upstairs: an arm
appeared to elongate itself; then, up went the blind, the window
followed it, and a bearded face looked out into the moonlight. Behind
was the table littered with papers, for Mr. Cathcart, laborious even
in the midst of anxiety, had brought down with him for the Sunday a
quantity of business that could not easily wait; and had sat there
patiently docketing, correcting, and writing ever since his interview
in the lane nearly five hours before.
Even now his face seemed serene enough; it jerked softly this way and
that, up the street and down again; then once more settled down to
stare across the road at the grey and silver pile beyond the trees.
Yet even he saw nothing there beyond what the landlord had seen. It
stood there, uncrossed by lights or footsteps or sounds, keeping its
secret well, even from him who knew what it contained.
Yet to the watcher the place was as sinister as a prison. Behind the
solemn walls and the superficial flash of the windows, beneath the
silence and the serenity, lay a life more terrible than death, engaged
now in some drama of which he could not guess the issue. A conflict
was proceeding there, more silent than the silence itself. Two souls
fought for one against a foe of unknown strength and unguessed
possibilities. The servants slept apart, and the old mistress apart,
yet in one of those rooms (and he did not know which) a battle was
locked of which the issue was more stupendous than that of any
struggle with disease. Yet he could do nothing to help, except what he
already did, with his fingers twisting and gripping a string of beads
beneath the window-sill. Such a battle as this must be fought by
picked champions; and since the priesthood in this instance could not
help, a girl's courage and love must take its place.
From the village above the hill came the stroke of a single bell; a
bird in the garden-walk beyond the paling chirped softly to his mate;
then once more silence came down upon the moonlit street, the striped
shadows, the tall house and trees, and the bearded face watching at
the window.
_Chapter XVII_
I
The little inner hall looked very quiet and familiar as Maggie
Deronnais stood on the landing, passing through her last struggle with
herself before the shock of battle. The stairs went straight down,
with the old carpet, up and down which she had gone a thousand times,
with every faint patch and line where it was a little worn at the
edges, visible in the lamplight from overhead; and she stared at
these, standing there silent in her white dress, bare-armed and
bare-necked, with her hair in great coils on her head, as upright as a
lance. Beneath lay the little hall, with the tiger-skin, the
red-papered walls, and a few miscellaneous things--an old cloak of
hers she used on rainy days in the garden, a straw hat of Laurie's,
and a cap or two, hanging on the pegs opposite. In front was the door
to the outer hall, to the left, that of the smoking-room. The house
was perfectly quiet. Dinner had been cleared away already through the
hatch into the kitchen passage, and the servants' quarters were on the
other side of the house. No sound of any kind came from the
smoking-room; not even the faint whiff of tobacco-smoke that had a way
of stealing out when Laurie was smoking really seriously within.
She did not know why, she had stopped there, half-way down the stairs.
She had dined from a tray in her own room, as she had said; and had
been there alone ever since, for the most part at her _prie-Dieu_, in
dead silence, conscious of nothing connected, listening to the
occasional tread of a maid in the hall beneath, passing to and from
the dining-room. There she had tried to face the ordeal that was
coming--the ordeal, at the nature of which even now she only half
guessed, and she had realized nothing, formed no plan, considered no
eventuality. Things were so wholly out of her experience that she had
no process whereby to deal with them. Just two words came over and
over again before her consciousness--Courage and Love.
She looked again at the door.
Laurie was there, she said. Then she questioned herself. Was it
Laurie...?
"He is there, underneath," she whispered to herself softly; "he is
waiting for me to help him." She remembered that she must make that
act of faith. Yet was it Laurie who had looked in at his mother's
door...? Well, the door was locked now. But that secretive visit
seemed to her terrible.
What, then, did she believe?
She had put that question to herself fifty times, and found no answer.
The old man's solution was clear enough now: he believed no less than
that out of that infinitely mysterious void that lies beyond the veils
of sense there had come a Personality, strong, malignant, degraded,
and seeking to degrade, seizing upon this lad's soul, in the disguise
of a dead girl, and desiring to possess it. How fantastic that
sounded! Did she believe it? She did not know. Then there was the
solution of a nervous strain, rising to a climax of insanity. This was
the answer of the average doctor. Did she believe that? Was that
enough to account for the look in the boy's eyes? She did not know.
She understood perfectly that the fact of herself living under
conditions of matter made the second solution the more natural; yet
that did not content her. For her religion informed her emphatically
that discarnate Personalities existed which desired the ruin of human
souls, and, indeed, forbade the practices of spiritualism for this
very reason. Yet there was hardly a Catholic she knew who regarded the
possibility in these days as more than a theoretical one. So she
hesitated, holding her judgment in suspense. One thing only she saw
clearly, and that was that she must act as if she believed the former
solution: she must treat the boy as one obsessed, whether indeed he
were so or not. There was no other manner in which she could
concentrate her force upon the heart of the struggle. If there were no
evil Personality in the affair, it was necessary to assume one.
And still she waited.
There came back to her an old childish memory.
Once, as a child of ten, she had had to undergo a small operation. One
of the nuns had taken her to the doctor's house. When she had
understood that she must come into the next room and have it done, she
had stopped dead. The nun had encouraged her.
"Leave me quite alone, please, Mother, just for one minute. Please
don't speak. I'll come in a minute."
After a minute's waiting, while they looked at her, she had gone
forward, sat down in the chair and behaved quite perfectly. Yes; she
understood that now. It was necessary first to collect forces, to
concentrate energies, to subdue the imagination: after that almost
anything could be borne.
So she stood here now, without even the thought of flight, not
arguing, not reassuring herself, not analyzing anything; but just
gathering strength, screwing the will tight, facing things.
And there was yet another psychological fact that astonished her,
though she was only conscious of it in a parenthetical kind of way,
and that was the strength of her feeling for Laurie himself. It seemed
to her curious, when she considered it, how the horror of that which
lay over the boy seemed, like death itself, to throw out as on a clear
background the best of himself. His figure appeared to her memory as
wholly good and sweet; the shadows on his character seemed absorbed in
the darkness that lay over him; and towards this figure she
experienced a sense of protective love and energy that astonished
her. She desired with all her power to seize and rescue him.
Then she drew a long steady breath, thrust out her strong white hand
to see if the fingers trembled; went down the stairs, and, without
knocking, opened the smoking-room door and went straight in, closing
it behind her. There was a screen to be passed round.
She passed round it.
And he sat there on the couch looking at her.