"Yes?"
"I thought I saw Laurie look in, just for an instant. But he looked awful, somehow. It was just one of my little waking visions I"ve told you of, I suppose."
The girl was silent; but the old lady saw her suddenly straighten herself.
"Just ask him whether he did look in, after all. It may just have been the shadow on his face."
"What time was it?"
"About ten past eight, I suppose, dearest. You"ll ask him, won"t you?"
"Yes, Auntie.... I think I"d better lock your door when I go out. You won"t fancy such things then, will you?"
"Very well, dearest. As you think best."
The old voice was becoming sleepy again: and Maggie stood watching a moment or two longer.
"Send Charlotte to me, dearest.... Good night, my pet.... I"m too sleepy again. My love to Laurie."
"Yes, Auntie."
The old lady felt the girl"s warm lips on her forehead. They seemed to linger a little. Then Mrs. Baxter lost herself once more.
IV
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 pa.s.s 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 gla.s.ses 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 hobn.o.bbing 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 peac.o.c.k 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 quant.i.ty 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, pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sage, 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, pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sume 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 rea.s.suring herself, not a.n.a.lyzing anything; but just gathering strength, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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.