Part 12 (2/2)
”My answer? Take it, ravisher and murderer of innocence and youth!
Die! in your crimes--Die!”
She stretched out her arm. There came a hoa.r.s.e cry, a crash, a heavy fall. Julian Estcourt lay upon the floor, white and senseless as the dead.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
EXPIATION.
A severe attack of her ”suppressed” enemy, and a nervous headache, the result of the shock of the previous evening, had driven Mrs Ray Jefferson to the Turkish bath as early as ten o'clock the morning after that strange exhibition of Clairvoyance.
She had the rooms all to herself, and as she leant back in her comfortable chair and dabbled her pretty bare feet in warm water; she reflected in a troubled and disjointed fas.h.i.+on over all that had occurred since that eventful morning when the beautiful ”mystery” had appeared before her standing in that curtained archway, which indeed looked a prosaic enough portal, and not by any means the sort of threshold for the development of occult science, or psychical marvels.
”She's completely unsettled me,” she murmured plaintively. ”How I wish I had never gone to her rooms last night. And that poor Colonel Estcourt--I wonder if he'll ever recover--they say he's never moved nor spoken since they took him away last night. I wonder what she really meant, and if she did kill that man she spoke of. I don't think it's possible. I expect she only _willed_ it, and that's not murder. Ugh!”
and she shuddered even in the warmth of the hot room where she had selected to go first. ”If the story leaks out--though I hope to goodness it won't--how delighted that horrid Mrs Masterman will be.
She never liked her. Well I'm--if that isn't the princess herself coming in! Her trance doesn't seem to have hurt her.”
Slowly and languidly through the open doorway, the beautiful figure swept in and up to the smaller chamber where sat the little American.
As Mrs Ray Jefferson looked at her, she became conscious of some subtle intangible change that had shadowed, as it were, the marvellous beauty of her face and form. Her large deep eyes had lost their l.u.s.tre, her clear creamy skin looked dull and opaque. Even the magnificent hair seemed to have been robbed of its sheen, and here and there amidst its ma.s.ses gleamed a silvery thread.
Up to this moment her age had been a matter of much speculation, varying from eighteen to twenty-six. Now one would have said unhesitatingly that she was a woman of at least thirty years, and a woman who did not carry those years lightly.
She sat down by Mrs Jefferson, and spoke in a low nervous voice. ”I knew I should find you here,” she said. ”I want your help. I think you have always been my friend here. Do me one service. Tell me what occurred in my room last night.”
”Do you mean to say?” asked Mrs Jefferson, amazed, ”that you don't know?”
”Should I ask if I did?” she said, mournfully. ”A great weight and terror are on my soul--yet I cannot explain them. In some of my trances I keep the memory of all I see; in some I lose it. I know nothing of what I said last night after you spoke and I parted from Julian. It was your voice that came between us. You have great psychic power; but it is undeveloped.”
”Good gracious!” cried Mrs Jefferson; ”then, if I'm responsible for what happened last night, I'll have nothing more to do with Occultism as long as I live.”
”I can't tell why it was,” resumed the Princess, mournfully. ”The chain of communication broke, and I got away, and my great dread was that Julian should suffer.”
”Well, your dread is realised,” said Mrs Jefferson. ”Don't you know he's very ill?”
She started, and grew deadly white. ”Ill--Julian! No; I did not know.
What is it?--serious do they say?”
”Very. Some shock to the brain. You know he was far from strong. He was only home from India on sick leave.”
The princess was silent for a moment. Her face looked inexpressibly mournful. Involuntarily her hand went to her heart, and she looked at Mrs Jefferson with sad, appealing eyes. ”I have suffered a great deal,” she said, slowly. ”I only bore it for his sake--for the hope they gave me that one day we should meet, and love, and taste the happiness of life together. Tell me, was it anything I said or revealed that shocked him?”
”Well--I guess so,” said the little American, uneasily. ”Of course, to us it was all mysterious; but he seemed to make it out, and at last, when you rose up and stretched out your arm and cried out, 'Die! in your crimes--_die_!' the Colonel just gave a sort of gasp, and crash went his chair, and he lay there on the floor like a dead creature. We were all finely scared, I can tell you. The odd part was that you went to sleep again like a child, just as simply and quietly as possible, and my husband and the poet, and poor old Diogenes, they got the Colonel to his room, and laid him on the bed, and we sent for a doctor, and he's not conscious yet. That's all I can tell you.”
The Princess Zairoff leant back on her chair white and silent. She asked no more questions.
Presently an attendant appeared with obsequious inquiries. The princess suddenly s.h.i.+vered. ”Ask them,” she said, abruptly, ”to bring up the temperature to 300 degrees, I am cold.”
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