“It makes my head hot,” I said, feeling somehow unworthy for not seeing
anything of interest. But the look in his eyes arrested my attention at
once.
“That sensation of heat is important,” he said significantly.
“It was certainly real, and rather uncomfortable,” I replied, hoping
he would expand and explain. “There was a distinct feeling of
warmth--internal warmth somewhere--oppressive in a sense.”
“That is interesting,” he remarked, putting the letter back in his
pocket, and settling himself in the corner with newspapers and books.
He vouchsafed nothing more, and I knew the uselessness of trying to
make him talk. Following his example I settled likewise with magazines
into my corner. But when I closed my eyes again to look for the
flashing lights and the sensation of heat, I found nothing but the
usual phantasmagoria of the day’s events--faces, scenes, memories,--and
in due course I fell asleep and then saw nothing at all of any kind.
When we left the train, after six hours’ travelling, at a little
wayside station standing without trees in a world of sand and heather,
the late October shadows had already dropped their sombre veil upon the
landscape, and the sun dipped almost out of sight behind the moorland
hills. In a high dogcart, behind a fast horse, we were soon rattling
across the undulating stretches of an open and bleak country, the keen
air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and bracken strong
about us. Bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon, and the
coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told
us the sea lay. Occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the
road among straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to
shift past us with a movement of their own in the gloom, were the only
signs of humanity and civilisation that we saw, until at the end of a
bracing five miles the lights of the lodge gates flared before us and
we plunged into a thick grove of pine trees that concealed the Manor
House up to the moment of actual arrival.
Colonel Wragge himself met us in the hall. He was the typical army
officer who had seen service, real service, and found himself in the
process. He was tall and well built, broad in the shoulders, but lean
as a greyhound, with grave eyes, rather stern, and a moustache turning
grey. I judged him to be about sixty years of age, but his movements
showed a suppleness of strength and agility that contradicted the
years. The face was full of character and resolution, the face of a man
to be depended upon, and the straight grey eyes, it seemed to me, wore
a veil of perplexed anxiety that he made no attempt to disguise. The
whole appearance of the man at once clothed the adventure with gravity
and importance. A matter that gave such a man cause for serious alarm,
I felt, must be something real and of genuine moment.
His speech and manner, as he welcomed us, were like his letter, simple
and sincere. He had a nature as direct and undeviating as a bullet.
Thus, he showed plainly his surprise that Dr. Silence had not come
alone.
“My confidential secretary, Mr. Hubbard,” the doctor said, introducing
me, and the steady gaze and powerful shake of the hand I then
received were well calculated, I remember thinking, to drive home the
impression that here was a man who was not to be trifled with, and
whose perplexity must spring from some very real and tangible cause.
And, quite obviously, he was relieved that we had come. His welcome was
unmistakably genuine.
He led us at once into a room, half library, half smoking-room,
that opened out of the low-ceilinged hall. The Manor House gave the
impression of a rambling and glorified farmhouse, solid, ancient,
comfortable, and wholly unpretentious. And so it was. Only the heat of
the place struck me as unnatural. This room with the blazing fire may
have seemed uncomfortably warm after the long drive through the night
air; yet it seemed to me that the hall itself, and the whole atmosphere
of the house, breathed a warmth that hardly belonged to well-filled
grates or the pipes of hot air and water. It was not the heat of the
greenhouse; it was an oppressive heat that somehow got into the head
and mind. It stirred a curious sense of uneasiness in me, and I caught
myself thinking of the sensation of warmth that had emanated from the
letter in the train.
I heard him thanking Dr. Silence for having come; there was no
preamble, and the exchange of civilities was of the briefest
description. Evidently here was a man who, like my companion, loved
action rather than talk. His manner was straightforward and direct. I
saw him in a flash: puzzled, worried, harassed into a state of alarm by
something he could not comprehend; forced to deal with things he would
have preferred to despise, yet facing it all with dogged seriousness
and making no attempt to conceal that he felt secretly ashamed of his
incompetence.
“So I cannot offer you much entertainment beyond that of my own
company, and the queer business that has been going on here, and is
still going on,” he said, with a slight inclination of the head towards
me by way of including me in his confidence.
“I think, Colonel Wragge,” replied John Silence impressively, “that we
shall none of us find the time hang heavy. I gather we shall have our
hands full.”
The two men looked at one another for the space of some seconds, and
there was an indefinable quality in their silence which for the first
time made me admit a swift question into my mind; and I wondered a
little at my rashness in coming with so little reflection into a big
case of this incalculable doctor. But no answer suggested itself, and
to withdraw was, of course, inconceivable. The gates had closed behind
me now, and the spirit of the adventure was already besieging my mind
with its advance guard of a thousand little hopes and fears.
Explaining that he would wait till after dinner to discuss anything
serious, as no reference was ever made before his sister, he led the
way upstairs and showed us personally to our rooms; and it was just as
I was finishing dressing that a knock came at my door and Dr. Silence
entered.
He was always what is called a serious man, so that even in moments of
comedy you felt he never lost sight of the profound gravity of life,
but as he came across the room to me I caught the expression of his
face and understood in a flash that he was now in his most grave and
earnest mood. He looked almost troubled. I stopped fumbling with my
black tie and stared.
“It _is_ serious,” he said, speaking in a low voice, “more so even than
I imagined. Colonel Wragge’s control over his thoughts concealed a
great deal in my psychometrising of the letter. I looked in to warn you
to keep yourself well in hand--generally speaking.”
“Haunted house?” I asked, conscious of a distinct shiver down my back.
But he smiled gravely at the question.
“Haunted House of Life more likely,” he replied, and a look came into
his eyes which I had only seen there when a human soul was in the toils
and he was thick in the fight of rescue. He was stirred in the deeps.
“Colonel Wragge--or the sister?” I asked hurriedly, for the gong was
sounding.
“Neither directly,” he said from the door. “Something far older,
something very, very remote indeed. This thing has to do with the ages,
unless I am mistaken greatly, the ages on which the mists of memory
have long lain undisturbed.”
He came across the floor very quickly with a finger on his lips,
looking at me with a peculiar searchingness of gaze.
“Are you aware yet of anything--odd here?” he asked in a whisper.
“Anything you cannot quite define, for instance. Tell me, Hubbard, for
I want to know all your impressions. They may help me.”
I shook my head, avoiding his gaze, for there was something in the eyes
that scared me a little. But he was so in earnest that I set my mind
keenly searching.
“Nothing yet,” I replied truthfully, wishing I could confess to a real
emotion; “nothing but the strange heat of the place.”
He gave a little jump forward in my direction.
“The heat again, that’s it!” he exclaimed, as though glad of my
corroboration. “And how would you describe it, perhaps?” he asked
quickly, with a hand on the door knob.
“It doesn’t seem like ordinary physical heat,” I said, casting about in
my thoughts for a definition.
“More a mental heat,” he interrupted, “a glowing of thought and desire,
a sort of feverish warmth of the spirit. Isn’t that it?”