"Don"t worry about it, old chap. This sort of thing can"t go on indefinitely. You know I saw it this time as well as you. It wasn"t half so active. It won"t go on living much longer, especially after that fall. I heard it hit the flags myself. As soon as you"re a bit stronger we"ll leave this place; not bag and baggage, but with only the clothes on our backs, so that it won"t be able to hide anywhere. We"ll escape it that way. We won"t give any address, and we won"t have any parcels sent after us. Cheer up, Eustace! You"ll be well enough to leave in a day or two. The doctor says I can take you out in a chair to-morrow."
"What have I done?" asked Eustace. "Why does it come after me? I"m no worse than other men. I"m no worse than you, Saunders; you know I"m not. It was you who were at the bottom of that dirty business in San Diego, and that was fifteen years ago."
"It"s not that, of course," said Saunders. "We are in the twentieth century, and even the parsons have dropped the idea of your old sins finding you out. Before you caught the hand in the library it was filled with pure malevolence-to you and all mankind. After you spiked it through with that nail it naturally forgot about other people, and concentrated its attention on you. It was shut up in the safe, you know, for nearly six months. That gives plenty of time for thinking of revenge."
Eustace Borlsover would not leave his room, but he thought that there might be something in Saunders"s suggestion to leave Brighton without notice. He began rapidly to regain his strength.
"We"ll go on the first of September," he said.
The evening of August 31st was oppressively warm. Though at midday the windows had been wide open, they had been shut an hour or so before dusk. Mrs. Prince had long since ceased to wonder at the strange habits of the gentlemen on the first floor. Soon after their arrival she had been told to take down the heavy window curtains in the two bedrooms, and day by day the rooms had seemed to grow more bare. Nothing was left lying about.
"Mr. Borlsover doesn"t like to have any place where dirt can collect," Saunders had said as an excuse. "He likes to see into all the corners of the room."
"Couldn"t I open the window just a little?" he said to Eustace that evening. "We"re simply roasting in here, you know."
"No, leave well alone. We"re not a couple of boarding-school misses fresh from a course of hygiene lectures. Get the chessboard out."
They sat down and played. At ten o"clock Mrs. Prince came to the door with a note. "I am sorry I didn"t bring it before," she said, "but it was left in the letter-box."
"Open it, Saunders, and see if it wants answering."
It was very brief. There was neither address nor signature.
"Will eleven o"clock to-night be suitable for our last appointment?"
"Who is it from?" asked Borlsover.
"It was meant for me," said Saunders. "There"s no answer, Mrs. Prince," and he put the paper into his pocket. "A dunning letter from a tailor; I suppose he must have got wind of our leaving."
It was a clever lie, and Eustace asked no more questions. They went on with their game.
On the landing outside Saunders could hear the grandfather"s clock whispering the seconds, blurting out the quarter-hours.
"Check!" said Eustace. The clock struck eleven. At the same time there was a gentle knocking on the door; it seemed to come from the bottom panel.
"Who"s there?" asked Eustace.
There was no answer.
"Mrs. Prince, is that you?"
"She is up above," said Saunders; "I can hear her walking about the room."
"Then lock the door; bolt it too. Your move, Saunders."
While Saunders sat with his eyes on the chessboard, Eustace walked over to the window and examined the fastenings. He did the same in Saunders"s room and the bathroom. There were no doors between the three rooms, or he would have shut and locked them too.
"Now, Saunders," he said, "don"t stay all night over your move. I"ve had time to smoke one cigarette already. It"s bad to keep an invalid waiting. There"s only one possible thing for you to do. What was that?"
"The ivy blowing against the window. There, it"s your move now, Eustace."
"It wasn"t the ivy, you idiot. It was someone tapping at the window," and he pulled up the blind. On the outer side of the window, clinging to the sash, was the hand.
"What is it that it"s holding?"
"It"s a pocket-knife. It"s going to try to open the window by pushing back the fastener with the blade."
"Well, let it try," said Eustace. "Those fasteners screw down; they can"t be opened that way. Anyhow, we"ll close the shutters. It"s your move, Saunders. I"ve played."
But Saunders found it impossible to fix his attention on the game. He could not understand Eustace, who seemed all at once to have lost his fear. "What do you say to some wine?" he asked. "You seem to be taking things coolly, but I don"t mind confessing that I"m in a blessed funk."
"You"ve no need to be. There"s nothing supernatural about that hand, Saunders. I mean it seems to be governed by the laws of time and s.p.a.ce. It"s not the sort of thing that vanishes into thin air or slides through oaken doors. And since that"s so, I defy it to get in here. We"ll leave the place in the morning. I for one have bottomed the depths of fear. Fill your gla.s.s, man! The windows are all shuttered, the door is locked and bolted. Pledge me my uncle Adrian! Drink, man! What are you waiting for?"
Saunders was standing with his gla.s.s half raised. "It can get in," he said hoa.r.s.ely; "it can get in! We"ve forgotten. There"s the fireplace in my bedroom. It will come down the chimney."
"Quick!" said Eustace, as he rushed into the other room; "we haven"t a minute to lose. What can we do? Light the fire, Saunders. Give me a match, quick!"
"They must be all in the other room. I"ll get them."
"Hurry, man, for goodness" sake! Look in the bookcase! Look in the bathroom! Here, come and stand here; I"ll look."
"Be quick!" shouted Saunders. "I can hear something!"
"Then plug a sheet from your bed up the chimney. No, here"s a match." He had found one at last that had slipped into a crack in the floor.
"Is the fire laid? Good, but it may not burn. I know-the oil from that old reading-lamp and this cotton-wool. Now the match, quick! Pull the sheet away, you fool! We don"t want it now."
There was a great roar from the grate as the flames shot up. Saunders had been a fraction of a second too late with the sheet. The oil had fallen on to it. It, too, was burning.
"The whole place will be on fire!" cried Eustace, as he tried to beat out the flames with a blanket. "It"s no good! I can"t manage it. You must open the door, Saunders, and get help."
Saunders ran to the door and fumbled with the bolts. The key was stiff in the lock.
"Hurry!" shouted Eustace; "the whole place is ablaze!"
The key turned in the lock at last. For half a second Saunders stopped to look back. Afterwards he could never be quite sure as to what he had seen, but at the time he thought that something black and charred was creeping slowly, very slowly, from the ma.s.s of flames towards Eustace Borlsover. For a moment he thought of returning to his friend, but the noise and the smell of the burning sent him running down the pa.s.sage crying, "Fire! Fire!" He rushed to the telephone to summon help, and then back to the bathroom-he should have thought of that before-for water. As he burst open the bedroom door there came a scream of terror which ended suddenly, and then the sound of a heavy fall.
The Ma.s.s of Shadows
By ANATOLE FRANCE
From Mother of Pearl, by Anatole France. Copyright by John Lane Company. By permission of the publishers.
This tale the sacristan of the church of St. Eulalie at Neuville d"Aumont told me, as we sat under the arbor of the White Horse, one fine summer evening, drinking a bottle of old wine to the health of the dead man, now very much at his ease, whom that very morning he had borne to the grave with full honors, beneath a pall powdered with smart silver tears.
"My poor father who is dead" (it is the sacristan who is speaking,) "was in his lifetime a grave-digger. He was of an agreeable disposition, the result, no doubt, of the calling he followed, for it has often been pointed out that people who work in cemeteries are of a jovial turn. Death has no terrors for them; they never give it a thought. I, for instance, monsieur, enter a cemetery at night as little perturbed as though it were the arbor of the White Horse. And if by chance I meet with a ghost, I don"t disturb myself in the least about it, for I reflect that he may just as likely have business of his own to attend to as I. I know the habits of the dead, and I know their character. Indeed, so far as that goes, I know things of which the priests themselves are ignorant. If I were to tell you all I have seen, you would be astounded. But a still tongue makes a wise head, and my father, who, all the same, delighted in spinning a yarn, did not disclose a twentieth part of what he knew. To make up for this he often repeated the same stories, and to my knowledge he told the story of Catherine Fontaine at least a hundred times.
"Catherine Fontaine was an old maid whom he well remembered having seen when he was a mere child. I should not be surprised if there were still, perhaps, three old fellows in the district who could remember having heard folks speak of her, for she was very well known and of excellent reputation, though poor enough. She lived at the corner of the Rue aux Nonnes, in the turret which is still to be seen there, and which formed part of an old half-ruined mansion looking on to the garden of the Ursuline nuns. On that turret can still be traced certain figures and half-obliterated inscriptions. The late cure of St. Eulalie, Monsieur Leva.s.seur, a.s.serted that there are the words in Latin, Love is stronger than death, "which is to be understood," so he would add, "of divine love."