Part 5 (1/2)

The figure of Geoffrey Ringwood placed one ghostly hand upon his left temple, and then pa.s.sed silently out of the room. I started up, and followed the phantom along the corridor-down the staircase-out at the front door, which still stood open-across the snow-covered lawn-into the plantation; and then it disappeared as strangely as I first had seen it; and, hardly knowing whether I was mad or dreaming, I found my way back to The Shallows.

For some weeks I was ill with brain-fever. When I recovered I was told that terrible things had happened at The Mere. Mr. Maryon had been found dead in Sir Henry Benet's room-an effusion of blood upon the brain, the doctors said-and the body of Colonel Bludyer had been discovered in the snow in an old disused gravel-pit not far from the house.

A year afterward I married Agnes Maryon; and, if all that I had seen and heard upon that 3d of February was not merely the invention of a fevered brain, the debt of honor was at last discharged, for I, the nephew of the murdered Geoffrey Ringwood, became the owner of The Mere.

DEVEREUX'S DREAM.

I give you this story only at second-hand; but you have it in substance-and he wasted few words over it-as Paul Devereux told it me.

It was not the only queer story he could have told about himself if he had chosen, by a good many, I should say. Paul's life had been an eminently unconventional one: the man's face certified to that-hard, bronzed, war-worn, seamed and scarred with strange battle-marks-the face of a man who had dared and done most things.

It was not his custom to speak much of what he had done, however.

Probably only because he and I were little likely to meet again that he told me this I am free to tell you now.

We had come across one another for the first time for years that afternoon on the Italian Boulevart. Paul had landed a couple of weeks previously at Ma.r.s.eilles from a long yacht-cruise in southern waters, the monotony of which we heard had been agreeably diversified by a little pirate-hunting and slaver-chasing-the evil tongues called it piracy and slave-running; and certainly Devereux was quite equal to either _metier_; and he was about starting on a promising little filibustering expedition across the Atlantic, where the chances were he would be shot, and the certainty was that he would be starved. So perhaps he felt inclined to be a trifle more communicative than usual, as we sat late that night over a blazing pyre of logs and in a cloud of Cavendish. At all events he was, and after this fas.h.i.+on.

I forget now exactly how the subject was led up to. Expression of some philosophic incredulity on my part regarding certain matters, followed by a ten-minutes' silence on his side pregnant with unwonted words to come-that was it, perhaps. At last he said, more to himself, it seemed, than to me:

”'Such stuff as dreams are made of.' Well, who knows? You're a Sadducee, Bertie; you call this sort of thing, politely, indigestion. Perhaps you're right. But yet I had a queer dream once.”

”Not unlikely,” I a.s.sented.

”You're wrong; I never dream, as a rule. But, as I say, I had a queer dream once; and queer because it came literally true three years afterward.”

”Queer indeed, Paul.”

”Happens to be true. What's queerer still, my dream was the means of my finding a man I owed a long score, and a heavy one, and of my paying him in full.”

”Bad for the payee!” I thought.

Paul's face had grown terribly eloquent as he spoke those last words. On a sudden the expression of it changed-another memory was stirring in him. Wonderfully tender the fierce eyes grew; wonderfully tender the faint, sad smile, that was like suns.h.i.+ne on storm-scathed granite. That smile transfigured the man before me.

”Ah, poor child-poor Lucille!” I heard him mutter.

That was it, was it? So I let him be. Presently he lifted his head. If he had let himself get the least thing out of hand for a moment, he had got back his self-mastery the next.

”I'll tell you that queer story, Bertie, if you like,” he said.

The proposition was flatteringly unusual, but the voice was quite his own.

”Somehow I'd sooner talk than think about-_her_,” he went on after a pause.

I nodded. He might talk about this, you see, but _I_ couldn't. He began with a question-an odd one:

”Did you ever hear I'd been married?”

Paul Devereux and a wife had always seemed and been to me a most unheard-of conjunction. So I laconically said: