The Gray Mask Part 23

"There were no marks on the body."

Alden looked up. His voice thickened.

"We are talking too much. I--I want you to stay and judge for yourself."

Garth arose and walked to the rear window, but he could see nothing for the mist. He stood there, nevertheless, for some time, puzzled and half angry. The mental and physical condition of his host, Mrs. Alden's shattered nerves, the extreme loneliness, impressed on him a sense of uncharted adventuring.

"Why," he asked himself, "won't these people talk? What do they expect me to find in this house?"

When he turned back he saw that Alden's eyes were closed. The regular rising and falling of his chest warned Garth to quietness. He would not disturb the worn-out man. So he pressed the electric bell and walked to the hall. He met John there.

"Please show me to my room," he said. "Mr. Alden's asleep. Perhaps you'd better speak to his wife before you disturb him."

John bowed and led him upstairs.

"Good-night, sir," he said, opening the door. "May you sleep well. It's a little hard here lately."

He hesitated. He cleared his throat.

"You couldn't persuade him to send his wife away?" he went on at last.

"She's not strong, sir. It's pitiful."

"See here, John," Garth said impulsively. "I know it's against the rules, but tell me what's wrong here. What are you all afraid of?"

The old man's lips moved. His eyes sought Garth's urgently. With a visible effort he backed out of the room. His glance left Garth. When he opened his lips all he said was:

"Good-night, sir."

Garth closed the door, shrugging his shoulders. Of what a delicacy the threat must be to require such scrupulous handling! "If there is anything," Alden had said. Garth brought his hands together.

"There is something," he muttered, "something as dangerous as the death Alden is manufacturing back there."

He went to bed, but the restlessness of the train returned to him.

Reviewing Alden's exhaustion and the old servant's significant comment, he wondered half seriously if sleep refused to enter this house. The place, even for his splendidly controlled emotions, possessed a character, depressive, unhealthy, calmly malevolent.

He had lost account of time. He had been, perhaps, on the frontier of sleep, for, as he sprang upright, he could not be all at once sure what had aroused him. A man's groan, he thought. Suddenly, tearing through the darkness, came the affirmation--a feminine scream, full of terror, abruptly ended.

He threw on his clothes, grasped his revolver, dashed down the stairs, and burst into the living-room. There was no light now beyond the wan glow of the fire, but it was still sufficient to show him Alden, huddled more than ever in the chair, and the terror that had quivered through the cry, persisted now in Alden's face.

His wife, in a dressing gown, knelt at his side, her arm around his knees. At Garth's entrance she sprang erect, facing him.

"It came," she gasped. "Oh, I knew it would. All along I've known."

"Tell me what's happened," Garth commanded.

The woman's voice was scarcely intelligible.

"I let him sleep here. Just now he groaned. I ran in.

Somebody--something had attacked him. I ran in. I--I saw it."

"Where?"

She pointed to the rear window.

"I saw it going out there. It was foggy. It went in the fog. I couldn't--"

Garth sprang to the window. It was, in fact, half open. Before he could get through Mrs. Alden had caught his arm.

"Don't follow. It isn't safe out there."

"I want that man," he said.

She leaned weakly against the cas.e.m.e.nt.

"But out there," she whispered, "they are not men."

Again she caught his arm.

"Don't leave me alone now that they can come in."

She pointed at her husband.

"Look at him. He saw it in the fog that came through the window. It is all fog out there. Don't leave me alone."

He thrust the revolver impatiently in her hand.

"Then take this. Not much use outside on such a night."

He jumped to the lawn and started swiftly across. Since the intruder had fled this way he might hear him in the woods, might grapple with him. He regretted the loss of his revolver, although he realized it would be useless to-night except at close quarters, and for that he possessed a cleverly-devised reserve, which he had arranged on first joining the force--a folding knife, hidden in his belt, sharp, well-tested, deadly.

At the edge of the woods he paused, straining his ears, trying to get his bearings, for he was on unfamiliar ground and the fog was very dense here. It lowered a white, translucent shroud over the nocturnal landscape. Beneath its folds he could make out only one or two tree trunks and a few drooping branches. These, as he stared, gave him the illusion of moving surrept.i.tiously.

The moon, he knew, was at the full, but its golden rotundity was heavily veiled to-night, so that it had the forlorn, the sorrowful appearance of a lamp, once brilliant, whose flame has gradually diminished and is about to expire.

Garth could hear nothing, but he waited breathlessly, still straining his ears. This, he mused, was the place where many soldiers had died in battle, the setting for ghostly legends, the spot where the servants had fancied a terrifying and bodiless re-animation, the death-bed of Alden's valet.

Now that he had time to weigh it, Mrs. Alden's manner puzzled him. She had said _it_ had been in the house, that now _they_ could come in, and that out here _they_ were not men. Had the loneliness imposed upon her intelligence such a repulsive credulity?

He had to admit that imagination in such a medium could precipitate shameful and deceptive fancies.

Then, without realizing at first why, Garth knew he had been unjust. He found his eyes striving to penetrate the night to the left. Surely it was not the old illusion of moving trees and branches that had set the fog in lazy motion over there. He stepped cautiously behind a pine tree.

The chill increased. A charnal atmosphere had crept into the woods. As he s.h.i.+vered he realized that this sepulchral place had filled with plausible inhabitants--shapes as restless and unsubstantial as if sprung solely from a morbid somnambulism.

CHAPTER IX

THE PHANTOM ARMY