Chapter Twenty Seven. In the Balance.

“How did you get this?” I asked the youth. “Who are you?”

“I’m John May, sir,” was his answer. “I work in the gardens at Lydford, an’ last night, soon after eleven, as I was a-comin’ home from Rockingham, I met Miss Asta out in the drive. She was like a mad thing. She ’ad the letter and wanted it delivered at once. So I went to the stables and, sayin’ nothink, came away.”

“Then she had written this note, and gone out in the hope of finding some one to deliver it?” I exclaimed, glancing at his horse, and noticing that it was absolutely done up after an all-night ride.

“I didn’t know it was you, sir, that passed me in a motor-car,” the young gardener went on.

“No,” I said, re-reading the mysterious summons for help. “But you and your horse must remain here and rest. I shall return to Lydford in the car.”

Full of anxiety, I put on my mackintosh and cap, for it was raining steadily, and within a quarter of an hour of receiving the note I was already on my way along the autumn-tinted roads.

The morning was that of the first of November. Regardless of speed-limits or of police-traps, I tore along until, just before eleven, I again pulled up at the ancient stone porch of the Hall.

A maid-servant opened the door, and I eagerly inquired for Miss Seymour.

“She’s very ill, sir,” was the girl’s reply. “Mr Shaw’s been called on the Bench this morning, but he’ll be back in an hour. Doctor Redwood is here, sir.”

“Redwood! Then what’s the matter?” I gasped.

“I hardly know, sir. But here’s Mrs Howard!” and looking along the wide hall I saw the grave-faced woman in black standing out of the light.

“Oh, Mrs Howard?” I cried, walking up to her. “What’s happened to Miss Asta? Tell me. Is she ill?”

“Very, I’m afraid, sir,” replied the housekeeper in a low voice. “The doctor is upstairs with her. What happened in the night was most extraordinary and mysterious.”

“Tell me—tell me all, I beg of you,” I cried quickly.

“Well, sir, it was like this,” said the woman. “Last night, about eleven, I heard Miss Asta go along the corridor past my room, and downstairs into the servants’ quarters. She was gone, perhaps, twenty minutes, and then I heard her repass again to her room and lock the door. I know she did that, because I heard it lock distinctly. Miss Asta sleeps at the other end of the corridor to where I sleep—just at the corner as you go round to the front staircase. Well, I suppose, after that I must have dropped off to sleep. But just after two o’clock we were all awakened by hearing loud, piercing screams of terror. At the first moment of awakening I was too frightened to move, but realising that it was Miss Asta I jumped up instantly, slipped on a dressing-gown, and ran along to the door of her room. Several of the other servants, awakened by the cries, were out in the corridor. She had, however, locked her door, and we could not get in. I shouted to her to open it, for she was still shrieking, but she did not do so. At that moment Mr Shaw came along in his dressing-gown, greatly alarmed, and with his assistance we burst in the door.”

“Then he helped you to do that?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the woman. “Inside, we found the poor young lady in her nightdress crouched down on the floor by the ottoman at the foot of the bed. She was still crying hysterically and quivering with fear from head to foot. I bent, and taking her in my arms asked her what was the matter, for as we had entered, somebody had switched on the electric light. For a moment she looked at me fixedly with a strange intense expression, as though she did not recognise me. Then she gasped the words: ‘Death!—hand!— hand!’ That was all. Next moment she fell back in my arms, and I thought her dead. Mr Shaw was beside himself with grief. He helped to lift her on to her bed and tried all he could to restore her with brandy and sal volatile, but without avail. In the meanwhile I had telephoned to Doctor Redwood, who arrived about half an hour later, and he’s been here ever since.”

“And how is Miss Asta now?” I inquired eagerly. “Still unconscious. The doctor has, I fear, but little hope of her recovery, sir. She has, he declared, received some great and terrible shock which has affected her heart.”

The circumstances were strangely parallel with those of Guy Nicholson’s mysterious end.

“No one has formed any conclusion of what caused the shock?”

“No, sir. None of us, not even the doctor, can guess what ‘hand’ and ‘death’ could signify more than the usual figure of speech,” the woman replied. “To me, when she spoke, she seemed to be strangely altered. Her poor face seemed thin, pinched, and utterly bloodless, and when she fell back into my arms I was convinced that the poor thing had gone.”

“You are quite certain the door of her room was locked?”

“Absolutely. I heard her lock it, as was her habit, and being the first person there on hearing the screams for help, I tried the door and found it still secured on the inside. Mr Shaw is half demented, and would not at first leave the poor young lady’s side—until compelled to go to the Petty Sessions. It seems that there is an important case, and no other magistrate is at home to take his place on such short notice. But I’m expecting him back at any moment now.”

“And is Miss Asta still in her room?” I asked. “I think you said that the door was broken open.”

“Yes, sir. For that reason we’ve carried her into the green guest-room, which is lower down the corridor, nearer to my own.”

“Thank you, Mrs Howard,” I said. “I’ll go up and find the doctor. I know my way.” Then, in quick anxiety, I breathlessly ascended the broad, thickly carpeted oak staircase, and a few moments later was in the room which I knew, by the door, was the apartment in which the weird occurrence had taken place.

I recollected only too vividly my own terrible experience, and by those ejaculations which had so puzzled everybody, I knew that she had again witnessed that claw-like hand.

The room, cosy, well-furnished and upholstered in pretty cretonne, was in great disorder. The bed—a brass one, with cretonne hangings over the head to match the furniture—was tumbled with half the clothes upon the floor, while the green satin down-quilt had been tossed some distance away. A chair lay overturned, and water and towels were about, showing the attempts at restoration.

Upon a little wicker-table near the bed stood a shaded electric light, and a novel which my love had evidently been reading on the previous night, lay open. Yet though I investigated the room with careful deliberation, fearing every moment lest Shaw should return, I could detect nothing to account for the singular phenomenon.

The window stood slightly open, but Mrs Howard had explained how it had been unlatched by herself.

I examined the lock of the door. The key was still on the inside, while the hasp was broken; while the hasp of a small brass safety-bolt above had also been forced off. Hence the door must have been both locked and bolted. Certainly there could have been no intruder in that room.

One object caused me curiosity, and my heart beat quickly. Upon the mantelshelf was a little framed snapshot of myself and her father which she had one day taken outside the Casino at Aix.

But what had she seen within that room to cause her such a shock—nay, to produce upon her almost exactly the same symptoms which in the case of Guy Nicholson had terminated fatally?

I heard a footstep in the corridor, and emerging from the room came face to face with the fussy old doctor in his rough tweeds.

My unexpected appearance caused him to utter an exclamation of surprise, but when I asked breathlessly for news of his patient, he looked very grave and said—

“A weak heart, and brain trouble, my dear Mr Kemball. To tell you frankly, alas! I fear the worst.”

“Come here a moment,” I said, taking him by the arm and pulling him into the disordered bedroom. “Now,” I added, as I pushed the door to as well as it would go. “Tell me truthfully. Doctor Redwood, what do you make of this affair?”

“Nothing at present,” he replied with a peculiar sniff, a habit of his, “Can’t make it out at all. But I don’t like the symptoms. Only once she has spoken. In her delirium she whispered something about a hand. She must have seen something or other—something uncanny, I think. And yet what can there be here?” he asked, gazing amazedly round the apartment.

“Look here, Redwood,” I exclaimed firmly, “the facts are very similar to those at Titmarsh. Poor Nicholson saw Something, you’ll recollect. And he had locked himself in—just as Miss Seymour did.”

The doctor stroked his ruddy, clean-shaven chin.

“I quite admit that in many of the details it is quite a parallel case. But I am hoping to get the young lady round sufficiently to describe what happened. The servants say that the screams were loud piercing ones of horror and terror. Shaw himself told me that he had the greatest difficulty in breaking down the door. They found her crouched down in fear—yonder, behind the ottoman. And she shrieked out something about a hand. To what could she have referred, do you think? She’s quite sane and of perfectly sound mind, or I should attribute the affair to some hallucination.”

“It was more than hallucination,” I assured him, recollecting my own experience, yet determined not to assist him towards the elucidation of the mystery. The dead man had evidently made a discovery immediately, before his fatal seizure. I recollected that brief urgent note of Asta’s. Had she, too, made a similar discovery?

Yes. There could be no evasion of the fact. The two cases were in every way identical.

For nearly a quarter of an hour I stood discussing the amazing affair with Redwood. I could see that he was both mystified and suspicious, therefore I extracted from him a pledge of secrecy, and promised to assist him towards a solution of the extraordinary problem. I made no mention to anybody of Asta’s message to me, which I intended should remain a secret.

At my earnest appeal he allowed me to creep on tiptoe into the darkened chamber, wherein still lay unconscious the woman I loved so profoundly—she who was all the world to me.

I bent over the poor white face that presented the waxen transparency of death, and touched the thin, soft hand that lay outside the coverlet. Then, with eyes filled with tears, and half choked by the sob which I was powerless to restrain, I turned away and left the room.

“Will she recover?” I managed to ask the doctor. But he merely raised his thick eyebrows in blank uncertainty.

What devil’s work had been accomplished within that locked room? Ay, what indeed?

Against the man Shaw, who had so cleverly misled her into the honest belief that he adored her, there arose within me a deep and angry hatred. Why was he not there, knowing Asta’s precarious condition? His excuse of enforced attendance at the Petty Sessions was no doubt an ingenious one. Little did he dream that before the occurrence Asta had summoned me, and for that reason I was there at her side.

So strange had been all the circumstances from that moment when the man of mystery—Melvill Arnold—had breathed his last, that I had become utterly bewildered. And this amazing occurrence in the night now staggered me. Only one person had solved the mystery of the shadowy hand, and he, alas I had not lived to reveal what, no doubt, was a terrible truth.

In the corridor I stood discussing my beloved’s condition in low, bated whispers with the fussy country practitioner, a man of the old fox-hunting school—for nearly every one rides to hounds in that grass-country. He had already telephoned for Doctor Petherbridge, in Northampton, to come for consultation, and was now expecting him to come over in his car.

“I have done all I can, Mr Kemball,” he said. “But as we don’t know the cause, the exact remedy is rather difficult to determine. Every symptom is of brain trouble through fright.”

“Exactly the same symptoms as those you observed in Nicholson!” I remarked. Whereat he slowly nodded in the affirmative, and again stroked his rosy, clean-shaven chin.

“Well, doctor,” I said, “I intend to make it my business to investigate the cause of this peculiar phenomenon.”

And I sat down and wrote an urgent telegram to Cardew, who was, I knew, now stationed at Aldershot.