The Third Window Part 8

"Beside. How odd," said Antonia.

It was very wearisome. Already they seemed to have sat there for hours.

His fear had not returned; but curiosity no longer consciously sustained him. An insufferable languor, rather, fell upon him and fumes of sleep seemed to coil heavily about his eyelids. He wished he could have a cigarette. He wished the thing would go more quickly and be over.

"T,H,E," had been spelled out and Antonia had reported "the." Miss Latimer's drugged voice had taken up the alphabet again and the table had rapped at "F."

Now the word demanded nearly the whole alphabet for the finding of its letters. "O" came. Then "U."

Antonia sat still. Her eyes were fixed, strangely, devouringly, upon Miss Latimer, whose head, drooping forward, seemed that of a swooning person. "F,O,U,N,T," she spelt.

Not till then did it flash upon him, and it came from Antonia's face rather than from the half-forgotten phrase.

He sprang up, stumbling, nearly falling, catching at Antonia's shoulder to right himself. "Stop the d.a.m.ned thing!" he exclaimed, and he lifted her hands. "It's quoting you!"

Miss Latimer's hands slid into her lap. She sat as if profoundly asleep.

Antonia rose from her place, and at last she looked at him. "Beside the fountain. Beside the fountain. He is there," she said.

He had seized her arms now as if to hold her back more forcibly.

"Nonsense!" he cried loudly. "Miss Latimer is a medium--as you know. Her subconsciousness got at yours. They are the words you used the other morning."

"He is there," she repeated; "and I must see him. He has come for me.

And I must see him."

He held her for a moment longer, measuring his fear by hers. Then, releasing her, "Very well," he said. "I'll come too. We shall see nothing." But he was not sure.

They crossed the room, Antonia swiftly going before him. She paused so that he might come up with her before she drew back the curtain from the third window. The moon was high. The cedar was black against the brightness. They looked down into the flagged garden and saw the empty moonlight. Empty. Nothing was there.

"Are you satisfied?" Bevis asked her. He placed his arm around her waist and a pa.s.sionate triumph filled him. Empty. They were safe.

Motionless within his grasp she stared and stared and found nothing.

Only the fountain was there, a thin spear of wavering light, and the fritillaries, rising like ghosts from their narrow beds.

"Are you satisfied?" Bevis repeated. They seemed measurelessly alone there at the exorcised window, alone, after the menace, as they had never been. He held her closely while they looked out, putting his other arm around her, too, as if for final security. "Will you come away with me to-morrow?" he whispered.

She looked at him. No; it was not triumph yet. Her eyes were empty; but of him, too. They showed him only a blank horror.

"What does it mean?" she said.

Dropping the curtain behind them, he looked round at Miss Latimer. Had she just moved forward? Or for how long had she been leaning like that on the table, her head upon her arms?

"It means her," he said. "She read your fear; she saw it. Have you had enough of it, Tony? Have you done playing with madness?"

"How could she read my fear? I was not thinking of it. I had forgotten it. It was not she. It came from something else." She was shuddering within his arms, and her eyes, with their devouring question, were on the seated figure.

"No, it didn't. From nothing else at all. It came from you and from me--and from her; all of us together. It was some power in her that conveyed it to our senses."

"You, I, and she--and something else," said Antonia. She drew away from him and went toward the fire, but so unsteadily that she had to pause and lay her hand on a chair as she went. At the table she stopped. Miss Latimer still sat fallen forward upon it. Silently Antonia stood looking at her.

"She's asleep, I think," said Bevis. He wished that she were dead. "It has exhausted her."

Antonia put out her hand and touched her. "It never was like this before.--Yes," she said, after a pause, "she is breathing very quietly.

She must be asleep. And I will go now."

She moved away swiftly; but, striding after her, he caught her at the door, seizing her hand on the lock.

"What do you want?" she said, stopping still and looking at him.

He said nothing for a moment. "You mustn't be alone," he then answered.

"What do you mean?" she repeated, and she continued to look at him with a cold gentleness. "I must be alone."

"I must come with you. I make my claim; in spite of what you feel; for your sake."

Still with the cold gentleness, she shook her head. "You don't understand," she said. "You couldn't say that, if you understood.

Good-night."

When she had closed the door behind her, he stood beside it for a long moment, wondering, even still, if he should not follow her. Then he remembered Miss Latimer, sleeping there--or was she sleeping?--behind him. He went back round the screen. She had not stirred and, after looking at her for a moment, he leaned over her, as Antonia had done, and listened. She was breathing slowly and deeply, but now he felt sure that she was not asleep. The pretence was a refuge she had taken against revelations overpowering to her as well as to Antonia. She was not asleep, and should he leave her alone in the now haunted room?

Restless, questioning, he limped up and down; and, going again to the window, he drew the curtain and again looked out. Nothing. Of course nothing. Only the fountain and the white fritillaries, strange, ghostly, pallid, and brooding. Well, they would get through the night. To-morrow should be the end of it. He promised himself, as he turned away, that Antonia should come with him to-morrow.

VI

He heard, as he waked next morning, that it was heavily raining. When he looked out, the trees stood still in grey sheets of straightly falling rain. There was no wind.

The mournful, obliterated scene did not oppress him. The weather was all to the good, he thought. He had always liked a rainy day in the country; and ghosts don't walk in the rain. If Malcolm hadn't come in the moonlight, he wouldn't come now. He felt sunken, exhausted, and rather sick; yet his spirits were not bad. He was fit for the encounter with Antonia.

When he went down to the dark dining-room, darker than ever to-day, he found only one place laid. The maid told him that both the ladies were breakfasting in their rooms. This was unexpected and disconcerting. But he made the best of it, and drank his coffee and ate kedgeree and toast with not too bad an appet.i.te. A little coal fire had been lighted in the library, and he went in there after breakfast and read the papers and wrote some letters, and the morning pa.s.sed not too heavily. But, at luncheon-time, his heart sank, almost to the qualm of the night before, when he found still only one place laid. After half an hour of indecision over his cigarette, he wrote a note and sent it up to Antonia.

"_Dearest Tony_, You don't want to drive me away, I suppose? Because I don't intend to go. When am I to see you? I hope you aren't unwell?

Yours ever, BEVIS."

The answer was brought with the smallest delay.

"_Dearest Bevis_, I'm not ill, only so dreadfully tired. Cicely will give you your tea and dine with you. I will see you to-morrow. Yours ever, TONY."

This consoled him much, though not altogether. And the handwriting puzzled him. He had never seen Tony write like that before. He could infer from the slant of the letters that she had written in bed; but it was in a hand cramped and controlled, as though with surely unnecessary thought and effort.

He was horridly lonely all the afternoon.

Tea was brought into the library and with it came Miss Latimer. She wore rain-dashed tweeds and under her battered black felt hat her hair was beaded with rain. At once he saw that she was altered. It was not that she was more pale than usual; less pale, indeed, for she had a spot of colour on each cheek, but, as if her being had gathered itself together, for some emergency, about its irreducible core of flame, she showed, to his new perception of her, an aspect at once ashen and feverish; and even though in her entrance she was composed, if that were possible, beyond her wont, his subtle sense of change detected in her self-mastery something desperate and distraught.

She did not look at him as she went to the tea-table, drawing off her wet gloves. The table had been placed before the fire, and Bevis, who had risen on her entrance, dropped again into his seat, the capacious leather divan set at right angles to the hearth, its back to the window.