Fear

He looked up, as if surprised at her entrance, but the shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even, as she fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.

‘What was it? Who was it?’ she asked.

‘Who?’ he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.

‘The man we saw coming towards the house.’

He seemed to reflect. ‘The man? Why, I thought I saw Peters; I dashed after him to say a word about the stable drains, but he had disappeared before I could get down.’

‘Disappeared? But he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw him.’

Boyne shrugged his shoulders. ‘So I thought; but he must have got up steam in the interval. What do you say to our trying a scramble up Meldon Steep before sunset?’

That was all. At the time the occurrence had been less than nothing, had, indeed, been immediately obliterated by the magic of their first vision from Meldon Steep, a height which they had dreamed of climbing ever since they had first seen its bare spine rising above the roof of Lyng. Doubtless it was the mere fact of the other incident’s having occurred on the very day of their ascent to Meldon that had kept it stored away in the fold of memory from which it now emerged; for in itself it had no mark of the portentous. At the moment there could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash down from the roof in pursuit of dilatory tradesmen. It was the period when they were always on the watch for one or the other of the specialists employed about the place; always lying in wait for them, and rushing out at them with questions, reproaches, or reminders. And certainly in the distance the grey figure had looked like Peters.

Yet now, as she reviewed the scene, she felt her husband’s explanation of it to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety on his face. Why had the familiar appearance of Peters made him anxious? Why, above all, if it was of such prime necessity to confer with him on the subject of the stable drains, had the failure to find him produced such a look of relief? Mary could not say that any one of these questions had occurred to her at the time, yet, from the promptness with which they now marshalled themselves at her summons, she had a sense that they must all along have been there, waiting their hour.

Weary with her thoughts, she moved to the window. The library was now quite dark, and she was surprised to see how much faint light the outer world still held.

As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself far down the perspective of bare limes: it looked a mere blot of deeper grey in the greyness, and for an instant, as it moved towards her, her heart thumped to the thought, ‘It’s the ghost!’

She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man of whom, two months earlier, she had had a distant vision from the roof, was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal himself as not having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the impending fear of the disclosure. But almost with the next tick of the clock the figure, gaining substance and character, showed itself even to her weak sight as her husband’s; and she turned to meet him, as he entered, with the confession of her folly.

‘It’s really too absurd,’ she laughed out, ‘but I never can remember!’

‘Remember what?’ Boyne questioned as they drew together.

‘That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it.’

Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no response in his gesture or in the lines of his preoccupied face.

‘Did you think you’d seen it?’ he asked, after an appreciable interval.

‘Why, I actually took you for it, my dear, in my mad determination to spot it!’

‘Me – just now?’ His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with a faint echo of her laugh. ‘Really, dearest, you’d better give it up, if that’s the best you can do.’

‘Oh yes, I give it up. Have you?’ she asked, turning round on him abruptly.

The parlour-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light struck up into Boyne’s face as he bent above the tray she presented.

‘Have you?’ Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had disappeared on her errand of illumination.

‘Have I what?’ he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the sharp stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the letters.

‘Given up trying to see the ghost.’ Her heart beat a little at the experiment s

he was making.

Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow of the hearth.

‘I never tried,’ he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper.

‘Well, of course,’ Mary persisted, ‘the exasperating thing is that there’s no use trying, since one can’t be sure until so long afterward.’

He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but after a pause, during which the sheets rustled spasmodically between his hands, he looked up to ask, ‘Have you any idea how long?’

Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fire-place. From her seat she glanced over, startled, at her husband’s profile, which was projected against the circle of lamplight.