The Watchers Part 28

Berkeley, in the room next to it;" and that arrangement suited me very well. Helen wished us both good-night, and left us together.

We went up into Mayle's cabin and Cullen mixed the rum, which I only sipped. So it was not the rum. I cannot, in fact, remember at all feeling any drowsiness or desire to sleep. I think if I had felt that desire coming over me I should have shaken it off; it would have warned me to keep wide awake. But I was not sensible of it at all; and I remember very vividly the last thing of which I was conscious. That was Cullen Mayle's great silver watch which he held by a ribbon and twirled this way and that as he chatted to me. He spun it with great quickness, so that it flashed in the light of the candle like a mirror, and at once held and tired the eyes. I was conscious of this, I say, and of nothing more until gradually I understood that some one was shaking me by the shoulders and rousing me from sleep. I opened my eyes and saw that it was Helen Mayle who had disturbed me.

It took me a little time to collect my wits. I should have fallen asleep again had she not hindered me; but at last I was sufficiently roused to realise that I was still in the cabin, but that Cullen Mayle had gone. A throb of anger at my weakness in so letting him steal a march quickened me and left me wide awake. Helen Mayle was however in the room, plainly then she had suffered no harm by my negligence. She was at this moment listening with her ear close to the door, so that I could not see her face.

"What has happened?" I asked, and she flung up her hand with an imperative gesture to be silent.

After listening for a minute or so longer she turned towards me, and the aspect of her face filled me with terror.

"In G.o.d's name what has happened, Helen?" I whispered. For never have I seen such a face, so horror-stricken--no, and I pray that I never may again, though the face be a stranger's and not one of which I carried an impression in my heart.

Yet she spoke with a natural voice.

"You took so long to wake!" said she.

"What o'clock is it?" I asked.

"Three. Three of the morning; but speak low, or rather listen! Listen, and while you listen look at me, so that I may know." She seated herself on a chair close to mine, and leant forward, speaking in a whisper. "On the night of the sixth of October I went to the shed on Castle Down and had word with Cullen Mayle. Returning I pa.s.sed you, brushed against you. So much you have maintained before. But listen, listen! That night you climbed into Cullen's bedroom and fell asleep, and you woke up in the dark middle of the night."

"Stop! stop!" I whispered, and seized her hands in mine. Horror was upon me now, and a hand of ice crus.h.i.+ng down my heart. I did not reason or argue at that moment. I knew--her face told me--she had been after all ignorant of what she had done that night. "Stop; not a word more--there is no truth in it."

"Then there is truth in it," she answered, "for you know what I have not yet told you. It is true, then--your waking up--the silk noose! My G.o.d! my G.o.d!" and all the while she spoke in a hushed whisper, which made her words ten times more horrible, and sat motionless as stone.

There was not even a tremor in the hands I held; they lay like ice in mine.

"How do you know?" I said. "But I would have spared you this! You did not know, and I doubted you. Of course--of course you did not know.

Good G.o.d! Why could not this secret have lain hid in me? I would have spared you the knowledge of it. I would have carried it down safe with me into my grave."

Her face hardened as I spoke. She looked down and saw that I held her hands; she plucked them free.

"You would have kept the secret safe," she said, steadily. "You liar!

You told it this night to Cullen Mayle."

Her words struck me like a blow in the face. I leaned back in my chair. She kept her eyes upon my face.

"I--told it--to Cullen Mayle?" I repeated.

She nodded her head.

"To-night?"

"Here in this room. My door was open. I overheard."

"I did not know I told him," I exclaimed; and she laughed horribly and leaned back in the chair.

All at once I understood, and the comprehension wrapped me in horror.

The horror pa.s.sed from me to her, though as yet she did not understand. She looked as though the world yawned wide beneath her feet. "Oh!" she moaned, and, "Hus.h.!.+" said I, and I leaned forward towards her. "I did not know, just as you did not know that you went to the shed on Castle Down, that you brushed against me as you returned,--just as you did not know of what happened thereafter."

She put her hands to her head and s.h.i.+vered.

"Just as you did not know that four years ago when Cullen Mayle was turned from the door, he bade you follow him, and you obeyed," I continued. "This is Cullen Mayle's work--devil's work. He spun his watch to dazzle you four years ago; he did the same to-night, and made me tell him why his plan miscarried. Plan!" and at last I understood.

I rose to my feet; she did the same. "Yes, plan! You told him you had bequeathed everything to him. He knew that tonight when I met him at St. Mary's. How did he know it unless you told him on Castle Down?

He bade you go home, enter his room, where no one would hear you, and--don't you see? Helen! Helen!"

I took her in my arms, and she put her hands upon my shoulders and clung to them.

"I have heard of such things in London," said I. "Some men have this power to send you to sleep and make you speak or forget at their pleasure; and some have more power than this, for they can make you do when you have waked up what they have bidden you to do while you slept, and afterwards forget the act;" and suddenly Helen started away from me, and raised her finger.

We both stood and listened.

"I can hear nothing," I whispered.

She looked over her shoulder to the door. I motioned her not to move.

I walked noiselessly to the door, and noiselessly turned the handle. I opened the door for the s.p.a.ce of an inch; all was quiet in the house.

"Yet I heard a voice," she said, and the next moment I heard it too.

The candles were alight. I crossed the room and squashed them with the palm of my hand. I was not a moment too soon, for even as I did so I heard the click of a door handle, and then a creak of the hinges, and a little afterwards--footsteps.

A hand crept into mine; we waited in the darkness, holding our breath.

The footsteps came down the pa.s.sage to the door behind which we stood and pa.s.sed on. I expected that they would be going towards the room in which Helen slept. I waited for them to cease that I might follow and catch Cullen Mayle, d.a.m.ned by some bright proof in his hand of a murderous intention. But they did not cease; they kept on and on.

Surely he must have reached the room. At last the footsteps ceased. I opened the door cautiously and heard beneath me in the hall a key turn in a lock.

A great hope sprang up in me. Suppose that since his plan had failed, and since Tortue waited for him on Tresco, he had given up! Suppose that he was leaving secretly, and for good and all! If that supposition could be true! I prayed that it might be true, and as if in answer to my prayer I saw below me where the hall door should be a thin slip of twilight. This slip broadened and broadened. The murmur of the waves became a roar. The door was opening--no, now it was shutting again; the twilight narrowed to a slip and disappeared altogether.

"Listen," said I, and we heard footsteps on the stone tiles of the porch.

"Oh, he is gone!" said Helen, in an indescribable accent of relief.

"Yes, gone," said I. "See, the door of his room is open."

I ran down the pa.s.sage and entered the room. Helen followed close behind me.

"He is gone," I repeated. The words sounded too pleasant to be true. I approached the bed and flung aside the curtains. I stooped forward over the bed.

"Helen," I cried, and aloud, "out of the room! Quick! Quick!"

For the words _were_ too pleasant to be true. I flung up my arm to keep her back. But I was too late. She had already seen. She had approached the bed, and in the dim twilight she had seen. She uttered a piercing scream, and fell against me in a dead swoon.

For the man who had descended the stairs and unlocked the door was not Cullen Mayle.

CHAPTER XIX

THE LAST

Mesmer at this date was a youth of twenty-four, but the writings of Van Helmont and Wirdig and G. Maxwell had already thrown more than a glimmering of light upon the reciprocal action of bodies upon each other, and had already demonstrated the existence of a universal magnetic force by which the human will was rendered capable of influencing the minds of others. It was not, however, till seventeen years later--in the year 1775, to be precise--that Mesmer published his famous letter to the Academies of Europe. And by a strange chance it was in the same year that I secured a further confirmation of his doctrines and at the same time an explanation of the one matter concerned with this history of which I was still in ignorance. In a word, I learned at last how young Peter Tortue came by his death.