She sighed. Her uncle was recounting that old story, which she had heard so many times, about how his dead fiancée had been restored to him in innumerable séances. Her name was Beatrice. “My angel Beatrice.” She had been killed in a hunting accident at nineteen.
How terrible to be dead so young, Sacha thought, suddenly. Poor Beatrice, with her love all young and wonderful round about her! Her grave was in the churchyard at Redden. It had a white marble cross at the head of it. There was an inscription, too, telling how she had died. The thought came, swift and unbidden, that perhaps her uncle if he recovered from this illness, would erect a cross on her grave also.
But no; that would scarcely be possible in her case. Sacha shuddered. People who took their own lives, she knew, were not buried within the churchyard walls. There had been the sad case of the gamekeeper at Redden Hall, Barrington’s keeper, whose death was really due to a broken heart because one of the village girls jilted him. If only men and women could escape from their feelings!
Lord Templewood began to speak again. Sacha broke off her own thoughts and listened, because his voice sounded gentler than usual. He was talking about Beatrice still! Oh, dear, could he not leave her to be dead in peace!
“She was everything to me — everything — everything. Her death — for so I called it in those darkest days — left me utterly desolate. Believe me, doctor, I had serious thoughts of taking my own life.”
His voice faded away. Sacha moved a few steps nearer to the couch. All her faculties, suddenly, were strained to breathless attention.
“As I know now,” Lord Templewood continued, “I should have defeated my own purpose if I had yielded to that impulse. It is a law of the spirit world that each of us must abide the will of Our Father. There was revealed to me a better way—”
He began to cough. Sacha came to him and rearranged the pillows. She glanced at his pale, wearied face, as she did so. She remained standing very close to the couch on which he lay, when she had completed her task, so that she might not miss a word.
“You mean your study of spiritualism?” Dr. Hailey asked.
“Yes.” Lord Templewood raised his thin hand in a gesture almost of benediction. “Ninon has given me back all, and more than all, that I have lost. Not one of the other mediums possesses a tithe of her divine gift. I know, for I have been seeking my angel Beatrice for more than twenty years. Only in this last year have I come as near to her as we were near to each other in our earthly relationship.”
Again his voice weakened to silence. Sacha glanced at Ninon and saw that her expression of inscrutability had not changed. Nor had Dick’s expression changed. She thought that he had been looking at her, because his eyes fell when she raised her head.
Could it be true what her uncle had said about the law of the spirit world against taking your own life? But her uncle’s case was different from her case. No one had forced him to be separated from the woman he adored here in this present life. Dr. Hailey’s voice came to her.
“You have been very happy, then, during the last year?”
He spoke quietly, but he appeared to watch closely the effect of his words. The effect was startling. Lord Templewood sat up and the last traces of color ebbed from his parchmentlike cheeks. He glared wildly about the room.
“I would have been happy, had it not been that powers and principalities of evil are massed against me!” he cried in hoarse tones, “as, from the beginning, they have always been massed against—”
The words died in his throat. His body grew rigid, as if suddenly grasped in mighty, invisible hands. His eyes stared with new horror.
“The Horseman!”
Sacha held her breath. From far-away, as it seemed, and faintly, there came the sound of galloping hooves.
The sound grew louder. Lord Templewood sprang to his feet and struck at the empty air with his hands. The pallor of his cheeks was replaced by a dusky hue, as though he struggled desperately to free himself from his unseen antagonist. His labored breathing mingles its harsh rhythm with the rhythm of the hooves.
They watched the dreadful encounter spellbound, while the galloping drew ever nearer, till it seemed to have come to the very edge of the moat.
Dick sprang to the window, and threw it open. He turned back suddenly to the room with a look of utter bewilderment on his face.
The galloping had ceased.
Lord Templewood sank down, limp and trembling. He began to moan, softly and pitifully, like a child in pain.
Sacha came to him.
At the same instant a cry pierced the heavy silence. She turned and saw the Italian woman struggling to free her arms from the grasp in which Dr. Hailey had secured them.
Chapter V
Into the Night
“The woman, my dear Mrs. Malone, I is an impostor. That trick of the galloping horseman is as old as spiritualism itself. It is childishly easy when you know how to perform it.”
Dr. Hailey adjusted his eyeglass, and contemplated Sacha’s beautiful, distressed face with kindly concern. He added:
“I did not fully expose her in your uncle’s presence, because the poor man has built his life on his faith in her powers. His mind could scarcely endure the shock of learning that she has been deceiving him.”
They were seated in the great hall of the castle. Sacha drew her breath sharply and clasped her hands together in a gesture of deep uneasiness.
“But I don’t understand,” she cried. “What reason can she have for torturing my uncle in this dreadful fashion?”
“I don’t know. I should like to know.”
Dr. Hailey extracted a silver box from his pocket and took a pinch of snuff with great deliberation.
“With your consent,” he said, “I shall stay here for a day or two, until Lord Templewood is better. I have already suggested to Mile. Ninon that her affairs in London demand her attention urgently.”
Sacha rose to go to bed. She turned to the staircase and went a few steps toward it. Then she came back to him again. She asked:
“It is not true, then, that my uncle has been able to communicate with his dead fiancée?”
Dr. Hailey’s large face became vacant suddenly. He contracted his brows.
“On the face of it, no,” he declared. “Ninon Darelli is a fraud. And yet it is not quite safe, I think, to conclude that, because she is evidently capable of deception, all her actions are necessarily of that character.
“It may well be that she really does possess in a high degree what is called ‘psychic power,’ though I am not going to say that I put any reliance on such a gift. The story of spiritualism, as perhaps you know, is the most amazing mixture of palpable fraud and passionate sincerity.”
She left him and climbed the stairs to the room which she always occupied on her visits to The Black Tower. She lit the gas fire and sat down before it. She was shivering with cold, and her head throbbed dreadfully, so that the thoughts which she meant to summon to her help were hopelessly scattered. If only she were not so great a coward!
She tried to think of death as she had been taught to think of it when she was a child, as a gentle falling on sleep, a mere passing from earth to heaven. But that beautiful vision wore no longer its first allurement. Her mind pictured, instead, the darkness and coldness of the Redden churchyard, where she had seen them bury her young husband beside the grave of the poor Beatrice.
She recalled that scene now with amazing clearness. Everybody had been so full of sympathy for her, and she had not desired or required any sympathy. Did not life, with his young glory, wait, impatient at her side? All that she was burying was her grief and her disillusionment — her bitter shame and degradation. And yet Orme had sometimes been kind to her, when he was not drinking. And he had been so full of the zest of his fierce living!