The Gray Mask by Charles Wadsworth Camp (children's ebooks online .txt) 📕

"New York!" the woman echoed.

"You've a doctor?" Garth asked.

"From the village," Alden answered. "I'm afraid he doesn't understand me."

"Then," Garth said firmly, "I should let the works go to blazes until I'd looked after myself."

Alden moved his hand vaguely.

"It's nothing—cold, maybe a touch of the gout. I sometimes suffer, and my nerves are a little under. Too much involved here, Mr. Garth. You couldn't afford to take chances with that."

Garth glanced at the room's luxurious furnishing.

"I couldn't," he answered captiously. "I'm not so sure about you."

It annoyed him that the lamp on the table failed to drive the shadows from the corners.

Mrs. Alden approached him timidly.

"You'll forgive our welcome? You'll try to understand? You may have noticed something about the fall in a remote place. It is very depressing here. If only you could persuade him to leave. You see we've no servants but old John. Shall I tell him to get you something—a whiskey and soda?"

Garth shook his head.

"I never drink when I'm at work."

"But you are our guest," she said.

"Our guest," came in her husband's difficult voice.

In neither of their faces could Garth read the reproof their tones had suggested. What point could there be in this abnormal masquerade?

He glanced at his watch. Mrs. Alden caught the gesture. She walked to a cabinet and measured her husband's medicine.

"It's time," she said as she gave it to him, "that we all were in bed. Shall I ring for John?"

"I'll ring," Garth answered, "a little later. I should be glad of a word with your husband."

When Mrs. Alden had gone he tried to talk sanely to the sick and melancholy man, urging him to seek more cheerful surroundings. Alden merely shook his head.

"See here," Garth exploded at last. "There's no point in your closing your confidence to me. It only makes matters a thousand times more difficult. You're afraid. Of what?"

The other answered with a difficulty that was not wholly physical. He had hit upon this incomprehensible plan and he would carry it through.

"Then it's only fair to tell you," Garth said, "that the man who drove me out talked a little. I've heard about your boat, of why your servants ran, of the strange men with whom you've crowded the village. Tell me one thing. Have you had threatening letters about your contracts?"

"Several."

The deep lines in Alden's face tightened.

"Don't think," he managed to get out, "that I'm a coward. I'll stay. My contracts will be carried through."

"No," Garth answered, "you're not that kind of a coward, but there's something else. Don't deny, Mr. Alden. You're more than sick. You're afraid. What is it?"

Alden shuddered.

"A—a coward."

The words stumbled out of his mouth.

"But I don't know what it is. You're to tell me, Mr. Garth, if it's anything."

"This rot about the woods and the spirits of dead soldiers?" Garth asked.

Alden stirred. He nodded in the direction of the rear casement windows.

"Just across the lawn."

"You haven't seen?" Garth asked sharply.

"But," Alden said, "the servants—"

This, then, Garth decided, must be the source of the fear the other's appearance recorded.

"Nonsense, Mr. Alden. That's one of the commonest superstitions the world over, that soldiers come back to the battlefields where they have died, and in time of war—"

"If there's nothing in it," Alden whispered, "why is it so common? Why did my servants swear they had seen? And the fog! We've had too much fog lately—every night for a week. My man died in the fog."

Garth whistled.

"Could they have mistaken him for you?"

"There were no marks on the body."

Alden looked up. His voice thickened.

"We are talking too much. I—I want you to stay and judge for yourself."

Garth arose and walked to the rear window, but he could see nothing for the mist. He stood there, nevertheless, for some time, puzzled and half angry. The mental and physical condition of his host, Mrs. Alden's shattered nerves, the extreme loneliness, impressed on him a sense of uncharted adventuring.

"Why," he asked himself, "won't these people talk? What do they expect me to find in this house?"

When he turned back he saw that Alden's eyes were closed. The regular rising and falling of his chest warned Garth to quietness. He would not disturb the worn-out man. So he pressed the electric bell and walked to the hall. He met John there.

"Please show me to my room," he said. "Mr. Alden's asleep. Perhaps you'd better speak to his wife before you disturb him."

John bowed and led him upstairs.

"Good-night, sir," he said, opening the door. "May you sleep well. It's a little hard here lately."

He hesitated. He cleared his throat.

"You couldn't persuade him to send his wife away?" he went on at last. "She's not strong, sir. It's pitiful."

"See here, John," Garth said impulsively. "I know it's against the rules, but tell me what's wrong here. What are you all afraid of?"

The old man's lips moved. His eyes sought Garth's urgently. With a visible effort he backed out of the room. His glance left Garth. When he opened his lips all he said was:

"Good-night, sir."

Garth closed the door, shrugging his shoulders. Of what a delicacy the threat must be to require such scrupulous handling! "If there is anything," Alden had said. Garth brought his hands together.

"There is something," he muttered, "something as dangerous as the death Alden is manufacturing back there."

He went to bed, but the restlessness of the train returned to him. Reviewing Alden's exhaustion and the old servant's significant comment, he wondered half seriously if sleep refused to enter this house. The place, even for his splendidly controlled emotions, possessed a character, depressive, unhealthy, calmly malevolent.

He had lost account of time. He had been, perhaps, on the frontier of sleep, for, as he sprang upright, he could not be all at once sure what had aroused him. A man's groan, he thought. Suddenly, tearing through the darkness, came the affirmation—a feminine scream, full of terror, abruptly ended.

He threw on his clothes, grasped his revolver, dashed down the stairs, and burst into the living-room. There was no light now beyond the wan glow of the fire, but it was still sufficient to show him Alden, huddled more than ever in the chair, and the terror that had quivered through the cry, persisted now in Alden's face.

His wife, in a dressing gown, knelt at his side, her arm around his knees. At Garth's entrance she sprang erect, facing him.

"It came," she gasped. "Oh, I knew it would. All along I've known."

"Tell me what's happened," Garth commanded.

The woman's voice was scarcely intelligible.

"I let him sleep here. Just now he groaned. I ran in. Somebody—something had attacked him. I ran in. I—I saw it."

"Where?"

She pointed to the rear window.

"I saw it going out there. It was foggy. It went in the fog. I couldn't—"

Garth sprang to the window. It was, in fact, half open. Before he could get through Mrs. Alden had caught his arm.

"Don't follow. It isn't safe out there."

"I want that man," he said.

She leaned weakly against the casement.

"But out there," she whispered, "they are not men."

Again she caught his arm.

"Don't leave me alone now that they can come in."

She pointed at her husband.

"Look at him. He saw it in the fog that came through the window. It is all fog out there. Don't leave me alone."

He thrust the revolver impatiently in her hand.

"Then take this. Not much use outside on such a night."

He jumped to the lawn and started swiftly across. Since the intruder had fled this way he might hear him in the woods, might grapple with him. He regretted the loss of his revolver, although he realized it would be useless to-night except at close quarters, and for that he possessed a cleverly-devised reserve, which he had arranged on first joining the force—a folding knife, hidden in his belt, sharp, well-tested, deadly.

At the edge of the woods he paused, straining his ears, trying to get his bearings, for he was on unfamiliar ground and the fog was very dense here. It lowered a white, translucent shroud over the nocturnal landscape. Beneath its folds he could make out only one or two tree trunks and a few drooping branches. These, as he stared, gave him the illusion of moving surreptitiously.

The moon, he knew, was at the full, but its golden rotundity was heavily veiled to-night, so that it had the forlorn, the sorrowful appearance of a lamp, once brilliant, whose flame has gradually diminished and is about to expire.

Garth could hear nothing, but he waited breathlessly, still straining his ears. This, he mused, was the place where many soldiers had died in battle, the setting for ghostly legends, the spot where the servants had fancied a terrifying and bodiless re-animation, the death-bed of Alden's valet.

Now that he had time to weigh it, Mrs. Alden's manner puzzled him. She had said it had been in the house, that now they could come in, and that out here they were not men. Had the loneliness imposed upon her intelligence such a repulsive credulity?

He had to admit that imagination in such a medium could precipitate shameful and deceptive fancies.

Then, without realizing at first why, Garth knew he had been unjust. He found his eyes striving to penetrate the night to the left. Surely it was not the old illusion of moving trees and branches that had set the fog in lazy motion over there. He stepped cautiously behind a pine tree. The chill increased. A charnal atmosphere had crept into the woods. As he shivered he realized that this sepulchral place had filled with plausible inhabitants—shapes as restless and unsubstantial as if sprung solely from a morbid somnambulism.

Shadows advanced through the shadowy fog, and Garth could define them as no more than shadows. In one place the mist thinned momentarily, and he glimpsed, apparently floating forward, the trunk of a man's figure. Pallid tatters, such as might survive in a mortuary, flapped about bare shoulders, and from a little distance beyond came a sickly gleam—the doubtful response uncertain moonlight might draw from a bayonet or a musket barrel.

The fog closed in. There were no more shadows. Garth, eager to follow, forced himself to wait. He told himself that the march of phantoms possessed a meaning which would give direction to his task. The unveiling of its impulse, he was confident, would unveil the mystery at the house. Against so many only caution was useful at present.

He was glad Nora was not with him. He knew how profoundly she would have been stirred, how ready she would have been to discard a rational explanation for the occult. He could smile a little. In this one respect of vulnerability to superstition he felt himself immeasurably her superior. He was glad she had not involved herself in such a case.

Finally, phantom-like himself, he proceeded through the fog in the direction the silent shadows had taken. He walked for some distance.

Without warning he stumbled and pitched forward to his knees. Reaching out to save himself, his fingers touched something wet, cold, and possessed of a revealing quality which in one breathless moment drove into his brain the excuse for those at the house, and focussed for him their terror of the unexplored world of whose adjacence their solitude must have convinced them.

He snatched his hand back, rendered for the moment without purpose by this silent and singular tryst to which chance had led him in the evil forest. It was necessary, however, to strip the mask of night from the face of the one who lay, defeated and beyond resistance, in the path of the shadowy army.

He took his pocket lamp from his coat and pressed the control. The light fought through the fog to the face of the old servant who a few hours ago had begged him to get Mrs. Alden away, whose lips had been incomprehensibly sealed.

Quickly he searched for the manner of death, for there could