Chapter 1

The Obtrusion of Parson Lolly

Highglen House, Aidenn Vale, Radnorshire,
October 3, 1925. 12.30 A.M.

Heaven smile on us if it can! Heaven watch and ward us. This is a
wedding party!

Crofts Pendleton has just brought me the fresh candles and this
writing-book. He wished me God-speed in my endeavours and good-night.

“Good-night!” It sounded like a travesty, or a challenge.

Surely I am the sane one here if anyone is. Yet I cannot name the
curse that lies on my spirit and keeps in my eyes the vision of the
two faces, the golden hair above the black! Never-to-be-forgotten
moment! But I shall not let it unnerve me now, as it seemed to then.

The worst of it is that I am confined in a musty chamber (among
store-rooms!) on the second floor where the web-scribbled ceiling
slants down with the roof and the eaves murmur uncannily just above my
window—a room to make flesh thrill and creep. It looks like a chamber
where murderers may have lurked in bygone days. The narrow, deep-set
window, the old twisty candle-brackets high on the stone wall, the
joined chest with never a nail to fasten its boards, the severely
plain four-square bedstead—they all remind me that I am in a building
centuries old where any or every fiendish deed may have been
performed. I wish that this storey, like the rest of the house, were
equipped with a good up-to-date electric service. The blinking light
of candles is not very comfortable in the gloom.

Nearly a page written, yet nothing pertinent said. This isn’t economy
in words. But now I’ll banish megrims, cease rambling, and come to the
situation.

I have been in Highglen House for a scant six hours. Events have been
moving with intermittent swiftness ever since I came, and they had not
been precisely quiet before my arrival. To-night, though it takes
until dawn, I shall describe as far as I can the happenings of the
last day unless I drift off to sleep in the process. But no, even with
doors locked, sleep is not likely to trouble anyone much to-night, not
after the alarm all of us—I don’t except myself in this case—have just
had.

Moreover, until the nowhere-to-be-found Sir Brooke puts in an
appearance, or some word is heard from him, there will be little rest
for me, with Eve Bartholomew knocking at the door every fifteen
minutes, with, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Bannerlee; are you still up? It’s
_so_ silly of me, of course—Sir Brooke can take care of himself as
well as any of us—better, I’m sure, than most—and yet I’m not so
sure—but it’s really odd, isn’t it? Now I know it’s silly of me—but
I’ve just had another idea. Don’t you think it’s possible that Sir
Brooke took the wrong train? Of course I don’t know whether you can do
that in Shrewsbury in the afternoon—but perhaps he got on the wrong
platform, or something—he never was an expert on getting about, poor
dear—and then he may have gone to sleep and not noticed where he was
going. He has a way of doing that in trains—I know him so well, you
see. Perhaps he didn’t learn until he got off at some scrubby little
place where there’s no telegraph. And then, of course, that explains
why there’s been no message from him.”

I have learned a good deal about Sir Brooke’s character since Mrs. B.
began her raids with a Macbethean knocking and a stage whisper. His
chief trait seems to be utter fickleness of memory, his next that
something, or lack of something, which makes able-bodied women like
Mrs. B. call men “dear” with “poor” prefixed. He is near-sighted,
liable to vertigo philanthropic, and a nuisance.

I said Macbethean knocking—I suppose that proves I’m a little
highly-strung myself. Certainly she caused a warm, douche-like
sensation to pass clear over my scalp to the nape of my neck. We have
had an evening which would make the staidest—

I have a severe mind to draw a line through these pages and begin
anew. This isn’t what I intended at all. My candles are bearded now,
and I haven’t scratched my subject. I repent and reform this very
instant. I am going to try to put down things in order, as they have
unfolded themselves in the course of one of the most amazing days I,
or any human being, ever lived through.

Yet first (before taking my way back to the hilltop where I wandered
this afternoon, never having so much as heard of Highglen House!)
while the spirit is urgent and the clutch of sense is keen, I’ll
transcribe the maddening events of the half-hour just past. Before I
forget—but shall I ever forget?

There they were in the Hall of the Moth, civilizees of assorted
temperaments, ignoring their alarms, submerging their differences, and
levelling their intellects in the fascination of a card game. How
“instructive and amusing” had been my introduction by Pendleton to
each of them in this very Hall scarcely more than an hour before! Save
for Alberta, that luscious wife of his, I had never laid eyes on one
of them previous to this evening.

Straight on my entering the Hall, Pendleton had cavalierly handed me
around from person to person.

First he revealed me to his wife, who set down her cards and rose with
one of the gladdest smiles I have ever seen. She was tall and
gracious. Her face, surrounded by its lustre of close-clipped, wavy
hair, was a joy to look at, being both pearly-clear and firm, like an
exquisite lily-petal of classic marble.

“Alfred! We hear that you have been raiding Aidenn Forest.”

“Please!” I laughed. “I wouldn’t call it anything so forcible as—”

But already Pendleton had presented me to Mrs. Belvoir. I withdrew my
hand from its clasp of Alberta’s and took the cold fingers of the
colourless man’s wife. What thoughts lay behind those brooding lids
and that close-lipped mouth? Her face had a wavering indistinctness,
like a face seen under flowing water.

“How do you do?” she said in that rich voice, gave me one full look
with eyes cold and pale as sapphires, and blinked languidly, as if the
discussion were closed.

Pendleton did not let me linger in perplexity. He gave me up to
Belvoir, who shook hands with a faint smile, saying, “Mr. Bannerlee
and I spelled our names to each other in the hall a little while ago.”

Next was Lord Ludlow. “I’ve seen him,” remarked his Lordship, gazing
at me with a little asperity, crinkling the skin over the high-pitched
bridge of his nose, and sat down, for he was wishful of continuing the
game, or of giving the impression that such was his desire.

I was whisked to the second table and made acquainted with the sole
woman there. Eve Bartholomew (God give her peace!) grasped my hand for
a tug or two, exclaiming hurriedly, “Oh, how do you do?” And she
added, with ill-feigned casualness, “They say you’ve been out on the
hills to-day. You’re sure you haven’t seen Sir Brooke?”

“Quite sure, Mrs. Bartholomew.”

“Or hear of anyone who might be him—he?”

“No.”

Next I was set face-to-face with her partner, the red-faced young man,
who I was not surprised to learn was Sean Cosgrove. His head was
large, his features large, too, without being lubberly. The ruddiness
of his complexion was accentuated by his very black and shining hair,
short and thick. There was something grim and settled in the line of
his jaw, and his blazing black eyes bore out the character of
determination. He shook hands unsmiling, gravely.

“My congratulations,” I offered.

He gave a short bow, looking at the floor. Then, “I have heard of
you,” he said, with not a trace of Irish lilt or accent in his speech.

“Is it possible?”

“You are a searcher for the buried lore of antiquity. Is not that so?”
he asked with a certain lofty seriousness.

“I have done a little research among the British saints, but I hardly
expected my labours—”

“They honour you,” asserted Cosgrove, but my smile of deprecation and
anything further he was about to say were cut off by Pendleton, who
relentlessly kept me on the go, and I faced the next guest.

Two men had been partners at this table; I now found myself staring at
a waxed moustache, and a very elegantly tapered and needle-pointed
specimen of craftsmanship it was. The rest of his face was nothing
remarkable, only a little swarthy-purplish with brandy, and a trifle
stary-eyed. I was not prepossessed with this gentleman, judging him to
be the sort who shows his cleverness to an assorted public in quips to
barmaids and dance-hall musicians. His name, “Mr. Charlton Oxford,”
struck me as strainedly aristocratic, though no fault of his.

“Chawmed.”

“Aesthete,” flashed through my brain, but a query-note raised itself
after the word. “Just plain fool,” I concluded.

“You _are_ being bandied about, aren’t you?”

I was surprised by the fluence and ease of his voice, and his
lightening smile, the big darkish man’s who had been dealing the cards
so ritualistically a few minutes before. He lifted his weight as if it
were that of a bubble, and I saw that indeed he was big, bearing his
torso on stanchion-legs. His mass must have been twice mine.

“Gilbert Maryvale, our complete man of business—iron-castings,” said
Pendleton, with evident gladness that his tale was over.

I saw a quick brightness come and go in Gilbert Maryvale’s eyes at
that description, as if the eyeball had darted out a little from its
station under thatch-brows.

“The winner of the Newman Prize for Lucid Prose, I think, in—let me
see—Nineteen-nineteen? May I congratulate you, Mr. Bannerlee, although
the time is past? I have read your ‘Poets of Enervation’ with
delight.”

“No, Mr. Maryvale, that was not my essay.”

“Surely I haven’t mistaken the name?”

“You have mistaken only the man. ‘Poets of Enervation’ was the
overflow of my cousin Norval’s pen. We were in the University
together. I made a bid for the Newman myself, but was buried. Norval
and I are often mistaken for each other, even in our literary
occupations.”

“No doubt you ran him close,” observed the big man twinkingly.

“I’m afraid not. And now, as Mr. Cosgrove has said, I am devoted to
dustier things, and the prose I give my time to is far from lucid.”

“But you wring lucidity out of it.”

Maryvale resumed his seat, picked up his hand, as did the rest, for in
spite of much invitation I insisted on remaining aloof from the game.
Broad capable cheek-bones, sudden forceful chin he had, but I had an
awareness there was much more than capability and force in this
“complete man of business.” That allusion to the Prize Essay for Lucid
Prose was a poser. Was there another trafficker in iron-castings in
the United Kingdom who had read “Poets of Enervation”?—or one who
would speak of it kindly if he had?

Well, all this was past, half-forgotten in ensuing talk. But now, at
one minute to midnight, a new presence was in the Hall, threatening
the mirth of the Feast! Anger!

For Lord Ludlow and Sean Cosgrove were having a beautiful row.

The Irishman’s gaze was hard and heavy, and seemed to bore into his
antagonist. His face, I noticed, was still suffusing with blood. No
one else ventured to intervene as madly as I had just done, and the
silence when the two men ceased parleying was like the yawn of ocean
after a gigantic wave.

Cosgrove’s bitterness seemed to be growing steadily, like the awful
momentum of a railway train, and I had no doubt that the time was not
many seconds away when he would arise and beard his foe with menacing
hands. Lord Ludlow’s acerbity was like the nervous, sputtering
viciousness of a dynamo. From his eyes seemed to come green electric
sparks, while he shifted his ire from me toward Cosgrove again.

“As for you, sir—”

“I accuse you—”

Hark!

The great Hall of the Moth where we stood was gripped in a new hush,
for the clock in the corner was speaking. I had regarded it curiously
in the evening, a fine old carcase with hood, waist, and base
enveloped in spider’s web marqueterie which obliterated the graining
of the wood. The brass dial was finely engraved, and Cupid’s head
appeared four times delicately chiselled in the spandrils.

Now its chime gave the burden it has tolled for two hundred years, and
midnight was ringing sternly through the House from the Hall of the
Moth. It is a strange clock, devised by some brooding or twisted or
philosophic mind long ago: it strikes, they say, only at midnight,
proclaiming the death and the birth of a day. The tones, vigorous and
vibrant, were mellow with centuries, and their song was poignant.

Like some greybeard councillor’s, the old clock’s voice appeared to
abash the hasty peer and the slowly enraged Irishman. They stared at
each other in grimness for an interim of seconds before his Lordship
shrugged his shoulders, cackled “Humph!” loudly, and turned to the
disrupted card-table. Cosgrove’s clenched hands came down in his lap
relaxed, and he, too, turned back to his table, moving his lips
without utterance.

But the game did not go on. It could hardly have pursued its placid
course again after this very distressing interruption of our peace,
even if the crying sound had not begun from somewhere outside the
Hall.

A low, tremulous, wheedling cry, strangled sometimes into a moan—it
froze every face and turned every eye to stone.

“What’s that?” gulped Eve Bartholomew. . . .

“_Where_ is it?” asked Belvoir, and one could tell that the “stick of
dynamite” had not much breath to spare.

But no one seemed to have the breath or the brain to answer him. My
own belief for a moment was that it proceeded from a plane above our
heads, instead of from somewhere in the long portrait-lined passage
outside the Hall of the Moth. This seemed to be Pendleton’s notion,
too, for with a tense “upstairs!” our host moved to the nearest door
to the corridor. But Alberta Pendleton, dismayed (like all of us, no
doubt) by the thought of the hovering menace that had shadowed
Highglen House, hurried across to her husband and clung to him,
positively clung to him, as I have seen actresses do in plays.

“No, Crofts dear—no, no! Wait—let someone go with you!”

“It’s up there,” declared Pendleton with steel-trap enunciation. “The
damned thing’s come again—up there.”

“That’s why you mustn’t go.”

“It’s up there,” he said doggedly, and tugged to loose himself. But
she took step for step with him, finally turning in his path with her
back against the door.

“We’ll all go,” said Maryvale.

“All the men,” said Cosgrove. “The women lock the doors behind us.”

“Ring for the servants,” said someone shakenly, I think Charlton
Oxford.

“Listen! . . . It’s not there any more. . . . It’s stopped.” We
listened with Mrs. Bartholomew; beyond our taut breathings and the
tick-tack-tock of the carcase in the corner—nothing.

“Ring for the servants, I tell you!”

“Listen! It’s out there.”

“Out there!”

“On the lawn.”

Unmistakably now the low wordless cry came through the half-opened
french window leading to the broad lawns beyond the entrance drive.
Pendleton was across the room in a trice, heedless of Alberta’s
protest; so were Maryvale and Cosgrove and I; so were all of us. We
followed our host through the window-entrance. Out to the darkness we
went from the bright-lit hall in a little throng, and when we were
outside, hearing the lonesome, half-whining cry no more, we recoiled
and huddled a little, like scared titmice.

Hardly a quarter of a minute—prolonged by our bewilderment and
dread—could have gone by, and we stood irresolute upon the fringe of
the lawn, when the cry came toward us again, and now it was followed
by a woman’s voice, different from the cry:

“Oh, come here, come here! I couldn’t call you and leave her alone.”

At the sound of that voice Cosgrove stamped like a raving beast.
“Paula,” he bellowed, and plunged across the obscurity of the lawn.

Following among those whose urgence was less than his, my eyes, which
deviated from straight ahead, caught sight of a spine-stirring thing.
It was motion, but of what? A darker mass on the dark sward. Size,
shape, untellable—but moving, moving to the right, now seeming to
crawl, now leaping—only an amorphous blob of black—moving, and
swiftly, toward the north, moving stilly, with only a small rustling
sound at whiles.

“Look there!” I exclaimed to someone who was near me, catching his
arm. (It was Oxford.)

“Hey! What!”

“That—going off there—a black thing.”

“I don’t see it.” Nor did he want to, I judged.

I guided his arm, extending it in the proper line. “Sight by that.”

But I could not make him see it. He and I then diverged from the
others, not much to his liking, and while we hastened after the
nameless thing, I bethought me that I had changed my electric torch to
these clothes. I hauled it from a side pocket, darted a cone of yellow
ahead of us, cast an elliptic figure of yellow on the grass, but found
no trace of the thing.

Oxford, however, saw an object ahead which made him give a yell. He
stopped petrified, and I followed his look far before us. What we both
then saw was too distant to be the thing I had observed nearby, unless
it were indeed a fiend possessed of superhuman powers. He was crossing
a patch of ground a hundred yards away where the moon streamed down
unscathed by clouds; save for the quick, brief clearing, indeed, we
should not have caught sight of him. Like the hopping, gliding thing
on the lawn, he was black, or robed in black. Contrary to report,
however, if this were Parson Lolly, his figure appeared not to be tall
but distinctly short and squatty. Just then the fringe of a cloud
partly obfuscated the moon, but still that space was clearer than all
around it. While the figure glided toward the trees, it seemed to
heave its shoulders and grow a foot, two feet, taller! Again it
writhed itself into greater height, its long cloak billowing, and
again! Just before gaining the covert of branches, it turned toward us
a moment, twice the height of a man. And its head, if head it had, was
only a pointed thing with unguessable features in the cavern of its
hood. The moon was absolutely overcast when the figure, again wheeling
about, went beneath the trees.

“Do we go after it?” I asked sardonically.

“We—we do not.”

“Righto.”

I heard a gurgle from Oxford’s lips and guessed that his heart must be
rotating in his throat. His shoulder to my touch was quivering, and
while we went to rejoin the rest he staggered as if in drink, although
certainly sober. But his nerves aren’t the best, I shouldn’t wonder,
for there must be regular occasions when he quaffs and quaffs again.

They were a chastened, vaguely murmurous company we discovered almost
beneath the arch of the ancient gate-house with its ivy swarming up
and up, now standing lone, its walls on either side all shorn away.
Only a spurt or two of a match they had to see by, until I came with
my torch and they made way for me. The light on the weather-beaten
stone was like the circle of an old medallion or mellowed painting:
two women, one pallid and lifeless, the other, seated on the grass,
supporting the lovely, unconscious head on her knees.

I supposed instantly that this was the young English-woman, Millicent
Mertoun, who lay wan—the most beautiful creature, I believe, I have
ever seen. Fine breeding, fine spirit were in her stricken face. Cold
loveliness, indeed, with the life gone out of it; eyes set widely
apart, closed beneath straight black eyebrows which were now lifted
apeak with the intensity of strain that showed in the fine lines
across her forehead and the slight drawing-back of her short upper
lip, disclosing her large, evenly graduated teeth. The lashes that
rested upon her cheeks were remarkably long, deep black, and it was
their fragile, almost imperceptible stirring alone that betokened a
possible reawakening to life. Her chin was softly rounded, and in the
disorder of her abundant black hair a delicate ear was exposed. The
suspension of life had withdrawn the blood from the full-contoured
lips, left the cheeks pallid, but while I gazed at the face and the
aristocratic little neck, twined about so by the tumbling length of
masses of black hair, I had a whisper of what beauty the face might
have when expression was restored to it, and the eyes, of unguessable
depth and sweetness, were open.

Of the other woman’s head I caught only the partly averted profile,
while she bent over Miss Mertoun, with one hand clasping together at
the throat the unconscious girl’s loose gown, apparently a garment of
negligée. She, of course, must be the American girl, for it was at the
sound of her voice that Sean Cosgrove had torn across the lawn. There
was dignity, I thought, in her head with its straitly fastened
golden-brown hair, and a lovely tenderness in the solicitude of her
pose.

She was in the midst of speech, relating the adventure which had
brought her and her companion to that plight. She did not look up or
turn her head when the light from my hand broke over her, and all the
while she spoke her watchful gaze was for the features of the girl
whose senses were benumbed. American speech it was, yet the words came
from her lips with a chiselled precision, the tone tending toward
viola depth.

“—blinding, yes, not blinding alone, but maddening. I got her into
looser clothing—she wouldn’t go to bed. She gave no sign of fainting,
but the pain drove her into delirium more than once, and I almost sent
for someone else to help me with her. Then the pain went down, and
suddenly she went to sleep.”

Someone, I think Cosgrove, took a step nearer. “No, keep away, please.
Don’t try to move her yet.”

“But, Paula, how did you ever come—?”

The American girl precluded the end of Alberta Pendleton’s question.
“Of course I am coming to that. She went sound asleep, and I thought
it better not to undress her; so I let her lie on the bed, and I
curled up in the chair by the window. Millicent’s wretched evening had
left me tired out, too, and I don’t remember anything more until when
I woke up to find her awake again and wandering about. There was
enough light from the globe by the mirror to see that she was terribly
distressed, but it was not with pain this time. She was suffering from
some—”

Paula Lebetwood hesitated for a moment, then recommenced. “I think she
was walking in her sleep.”

A note of surprise and pity came from all our mouths.

“Were her eyes open?” asked Mrs. Belvoir.

“Yes, with the darkest vagueness in them.”

“Didn’t she recognize you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What?”

“You see, it all happened so quickly. Only a couple of seconds after I
had roused myself the clock in the Hall of the Moth commenced ringing
midnight. Millicent stopped for a moment and put her hand to her
heart, a queer thing, I thought. ‘It’s his music,’ she said, and made
for the door.”

Renewed exclamations of surprise attested our close-held interest.

“She ran down the hall—”

“But, Paula, did you let her—?”

“She was too strong for me, or perhaps too quick. She twisted away
from me when I tried to prevent her from leaving the room. She almost
flew down the hall; I was afraid she would throw herself down the
stairs, and I caught up with her just in time. We came down—”

“Did she make any sound?” burst in Pendleton.

“Yes, a wailing sound—if there were any words, I couldn’t distinguish
them. Didn’t you hear her? Oh, I was wishing you would. I didn’t dare
to cry out, you know, since she was in that dangerous state.”

“We heard, dear,” said Alberta Pendleton. “But the sound kept
changing, and we were undecided.”

“She had a definite intention to go out, and out of the front entrance
we went whether I would or not. And then, then, while we were far away
on the lawn, we saw the—the—I can’t name it.”

“What was it like?” asked Pendleton, and I recall that all of us
closed in a little further to hear.

“The head, I suppose you’d call it. It was—awful.”

“What—where?”

“Didn’t any of you see it?” she asked in much surprise, yet not for a
second lifting her intent look from Millicent Mertoun’s face. “It was
just after that I noticed that foul reek of blood.”

“Blood!” That was Eve Bartholomew’s cry.

“Oh, haven’t you noticed that either? The smell was so bad, I feared
it would have some ghastly effect on Millicent. I hoped she wouldn’t
notice it, in her condition. And then—we were beyond the gate-house,
coming back toward the mansion, when we saw—the head.”

“Where, for God’s sake?”

“About a hundred feet away from us. I heard something stirring first,
something scuttling, you might say. Then we saw it. Ugh! . . .
Straight out of hell, surely. . . .”

Pendleton’s excitement was getting too much for him, and he broke
through courtesy. “Why do you keep boggling it? Where was it? What did
it do?”

“Crofts!” reprimanded Alberta.

Still with averted face, Paula Lebetwood tried to satisfy our fuming
host. “Where? I don’t know exactly where. Near the gate-house here, I
suppose. It seemed thirty or forty yards away. It was enormous, about
six feet high—oh, fully that. It hung in the air—there wasn’t any body
beneath. And it didn’t do anything, just remained there long enough to
be seen, half a second, perhaps, and disappeared with a sort of sigh.
I thought I heard a sigh. It—well, it simply went out. . . . It was
hideous.”

“What did it look like, dear?” asked Alberta, more to anticipate her
bluff husband than to satisfy curiosity, for her question was
tremulous.

“Hideous—a great round head with red goggle eyes and a hole for a nose
and broken teeth all grinning. It looked alive and staring—worse than
any mask I’ve ever seen—an indecent thing. . . . Oh, don’t think that
it was hallucination—poor Millicent saw it too, though it came and
went like the winking of an eye. It seemed to strike to her heart—and
to mine, for that matter—and she could manage to walk only a few steps
more—on my arm—through the archway before she weakened and collapsed,
and I saw you all there outside the french window, and called.”

She turned her head full toward us for the first time since Oxford and
I had come from our private chase. Such was my position when she
lifted her bent head that I, and only I, saw, on the yellow-lit ground
revealed beyond, a small placard with uncouth letters thereon, large
enough to be read in spite of their unshapeliness:

P A R S O N L O L L Y S e N d s R E G a R D s L o o K O U T
F O R P A R S O N L O L L Y

A storm sprang in my mind, such a whirlwind of spirit as I believe I
have never before experienced, when behind the quick, expectant face
of this American girl, one so tender to her stricken friend, one so
fearless, I saw that obscene sign. She was at first dazzled by the
light in my hand, and her dark blue eyes show wonderfully bright and
wild. Her gold hair then had a fine-spun beauty. And beside the old
gate-tower lay the sneering message of one who affronted both manhood
and womanhood. Anger at the marauder who made beauty his victim, shame
for being duped, fear of being duped again, a craving to bring the
rascal down—these and I know that not what other unleashed gales met
in the cross-roads of my mind. The winds rose to raving, towered into
hurricanes. My soul was dizzy, staggering. I was not rational at that
moment—then the gales went down. I bit my lip hard, stepped around the
two women there, picked up the sign (which had been printed with a
smudgy pencil on a stiff folio sheet) and showed it to the rest.

“Parson Lolly!” exclaimed more than one.

Then Oxford, perhaps intending to be jocose, said,

“‘Beware of Parson Lolly.’ Beggar’s a bit late, it seems to me.”

“At least,” said Crofts Pendleton thickly “it proves he’s human—the
devil!”

“_In some ways human_, perhaps,” amended Maryvale.

“What else, then?”

“Less than human. Consider the birds of the air, my friends. They are,
I suppose, less than human—yet—they—can—fly!”

I gave a stout shrug to rid myself of the disquiet compelled by such a
suggestion.

Anxiety over Miss Mertoun’s exposure to the midnight air prompted
Alberta Pendleton, not for the first time, to urge taking her inside
the Hall. But Miss Lebetwood shook her head in a determined manner,
and with a gesture showed that she believed it was too far to carry
her to the mansion.

“It’s very mild out here now,” she declared. “I know sleep-walking
people. If she were to wake up while she’s being taken, it might have
some long-lasting ill effect. Alberta, please don’t ask again. I want
her to be in my arms when she opens her eyes. You good people don’t
need to stay. I—and Sean—can wait here with her alone.”

But none of us would go. Then while we waited to see a greater sign of
life than the restlessness of those long black lashes on the pallid
cheek, down from the dark north came that ragged, hungry voice I had
heard while alone earlier in the night, a cry that tore at our nerves
and congealed our blood to ice-drops in our veins. A carnal, raving
cry, thinning to a shriek that pierced the ear, swelling to a howl
that loosened the knees.

Of that dire, abysmal wail of mad desire, an overtone must have found
a counterpart in Cosgrove’s spirit. Out of the past of his kind, that
had seen things more clearly in the dusk than in the plain light of
day, that had loved cries of battle and death more than joyful cries,
some strain may have wrung the man’s soul. Terribly to all of us, he
raised his voice in answer to the inhuman call; I, at least, had no
sense of body or of time and place while he burst into a black rain of
words, a torrent of rancour, and defiance against the fiend of the
pit, whose incarnate self he seemed to hear in the voice of the beast.

But a low call from Paula Lebetwood reduced him to a stunning silence.
“I think she’s coming to.”

The unconscious girl’s fingers fluttered briefly; her lips stirred;
her whole body stirred a little. She turned once, twice, restlessly,
and sank, with a little sigh, comfortably and trustingly into the
American girl’s embrace. The trace of a sneer had vanished from her
face, and her breast moved with her breathing.

“She’s sleeping now,” said Alberta Pendleton, and stooped beside the
pair on the grass.

Miss Lebetwood whispered, “Dearest, do you hear me? Do you know me?
It’s Paula. . . . Dearest, do you hear me?” She stroked the pale
forehead free of its last furrow.

“Yes,” came like a shadow of a word from the sleeping girl.

“Dearest, Paula wants you to come with her.” Still she spoke,
soothing, caressing, in the effort to woo her to awaken peacefully.
And the eyes of Millicent Mertoun opened, revealing themselves to be
of a deep blackness that rivalled her errant hair, opened to see only
the smile of love on the face of the American girl bending over her;
and the English girl smiled too.

“Your headache is all gone, isn’t it, dearest?”

“Yes . . . but where . . . is this?”

“Don’t be frightened, dear. It’s the lawn by the gate-house. Now we’re
going inside.”

“But how? . . . I don’t understand . . . these people.”

Miss Lebetwood kissed her cheek, leaned her forehead against it.
“Never mind, dearest. Everyone is a friend, you know. Can you walk?
Here, now.”

The English girl was sitting up; she rubbed her eyes, and sent short,
bewildered looks this way and that, far from comprehending her
situation. Too many of the party were trying to explain everything to
her, and she was beginning to look desperate and unhappy.

“Never mind the silly people,” said Miss Lebetwood sensibly.
“See—we’re just a few steps away from the house—where we’ve been
before, you know. Now we must go in. Sean, help me.”

The Irishman and the women at last began to support the strengthless
girl into the Hall. It must have been a full quarter of an hour since
we had poured out from that vaulted chamber into the enigmatic night
and had heard the call from the gate-house. Now the servants were
roused, summoned by someone, and lanterns were rushing across the lawn
in our direction. I had commenced to go with the party about Miss
Mertoun, desirous of casting a light before their feet. But Pendleton
called me back somewhat peremptorily.

“Bright enough from the Hall for ’em not to stumble by.” Alone in the
great mansion the Hall of the Moth sparkled forth, but the glare from
its massive chandelier was a sure guiding light. “We need you here,”
added our host; “there’s a good deal more of this needs looking at.”

At a phrase from him the lanterns began to swing hither and thither
about the lawn, and we men of the party passed across the drawbridge
under the resounding gate-house arch.

“Is this usually lowered?” I asked.

“Usually. Can be raised for the sport of it. It’s part of the main
drive, you see. It must have been hereabout that they smelt—”

He had no need to say more.

“Great God, what an unholy stench!”

“It _is_ blood!”

“Bottles of it.”

Crofts Pendleton’s voice shook. “I hope—it’s not—anything serious.”

Just then nothing could have struck us as amusing. Lord Ludlow
interjected, “Remember, sir, that there is a missing man—”

“Oh, Lord, look there! My boot!”

Belvoir lifted a foot for inspection, while I turned the eye of the
torch upon it. The leather was stained with a fluid dark and thick.

“My God!” observed Pendleton.

“It’s jolly well begun to clot.”

“Look out, you chaps, you’ll mire yourselves.”

“Show us the place, Bannerlee.”

My torch exposed a patch of darkened grass only a foot or so each way.
There was nothing else about nearby.

Pendleton, half aghast, kneeled on the edge of the patch and studied
it.

“A lot of blood’s been spilled here. It must have soaked down, a
goodish bit of it, but there’s quite a pool about the grass roots.
This spot will have to be guarded to-night. Pity we’ve tramped about.”

A thick voice lifted in excitement from the north of us.

“Oh, Mister Crofts, sir, do come here.”

“What is it, Tenney? Let it stay, whatever it is.”

“Small fear I’ll touch it, sir. It’s one of them old fightin’ irons.”

“A weapon, by heaven!” exclaimed Lord Ludlow.

“Has it blood on it?”

“All sticky dried, sir.”

We were beside the quaking man-servant in a jiffy or two, staring
curiously where lay a small battle-axe, with an inconsiderable curve
of blade. It was a weapon of uncommon slightness. Both metal and wood
were dark with the same viscous fluid, the handle being quite
slobbered with it.

“From the armoury!” cried our host. “The foul devil’s actually been
inside the house! Don’t touch it!”

“That weapon was on the wall at a quarter before eight,” said Lord
Ludlow. (Ah, I knew why he could say that!) “I was passing through to
the library for my glasses.” (There, to be sure, the old rascal
prevaricated.)

“You don’t say!”

“This looks like a serious crime,” remarked his Lordship.

“Serious crime!” Pendleton snorted. “Ludlow, you surprise me. I
thought it was child’s play.”

“I think that by a serious crime our noble friend means a particular
crime—don’t you, Ludlow? Isn’t it the customary euphemism?” asked
Belvoir.

“I mean murder, sir.”

“Should have said so in the first place,” growled Pendleton, and
added, “No need to say it at all.”

“It’s jolly irregular, though,” declared Oxford. “All that blood in
one spot, and this gory thing over here.”

“This was not done according to rule,” rejoined his Lordship.

“It was not carried out as planned,” declared Cosgrove, who had come
out from the mansion again.

“And one, er, detail only needs to be filled in.” That was Belvoir
from somewhere in the darkness behind us. “The, er, _corpus delicti_.”

“Gad, yes—scatter, now—search—all the way to Aidenn Water.”

The cluster of lanterns spread into kaleidoscopic figures again,
although the men seemed none too happy to leave the protection of one
another. But they did not discover any further traces of the marauder
or a vestige of a victim who might have furnished all that blood. My
own light picked up the last find of the night, a round, battered
object on the grass even further north than the blood-stained axe.

“A hat!”

“Can it be Sir Brooke’s?”

Pendleton leaped ahead of us and snatched it from the ground, held it
from him contemptuously.

“I doubt it.”

“I can tell you certainly that it is not Sir Brooke’s!”

One man, at least, jumped at the sound of a female voice among us.
There was Eve Bartholomew, standing tall and tragic, clinging, I
thought, to the last pinch of nerve she possessed.

“I couldn’t help being interested, you know,” she remarked
ingenuously, and gave a little high-keyed laugh. “I just came from the
Hall. But I can assure you that Sir Brooke has nothing to do with this
affair. He would be mad to take any part in it. He would be mad to
wear that rag of a disreputable hat.”

“Yes, Mrs. Bartholomew,” I agreed, “he would. I was about to say,
before you identified the hat as not Sir Brooke’s, that it belongs to
me. I wore it down the slopes of Aidenn Vale.”

“You did!”

“Yes—none too new when I set forth with it this morning, it has
suffered a lifetime’s wear and tear with me to-day. That is the
history of the hat.”

“But where did you see it last?” demanded Pendleton.

“I left it hanging in the entrance-hall. And I saw it on the rack as
you and I came down the stairs before we went in to the Bidding
Feast.”

“By gad, I remember it too,” he assented. “Then if—”

But he never finished that sentence, whose protases and apodoses might
have filled an hour. Quick with surmise, we turned back to the house.

Millicent Mertoun and her retinue had by this time gone upstairs, but
the Hall of the Moth was full of the women-servants of the house,
arrayed in white as if risen from their graves in winding sheets. A
small boy in a nightgown, scared half to death, was blubbering
soulfully, as were some of the women. Blenkinson, the butler, the only
man of them who had not got into clothes and gone forth, was quieting
everyone with loud sibilance.

Pendleton confronted them somewhat nervously.

“There’s been too much racket about nothing,” he asserted. “Miss
Mertoun walked a little in her sleep. That’s really all that’s
happened. You’re all very silly, you see, to take on so. Now get to
bed.”

But when they had departed he turned upon Eve Bartholomew with a face
full of bale. “I can tell you one thing about Sir Brooke. If he
doesn’t show up to-morrow and clear things up a bit, he’ll find no
Bidding Feast when he gets here. I’ll invite ’em to clear out. I’m not
going to have my guests hounded and threatened.”

Mrs. Bartholomew gasped. “Why, you can’t say that Sir Brooke has
anything—”

“I don’t know,” scowled Pendleton, “but I want him—here!”

We are truly blissful marriage celebrators.

. . . . A thought had been germinating in my mind ever since the
moment of my near-madness on the lawn, when the iniquity of Parson
Lolly had so taken hold of me. When we were alone:

“Crofts, I want to prove I’m not crazy. Show me where you want me to
sleep, and give me a book to write in. And keep it quiet, for heaven’s
sake.”

“A book to write in?”

“I have many words within me craving to be penned. Give me a book to
write in, and show me my room.”

Well, this is the room, and these some of the words.

Now to tell of the many things that happened to me to-day before these
many things.