She kissed Lady Mary’s cheek impulsively and ran through the corridors and passages to her grandfather’s room.
Left alone Lady Mary continued to sit on the stone ledge in the wall. She clasped her hands on her lap, not together, but one hand laid in the other, palm up, like a bowl, waiting to receive. She gathered her strength, closed her eyes, and concentrated on the familiar long dark tunnel and upon the silver spot of light at its end.
“I give myself up,” she said in a low clear voice. “I am empty. I am waiting — waiting — waiting—”
She lifted her head to listen, she opened her eyes. There was a voice — yes, distinctly there was a voice — no, two voices, somewhere far above her. To the left? No, the right — difficult to tell! They echoed strangely beyond and above and — everywhere. She could not hear the words — not quite. Then she heard almost clearly—“Your Majesty—” She felt suddenly faint. Then it was true. She had not only imagined. It was more than the wind in the ivy clinging to the walls. Others did live here in the castle.
Her head drooped upon her breast. Her hands grew limp and her eyes closed.
… “Grandfather!” Kate called.
There was no answer. She flung open the door. The room was dim in the approaching dawn. She entered and looked behind the curtains at the old-fashioned bed where Wells slept. He was not there.
“Whatever!” Kate muttered to herself. “He can’t have gone to the kitchens so early as this.”
She ran out of the room again and had scarcely gone twenty feet when she heard a loud shout from the direction of the Duke’s room. The bell rang violently and she heard a door flung open.
“What the devil!” John Blayne roared.
“Wait,” she cried. “I’m coming.”
She made haste in the direction of the Duke’s room. John stood there in the doorway. She put back her hair and tied the sash of her dressing gown more tightly about her waist.
“What is it, please?” she asked, and could not but notice how his crimson satin dressing gown became him, and how young he looked, his hair every which way and his face fresh with sleep.
He tried to laugh. “Idiotic — but I saw a sort of floating head going by the window! Somebody is playing jokes.”
“You were dreaming,” she said.
He rubbed his hands through his hair and lifted his eyebrows. “Dreaming? Maybe. I am. Where did you come from, for example?”
“I am looking for my grandfather. Have you seen him?”
“At this hour? No … Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean? You don’t know? Is someone ill?”
“I don’t think so but—”
“You’re ill!”
He stepped forward and put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re shivering — yes, you are! Why are you wandering about at this time of night if you aren’t ill? Or frightened?”
He had her hands now and was chafing them.
“Perhaps I am frightened — a little,” she confessed.
“Which I can fully understand,” he went on, “for I’ll confess now, to you, that at this hour of the night your castle gives me the creeps. I don’t believe a word of what Lady Mary says, mind you — but I have the creeps, nevertheless. I don’t believe I saw a head without a body floating past my window, but I did. How in the devil have you lived here all your life and stayed what you are?”
She was smiling into his eyes, drinking in what he was saying. “How do you know what I am? You never saw me until yesterday!”
“I know a rose when I see one,” he said, half teasing. “And a rose by any other name than yours is not as sweet, Shakespeare notwithstanding.”
She was trembling now and not with cold. She must stop this at once, this impossible talk, this — this absurd way she felt — this melting and dissolving inside herself.
“Oh,” she cried softly, “what am I doing? I’ve forgotten Lady Mary!”
She pulled her hands away and fled.
… She disappeared so quickly that he could almost have believed that she sank through the floor except that it was stone, or slid through an unseen door, except that there was no door. The winding corridors hid her instantly, but he ran after her nevertheless, and found himself in a tangle of passages. It was no use. He could not find her and wandering indefinitely in the dim light before dawn, he could only be lost in the end. Indeed he was already lost. Which was his door? He had left it ajar but a cold wind blew through the corridors and no doors were open.
“What the devil is going on?” he muttered as he went this way and that.
And speaking of devils, he thought, where was Wells? He was reminded of the fellow now by a long, frayed bell rope that hung meaninglessly against a wall. He pulled it and heard a distant high jangle, but no one came. He pulled again, this time with force, and the velvet rope fell from the groined ceiling and wound about his shoulders like a snake. He threw it on the floor in disgust. There was nothing for it but to find his way back by wandering. There must be an end somewhere to this corridor.
He walked for several minutes, then the corridor made a sharp right-angle turn. He paused and looked straight ahead for fifty feet or more. The passage was windowless but at the end he saw a tall motionless figure, vague in the darkness.
“Wells!”
There was no answer. The man stood motionless. He went forward uncertainly until he was near enough to put out his hand. He felt cold steel. The man was a coat of armor — no more, no less! He burst into laughter and at himself.
“I am getting as crazy as you are, my good man,” he muttered. His voice echoed strangely between the stone walls and he tried to laugh again and found he could not.
“An empty shell of a man, that’s what you are,” he said loudly, “and that’s what we’ll all be if we stay here much longer.” He turned and strode back in the direction in which he had come.
He had not gone far, however, when he heard a low deep groan that ended in a choking gasp. He stopped. The noise came from behind a door some twenty feet ahead of him. He went to it and knocked. No one replied. He tried the door softly and it opened. A candle burned on a table beside a heavily curtained bed. From behind the curtains the groan broke forth again, ending in the choking gurgling gasp. He tiptoed across the floor and drew aside the worn red satin curtains. There under a tattered silken coverlet Webster lay sleeping, flat upon his back, his rough beard upthrust. The groan and gurgle gathered in his throat again, ready to explode.
He drew the curtains hastily together upon the hideous sight. Let Webster sleep, if he could — if anyone could in this ghostly dwelling place! He would get back to his own room somehow although he might be more lost than he imagined, in this Jules Verne sort of bewilderment, a relapse of time, a confusion of centuries. Though why Jules Verne, when Einstein himself in this modern age had declared the eternity of time? History repeating itself was a truism, simple enough until Einstein made his portentous discoveries. What if time were indeed a circle, a never-ending merry-go-round, repeating again and again the identical? What if all this were merely a remnant of time, a sort of neutrino, an ash of what had happened long ago?
Stop it, he said to himself. Get hold of yourself, stop these antics of your brain! This was the sort of thinking a brain did at night when the conscious will was sleeping at the controls. Nightmares!
He broke off his self-admonishment. He saw beneath his feet a broad white line encircling Webster’s bed. He took up the candle and followed it. It was a line drawn unevenly upon the ancient floor, a chalk line, marked here and there by crude crosses. He walked its length and then returned to put the candle on the table. A chalk line — and crosses! Where had he heard that ancient superstition? In Ireland, of course, in the last summer of his mother’s life! She had wanted to see the green isle again and he had taken her to County Wicklow and they had spent a fortnight there, walking over the dark hills and picnicking beside a deep tarn in some lovely valley. A farmer’s wife had told him one night in a thatched-roofed farmhouse where he and his mother had taken shelter in a sudden storm, that though spirits walked the hillside and even came into the house, “they can’t touch you, sir, if you’ll but draw a white chalk line around the bed you sleep on, and put in plenty of crosses.”