STRANGE OCCURRENCE IN THE TEMPLE
Like most writers, Donald Megbie was of a nervous and sensitive
temperament. Both mental and physical impressions recorded themselves
very rapidly and completely upon his consciousness.
He arrived at the Inner Temple with every nerve in a state of
excitement, such as he had hardly ever known before.
He walked down the dim echoing ways towards the river, his chambers
being situated in the new buildings upon the embankment.
A full moon hung in the sky, brilliant and honey-coloured, attended by
little drifts of amber and sulphur-tinted clouds.
But the journalist saw nothing of the night's splendour. He almost
stumbled up the stairs to the first floor.
A lamp was burning over the door of his rooms, and his name was painted
in white letters upon the oak. He went in and turned on the electric
light. Then, for a moment, he stood still in the hall, a
richly-furnished place surrounded on all sides by doors painted white.
His feet made no sound upon the thick Persian carpet, and the whole flat
was perfectly still.
He felt uneasy, curiously so, as if some calamity was impending. The
exhilaration of his stirring talk with Sir William Gouldesbrough--so
recent, so profoundly moving--had now quite departed. His whole
consciousness was concentrated upon a little box of metal in the pocket
of his overcoat. It seemed alive, he was acutely conscious of its
presence, though his fingers were not touching it.
"By Jove!" he said to himself aloud, "the thing's like an electric
battery. It seems as if actual currents radiated from it." His own voice
sounded odd and unnatural in his ears, and as he hung up his coat and
went into the study with the cigarette-case in his hand, he found
himself wishing that he had not given his man a holiday--he had allowed
him to go to Windsor to spend a night at his mother's house.
A bright fire glowed in the grate of red brick. It shone upon the
book-lined walls, playing cheerily upon the crimson, green and gold of
the bindings, and turned the great silver inkstand upon the
writing-table into a thing of flame.
Everything was cheerful and just as usual.
Megbie put the box down on the table and sank into a huge leather
arm-chair with a sigh of relief and pleasure.
It was good to be back in his own place again, the curtains drawn, the
lamps glowing, the world shut out. He was happier here than anywhere
else, after all! It was here in this beautiful room, with its books and
pictures, its cultured comfort, that the real events of his life took
place, those splendid hours of solitude, when he set down the vivid
experiences of his crowded life with all the skill and power God had
given him, and he himself had cultivated so manfully and well.
Now for it! Tired as his mind was, there lay a time of deep thinking
before it. There was the article for to-morrow to group and arrange. It
was probably the most important piece of work he had ever been called
upon to do. It would startle the world, and it behoved him to put forth
all his energies.
Yet there was something else. He must consider the problem of the
cigarette-case first. It was immediate and disturbing.
How had this thing come into Sir William's possession? What
communication had Gouldesbrough had with Guy Rathbone? That they were
rivals for the hand of Miss Poole Megbie knew quite well. Every one knew
it. It was most unlikely that the two men could have been friends or
even acquaintances. Indeed Megbie was almost certain that Rathbone did
not know Sir William.
Was that little shining toy on the table a message from the past? Or was
it rather instinct with a present meaning?
He took it up again and looked at it curiously.
Immediately that he did so, the sense of agitation and unrest returned
to him with tremendous force.
Megbie was not a superstitious man. But now-a-days we all know so much
more about the non-material things of life that only the most ignorant
people call a man with a belief in the supernatural, superstitious.
Like many another highly educated man of our time, Megbie knew that
there are strange and little-understood forces all round us. When an
ex-Prime Minister is a keen investigator into the psychic, when the
principal of Birmingham University, a leading scientist, writes
constantly in dispute of the mere material aspect of life--the cultured
world follows suit.
Megbie held the cigarette-case in his hand. All the electric lights
burned steadily. The door was closed and there was not a sound in the
flat.
Then, with absolute suddenness, Megbie saw that a man was standing in
front of him, at the other side of the fireplace, not three yards away.
He was a tall man, clean-shaven, with light close-cropped hair and a
rather large face. The eyes were light blue in colour and surrounded by
minute puckers and wrinkles. The nose was aquiline, the mouth clean-cut
and rather full. The man was dressed in a dark blue overcoat, and the
collar and cuffs of the coat were heavily trimmed with astrachan fur.
The room was absolutely still.
Something like a grey mist or curtain descended over Megbie's eyes. It
rolled up, like a curtain, and Megbie saw the man with absolute
clearness and certainty. He could almost have put out his hand and
touched him.
Measured by the mere material standard of time, these events did not
take more than a second, perhaps only a part of a second.
Then the writer became aware that the room was filled with
sound--sudden, loud and menacing. It was a sound as of sudden drums at
midnight, such a sound as the gay dances in Brussels heard on the eve of
Waterloo, when the Assembly sounded in the great square, and the whole
city awoke.
In another moment, Megbie knew what the sound in his ears really was.
His own heart and pulses were racing and beating like the sudden
_traillerie_ of drums.
In a flash he recognized the face and form of his visitor--this outward
form and semblance of a man which had sprung up and grown concrete in
the night! The phantom--if indeed it was a phantom--wore the dress and
aspect of Eustace Charliewood, the well-known man about town who had
killed himself at Brighton a few years ago!
Megbie had never spoken to Charliewood--so far as he could remember--but
he knew him perfectly well by sight, as every one in the West End of
London had known him, and he was a member of one of the clubs to which
the dead man had belonged.
The Thing that stood there, the Thing or Person which had sprung out of
the air, wore the earthly semblance of Eustace Charliewood.
Megbie shouted out loud. A great cry burst from his lips, a cry of
surprise and fear, a challenge of that almost dreadful _curiosity_ that
men experience now and then when they are in the presence of the
inexplicable, the terrible and the unknown.
Then Megbie saw that the face of the Apparition was horribly contorted.
The mouth was opening and shutting rapidly in an agony of appeal. It
seemed as though a torrent of words must be pouring from it, though
there was not a sound of human speech in the large warm room.
Great tears rolled down the large pale cheeks, the brow was wrinkled
with pain. The hands gesticulated and pointed, flickering rapidly hither
and thither without sound. And continually, over and over again, the
hands pointed to the gleaming silver case for cigarettes which Donald
Megbie clasped tightly in his right hand.
The silent agitated Thing, so close--ah, so close! was trying to tell
Donald something.
It was trying to say something about the cigarette-case, it was trying
to tell Megbie something about Guy Rathbone.
And what? What was this fearful message that the agonized Thing was so
eager and so horribly impotent to deliver?
Megbie's voice came to him. It sounded thin and muffled, just like the
voice of a mechanical toy.
What is it? What is it? What are you trying to say to me about poor Guy
Rathbone?
And then, as if it had seen that Megbie was trying to speak to it, but
it could not hear his words, the figure of Eustace Charliewood wrung its
hands, with a gesture which was inexpressibly dreadful, unutterably
painful to see.
Megbie started up. He stepped forward. "Oh, don't, don't!" he said. As
he spoke he dropped the cigarette-case, which, up to the present he had
clutched in a hot wet hand. It fell with a clatter against the
fender--that at any rate was a real noise!
In a moment the mopping, mourning, weeping phantom was gone.
The room was exactly as it had been before, still, warm,
brilliantly-lit. And Donald Megbie stood upon the hearth-rug dazed and
motionless, while a huge and icy hand seemed to creep round his heart
and clutch it with lean, cold fingers.
Donald Megbie stood perfectly motionless for nearly a minute.
Then he knelt down and prayed fervently for help and guidance. At
moments such as this men pray.
Much comforted and refreshed he rose from his knees, and went to one of
the windows that looked out over the Thames.
He pulled aside the heavy green curtain, and saw that a clear colourless
light immediately began to flow and flood into the room.
It was not yet dawn, but that mysterious hour which immediately presages
the dawn had come.
The river was like a livid streak of pewter, the leafless plane-trees of
the embankment seemed like delicate tracery of iron in the faint
half-light. London was sleeping still.
The writer felt very calm and quiet as he turned away from the window
and moved towards his bedroom.
The fire was nearly dead, but he saw the silver cigarette-case upon the
rug and picked it up. He went to bed with the case under his pillow, and
this is what he dreamed--
He saw Guy Rathbone in a position of extreme peril and danger. The
circumstances were not defined, what the actual peril might be was not
revealed. But Megbie knew that Rathbone was communicating with his brain
while he slept. Rathbone was living somewhere. He was captive in the
hands of enemies, he was trying to "get through" to the brain of some
one who could help him.
The journalist only slept for a few short hours. He rose refreshed in
body and with an unalterable conviction in his mind. The events of the
last night were real. No chance or illusion had sent the vision and the
dream, and the innocent-looking cigarette-case that lay upon the table,
and which had come into his hands so strangely, was the pivot upon which
strange events had turned.
The little silver thing was surrounded by as black and impenetrable a
mystery as ever a man had trodden into unawares.
And in the broad daylight, when all that was fantastic and unreal was
banished from thought, Megbie knew quite well towards whom his thoughts
tended, on what remarkable and inscrutable personality his dreadful
suspicions had begun to focus themselves.
He sat down and wrote his article till lunch-time. It was the best thing
he had ever done, he felt, as he gathered the loose sheets together, and
thrust a paper-clip through the corners.
He rose and was about to ring for his man--who had returned at
breakfast-time--when the door opened and the man himself came in.
"Miss Marjorie Poole would like to see you, sir, if you are disengaged,"
he said.
Donald Megbie's face grew quite white with surprise.
Once more he felt the mysterious quickenings of the night before.
"Ask Miss Poole to come in," he said.