Aspasia awoke from a heavy dreamless sleep with a sense of panic. Her heart was beating violently. She sat up in bed, listening eagerly, through the hammering of her pulses.
It is the nature of such old haunted places as Saltwoods that they impress you with their stillness by day and their stirring by night. Then the old boards creak as if to the tread of forgotten steps; old echoes answer to voices long silent; there is a rustle down the narrow passages as of garments the very texture of which is forgotten; there are sighs in the night airs, and little cold blasts wandering round corners, even on the stillest night. You tell yourself that it is the crumbling brick and wood work setting ever a little more towards destruction; but it seems rather as if the years-laden habitation had acquired a sentient being of its own; that when, like the aged, it lies wakeful in the night, the memories of the past come back to it; that it laments, with sighs, lost life, lost mirth, lost dignity.
But Baby would at no time, have had, in her practical young mind, room for such fancies as these; and now, the very real well-grounded fears which were strong upon her lent every stealthy creak about her a hideous material significance, every sighing breath the echo of a present tragedy.
Supposing Muhammed were really to creep into the Runkle's room—Sir Arthur might not have locked his door. It is all very well, in a fit of rage, to wish an irritating relative disposed of; it is a very different thing to wake in the middle of the night and think of the murderer at his work. Poor old Runkle...! Or, suppose Lady Gerardine were to do herself a mischief, were to ... there are ideas to which one cannot bear to give concrete shape, even in one's own imagination.
The girl lit a candle, sprang out of bed, and huddled on a dressing-gown. How foolish, how selfish, how wicked she had been to leave the fevered woman alone with Jani—Jani, the most helpless and unreasoning of human beings!
The old house might have been in league with the evil passions it housed that night, so loudly did it seem to protest against Aspasia's interference.
Heard any one ever door so groan on its hinges, ever boards so complain under tread of light foot? What menacing shadows leapt from every corner! It was enough to scare any less courageous heart from its purpose. But on went Baby, down the little stairs, past Lady Aspasia's door (the creature snored—it was quite what Baby expected of her); round the corner of the passage, past Sir Arthur's little room. What a dead silence in there! She was afraid to listen to the suggestion, and scurried by, past M. Chatelard's room. Her aunt's door at last in sight. Baby stopped with a great start, her heart in her mouth, the candle almost dropping from her grasp—what was that black thing lying at such sinister length across the threshold? A heap of clothes? ... Jani? No—diminutive Jani could never spread to such bulk. Then what?
The thing moved slowly, reared itself to its knees, turned a wild black head, a wild black-bearded face, fierce eyes, towards Aspasia; then rose, with a spring.
Aspasia, in her mind, flung the light from her and ran into the darkness, shrieking: "The Panther, the Panther!" But Aspasia, in the flesh, stood rooted to the spot, in a paralysis of terror, unable to move a muscle.
The thing came close to her on its noiseless feet. And she saw that the panther was Muhammed. This was no surprise; she had known it.
But, under his dishevelled locks, from out of the barbaric wings of his beard, the savage being's face was gazing upon her—as it gradually filtered to her panic-stricken mind—with no sort of savageness; rather, indeed, a gentle, a pathetic anxiety.
"Miss Cuningham..." said the Pathan.
To her bewildered ears it was the voice of no Pathan that spoke, but the high-bred accents of an English gentleman. The girl rubbed her eyes with her left hand. ("Wake up, Aspasia, wake up. You are still asleep, and in the middle of some ridiculous dream!")
"Miss Cuningham," pursued the dream-creature that was panther and Pathan, and yet looked and spoke like one of her own sober kin; "are you going to her?"
"I was going," answered the girl, abandoning herself to her dream. Then she began suddenly to tremble, and with knees giving way beneath her, advanced uncertainly towards the door, all her energies bent on reaching safety within. But he, with an outflung gesture of prayer, cried to her, in that low English voice that was so amazing, yet which, in spite of its incongruity, soothed her frantic fear.
"In pity, stop one second. Do you hear how she is crying within? Tell me, what is her trouble?" And, as Baby fell from amazement to amazement, as even in dreams one falls, and could find no thought, much less words for answer, he went on in his pleading undertone: "Is the old man not good to her? Oh, do not stop to wonder why I should ask you! Answer me, in the name of God, as one fellow-creature to another: Whom, or what, is she mourning for?"
Aspasia saw how, between the sweep of his moustache and the great fans of his beard, the man's lips quivered as he spoke: she felt his haggard eyes imploring, compelling; and she made answer, as she was bidden, "as one fellow-creature to another," with a solemnity which she herself was scarce aware of:
"She is mourning for her dead husband."
When she had spoken, Baby had a vision so swift that she had hardly time to seize it, of Muhammed's eyes lightening upon her with an extraordinary illumination. The next instant he had dropped his lids. Then he turned and, running, left her; and she heard the crazy boards creak, the stairs groan under his flying unshod feet.
Utter chaos possessed her thoughts as she turned the handle of the locked door and gently knocked, calling upon Jani; the fantastic terrors of her inexplicable experience, and the sounds of Rosamond's moans and sobs within driving her to urgency. As still in a sort of nightmare she found herself repeating her own phrase to the Pathan, and an odd speech of her aunt's, as if in answer to it: "She is mourning for her dead husband.... He is not really dead, Baby...."
Here an idea so extraordinary, so utterly impossible, suddenly tapped at her brain that, added to all the rest, a new fear of her own self came upon her.
"I think I am going mad, too," said the poor child to herself. "Jani, Jani," she cried louder, "let me in!"
And Jani, hearing, did so—this time, it seemed, with alacrity.
The candles on Lady Gerardine's dressing-table had been lit, and the portrait on the panel was in full illumination.
Rosamond was crouching in bed, her head on her knees, her hair in long strands about her. She did not move upon Aspasia's entrance; she did not seem to have heard it. Now and again a moan escaped her.
"Why did you not call me?" cried the girl, turning angrily upon Jani.
The ayah shook her head, her face was wrinkled into a thousand lines of dismay. She made a helpless gesture with both hands.
"Has she been like that all night?" asked Aspasia.
"All night," answered Jani, adding apologetically: "quieter now."
"Quiet!" echoed Baby.
Quiet! It was indeed this very quietude of suffering that terrified her. From such an extremity of pain she felt herself separated by all her own young vitality as from death itself. Here the science of her heart failed her. This inert woman, moaning like a suffering animal, seemed something horribly different from her beautiful aunt. Baby dared not touch her; she could not even find a word for her.
"Speak to her, you, Jani," she whispered.
Jani obediently approached the bed and, bending towards her mistress, poured forth a flood of Hindustani. Failing to make an impression, she seized the clasped hands in her claw-like grip and shook them.
Then Rosamond raised her head and turned a vacant look. Her face was drawn beyond recognition; Baby saw a slow tear gather and roll down into the open mouth. Anything more forlorn, more hopeless, the girl thought she had never beheld. As the golden head drooped once more into its broken attitude, Baby, her own tears springing scalding to her eyes, turned determinedly to Jani:
"I will get old Mary," she cried; and, seizing her candle again, pattered from the room, all her previous terrors swallowed up in the single huge anxiety. Instinctively Aspasia felt that if Lady Gerardine's reason, nay, her life itself, were to be saved, help must be forthcoming. And the only h............