The Beetle Part 28

She refused to budge.

'No,-I will tell you all about it here.' She looked about her,- as it struck me queerly. 'This is just the sort of place in which to unfold a tale like mine. It looks uncanny.'

'But-'

'"But me no buts!" Sydney, don't torture me,-let me stop here where I am,-don't you see I'm haunted?'

She had seated herself. Now she stood up, holding her hands out in front of her in a state of extraordinary agitation, her manner as wild as her words.

'Why are you staring at me like that? Do you think I'm mad?-I wonder if I'm going mad.-Sydney, do people suddenly go mad? You're a bit of everything, you're a bit of a doctor too, feel my pulse,-there it is!-tell me if I'm ill!'

I felt her pulse,-it did not need its swift beating to inform me that fever of some sort was in her veins. I gave her something in a gla.s.s. She held it up to the level of her eyes.

'What's this?'

'It's a decoction of my own. You might not think it, but my brain sometimes gets into a whirl. I use it as a sedative. It will do you good.'

She drained the gla.s.s.

'It's done me good already,-I believe it has; that's being something like a doctor.-Well, Sydney, the storm has almost burst. Last night papa forbade me to speak to Paul Lessingham-by way of a prelude.'

'Exactly. Mr Lindon--'

'Yes, Mr Lindon,-that's papa. I fancy we almost quarrelled. I know papa said some surprising things,-but it's a way he has,- he's apt to say surprising things. He's the best father in the world, but-it's not in his nature to like a really clever person; your good high dried old Tory never can;-I've always thought that that's why he's so fond of you.'

'Thank you, I presume that is the reason, though it had not occurred to me before.'

Since her entry, I had, to the best of my ability, been turning the position over in my mind. I came to the conclusion that, all things considered, her father had probably as much right to be a sharer of his daughter's confidence as I had, even from the vantage of the screen,-and that for him to hear a few home truths proceeding from her lips might serve to clear the air. From such a clearance the lady would not be likely to come off worst. I had not the faintest inkling of what was the actual purport of her visit.

She started off, as it seemed to me, at a tangent.

'Did I tell you last night about what took place yesterday morning,-about the adventure of my finding the man?'

'Not a word.'

'I believe I meant to,-I'm half disposed to think he's brought me trouble. Isn't there some superst.i.tion about evil befalling whoever shelters a homeless stranger?'

'We'll hope not, for humanity's sake.'

'I fancy there is,-I feel sure there is.-Anyhow, listen to my story. Yesterday morning, before breakfast,-to be accurate, between eight and nine, I looked out of the window, and I saw a crowd in the street. I sent Peter out to see what was the matter. He came back and said there was a man in a fit. I went out to look at the man in the fit. I found, lying on the ground, in the centre of the crowd, a man who, but for the tattered remnants of what had apparently once been a cloak, would have been stark naked. He was covered with dust, and dirt, and blood,-a dreadful sight. As you know, I have had my smattering of instruction in First Aid to the Injured, and that kind of thing, so, as no one else seemed to have any sense, and the man seemed as good as dead, I thought I would try my hand. Directly I knelt down beside him, what do you think he said?'

'Thank you.'

'Nonsense.-He said, in such a queer, hollow, croaking voice, "Paul Lessingham." I was dreadfully startled. To hear a perfect stranger, a man in his condition, utter that name in such a fashion-to me, of all people in the world!-took me aback. The policeman who was holding his head remarked, "That's the first time he's opened his mouth. I thought he was dead." He opened his mouth a second time. A convulsive movement went all over him, and he exclaimed, with the strangest earnestness, and so loudly that you might have heard him at the other end of the street, "Be warned, Paul Lessingham, be warned!" It was very silly of me, perhaps, but I cannot tell you how his words, and his manner-the two together-affected me.-Well, the long and the short of it was, that I had him taken into the house, and washed, and put to bed,-and I had the doctor sent for. The doctor could make nothing of it at all. He reported that the man seemed to be suffering from some sort of cataleptic seizure,-I could see that he thought it likely to turn out almost as interesting a case as I did.'

'Did you acquaint your father with the addition to his household?'

She looked at me, quizzically.

'You see, when one has such a father as mine one cannot tell him everything, at once. There are occasions on which one requires time.'

I felt that this would be wholesome hearing for old Lindon.

'Last night, after papa and I had exchanged our little courtesies,-which, it is to be hoped, were to papa's satisfaction, since they were not to be mine-I went to see the patient. I was told that he had neither eaten nor drunk, moved nor spoken. But, so soon as I approached his bed, he showed signs of agitation. He half raised himself upon his pillow, and he called out, as if he had been addressing some large a.s.sembly-I can't describe to you the dreadful something which was in his voice, and on his face,-"Paul Lessingham!-Beware!-The Beetle!"'

When she said that, I was startled.

'Are you sure those were the words he used?'

'Quite sure. Do you think I could mistake them,-especially after what has happened since? I hear them singing in my ears,-they haunt me all the time.'

She put her hands up to her face, as if to veil something from her eyes. I was becoming more and more convinced that there was something about the Apostle's connection with his Oriental friend which needed probing to the bottom.

'What sort of a man is he to look at, this patient of yours?'

I had my doubts as to the gentleman's ident.i.ty,-which her words dissolved; only, however, to increase my mystification in another direction.

'He seems to be between thirty and forty. He has light hair, and straggling sandy whiskers. He is so thin as to be nothing but skin and bone,-the doctor says it's a case of starvation.'

'You say he has light hair, and sandy whiskers. Are you sure the whiskers are real?'

She opened her eyes.

'Of course they're real. Why shouldn't they be real?'

'Does he strike you as being a-foreigner?'

'Certainly not. He looks like an Englishman, and he speaks like one, and not, I should say, of the lowest cla.s.s. It is true that there is a very curious, a weird, quality in his voice, what I have heard of it, but it is not un-English. If it is catalepsy he is suffering from, then it is a kind of catalepsy I never heard of. Have you ever seen a clairvoyant?' I nodded. 'He seems to me to be in a state of clairvoyance. Of course the doctor laughed when I told him so, but we know what doctors are, and I still believe that he is in some condition of the kind. When he said that last night he struck me as being under what those sort of people call 'influence,' and that whoever had him under influence was forcing him to speak against his will, for the words came from his lips as if they had been wrung from him in agony.'

Knowing what I did know, that struck me as being rather a remarkable conclusion for her to have reached, by the exercise of her own unaided powers of intuition,-but I did not choose to let her know I thought so.

'My dear Marjorie!-you who pride yourself on having your imagination so strictly under control!-on suffering it to take no errant flights!'

'Is not the fact that I do so pride myself proof that I am not likely to make a.s.sertions wildly,-proof, at any rate, to you? Listen to me. When I left that unfortunate creature's room,-I had had a nurse sent for, I left him in her charge-and reached my own bedroom, I was possessed by a profound conviction that some appalling, intangible, but very real danger, was at that moment threatening Paul.'

'Remember,-you had had an exciting evening; and a discussion with your father. Your patient's words came as a climax.'

'That is what I told myself,-or, rather, that was what I tried to tell myself; because, in some extraordinary fashion, I had lost the command of my powers of reflection.'

'Precisely.'

'It was not precisely,-or, at least, it was not precisely in the sense you mean. You may laugh at me, Sydney, but I had an altogether indescribable feeling, a feeling which amounted to knowledge, that I was in the presence of the supernatural.'

'Nonsense!'

'It was not nonsense,-I wish it had been nonsense. As I have said, I was conscious, completely conscious, that some frightful peril was a.s.sailing Paul. I did not know what it was, but I did know that it was something altogether awful, of which merely to think was to shudder. I wanted to go to his a.s.sistance, I tried to, more than once; but I couldn't, and I knew that I couldn't,-I knew that I couldn't move as much as a finger to help him.-Stop, -let me finish!-I told myself that it was absurd, but it wouldn't do; absurd or not, there was the terror with me in the room. I knelt down, and I prayed, but the words wouldn't come. I tried to ask G.o.d to remove this burden from my brain, but my longings wouldn't shape themselves into words, and my tongue was palsied. I don't know how long I struggled, but, at last, I came to understand that, for some cause, G.o.d had chosen to leave me to fight the fight alone. So I got up, and undressed, and went to bed,-and that was the worst of all. I had sent my maid away in the first rush of my terror, afraid, and, I think, ashamed, to let her see my fear. Now I would have given anything to summon her back again, but I couldn't do it, I couldn't even ring the bell. So, as I say, I got into bed.'

She paused, as if to collect her thoughts. To listen to her words, and to think of the suffering which they meant to her, was almost more than I could endure. I would have thrown away the world to have been able to take her in my arms, and soothe her fears. I knew her to be, in general, the least hysterical of young women; little wont to become the prey of mere delusions; and, incredible though it sounded, I had an innate conviction that, even in its wildest periods, her story had some sort of basis in solid fact. What that basis amounted to, it would be my business, at any and every cost, quickly to determine.