Part 26 (2/2)

Dominey's arm responded for a moment to the pressure of her fingers.

Then he turned to the beaters.

”Well, no one is going to ask you to go to the Black Wood,” he promised.

”Get round to the back of Hunt's stubbles, and bring them into the roots and then over into the park. We will line the park fence. How is that, Middleton?”

The keeper touched his hat and stepped briskly off.

”I'll just have a walk with them myself, sir,” he said. ”Them birds do break at Fuller's corner. I'll see if I can flank them. You'll know where to put the guns, Squire.”

Dominey nodded. One and all the beaters were walking with most unaccustomed speed towards their destination. Their backs were towards the Black Wood. Terniloff came up to his host.

”Have I, by chance, been terribly tactless?” he asked.

Dominey shook his head.

”You asked a perfectly natural question, Prince,” he replied. ”There is no reason why you should not know the truth. Near that wood occurred the tragedy which drove me from England for so many years.”

”I am deeply grieved,” the Prince began--

”It is false sentiment to avoid allusions to it,” Dominey interrupted.

”I was attacked there one night by a man who had some cause for offence against me. We fought, and I reached home in a somewhat alarming state.

My condition terrified my wife so much that she has been an invalid ever since. But here is the point which has given birth to all these superst.i.tions, and which made me for many years a suspected person. The man with whom I fought has never been seen since.”

Terniloff was at once too fascinated by the story and puzzled by his host's manner of telling it to maintain his apologetic att.i.tude.

”Never seen since!” he repeated.

”My own memory as to the end of our fight is uncertain,” Dominey continued. ”My impression is that I left my a.s.sailant unconscious upon the ground.”

”Then it is his ghost, I imagine, who haunts the Black Wood?”

Dominey shook himself as one who would get rid of an unwholesome thought.

”The wood itself, Prince,” he explained, as they walked along, ”is a noisome place. There are quagmires even in the middle of it, where a man may sink in and be never heard of again. Every sort of vermin abounds there, every unclean insect and bird are to be found in the thickets. I suppose the character of the place has encouraged the local superst.i.tion in which every one of those men firmly believes.”

”They absolutely believe the place to be haunted, then?”

”The superst.i.tion goes further,” Dominey continued. ”Our locals say that somewhere in the heart of the wood, where I believe that no human being for many years has dared to penetrate, there is living in the spiritual sense some sort of a demon who comes out only at night and howls underneath my windows.”

”Has any one ever seen it?”

”One or two of the villagers; to the best of my belief, no one else,”

Dominey replied.

Terniloff seemed on the point of asking more questions, but the Duke touched him on the arm and drew him to one side, as though to call his attention to the sea fogs which were rolling up from the marshes.

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