A Stranded Soul

by E. L. White

A Stranded
Soul

By E. L. White

Illustrated by Percy E. Green

THE painted face on the canvas looked down, with supreme superiority, at the painted face of the lady. Each returned stare for stare, with interest. But the scrutiny of the fifteenth-century portrait was of so piercing a quality that the twentieth-century lady paid her the compliment of putting up her lorgnette, behind which screen of vantage she continued the critical battery.

There was nothing to distinguish Lady Rosemary Vine from any other of the feminine throng that filled the picture gallery. In her spreading hat and Directoire gown, she was merely one of a crowd, just as the pretty artifice of her face proclaimed her one of a type—the feather-bed section of Society.

Therefore it was a distinct tribute to the penetration of Dr. Hardcastle Pepper that, when he stopped before the slender figure in kingfisher-blue, he was instantly able to put the correct name to her.

“Lady Rosemary!” he exclaimed. “Who on earth would have expected to find you here? Didn’t know pictures were in your line.”

“Well, they’re certainly out of my line of vision, if you stand blocking my view,” was the pettish answer. Then, as the young man jumped back hastily, she relented.

“You’re about right,” she said. “Show-Sunday and the Private View is about the utmost I can rise to. And both upset me. Headache and heartache, over the gowns. I always break the Tenth Commandment, I mean. No, I popped in here, this afternoon, just to recover myself.”

Dr. Pepper raised his eyebrows interrogatively. Possibly he questioned her misapplied energy.

“Um?” he enquired lucidly.

“A motor smash,” explained Lady Rosemary. “Congratulate me, I’ve had one at last. Now I may consider myself blooded. No, I wasn’t hurt a bit—wasn’t it sweet luck? Just the shock.”

“Anyone else damaged?”

“I believe the taxi-driver was, but I didn’t stop to see. You ought to know by now how sensitive I am to suffering!”

Pepper smiled slightly.

“] hardly think you are of the stuff martyrs are made of,” he remarked.

“You’re right, and I’m proud of it,” was the light answer; “so you need not look so knowing.”

But Lady Rosemary was wrong, for Dr. Pepper was one of those men who know too much to be knowing. He had taken her measure accurately. He knew that she ran a nervous system in place of a soul, and that her brain was of about equal consistency with a muffin. But he also knew that if her mind was shallow her dimples were deep. So he placed her at her true value—that of a pretty woman.

Therefore he smiled at her indulgently.

“Well, who is this luckless female you’re quizzing so cruelly?” he asked, turning to the portrait.

“Just exactly what I want to find out. Look her up, will you?”

Dr. Pepper began to turn over the pages of his catalogue.

“Why this keen interest?” he enquired.

“I don’t know—but it’s her eyes. I know her face as well as I know my own—which is admitting a great deal.”

Pepper stopped in his search.

“Can’t you place her?” he asked. “A mutual friend, perhaps?”

But Lady Rosemary shook her head.

“No, it’s no mere acquaintance like that. It’s someone I have known intimately. I seem to have seen those eyes ever since I’ve known anything. Only—they didn’t look like that then. They’re different now. They look as if they were reproving me for something. They’re angry with me!”

Pepper watched her with interest as her eyes dilated in the effort of recollection. The sight of mental strain on her face was unusual.

“An early nurse or governess, perhaps?” he hazarded.

Again the woman shook aside the suggestion.

“No, no,” she cried impatiently. “I shall remember presently.”

Then her habitual insolent stare came back to her china-blue eyes as she regarded the portrait.

“Quaint type of woman was in then,” she reflected. “She wouldn’t have a show nowadays. We’re certainly grown better-looking now. Good crop of hair—not half her own, I'll be bound! And, mercy, what a figure! Imagine her in a Directoire!”

“Should be sorry to,” was the non-committal answer, as the doctor glanced from the sturdy grace and noble proportions of the portrait to the tightly corsetted form of Rosemary.

“Thank Heavens, I didn’t live then,” continued Lady Rosemary complacently. “Those weird clothes don’t give chances. Aren’t they ghastly? That tight, stiff bodice and bulgy skirt, and that plaid arrangement caught up with a brooch the size of a plaster!”

“A brooch?” interrogated Pepper. “Where?”

Lady Rosemary bent to adjust a fold of her gown.

“A great silver brooch, shaped like a shield, with an embossed thistle, on her left shoulder,” she answered glibly.

“That’s not in the picture,” said Pepper; and Lady Rosemary looked up impatiently.

“Yes, it is—well, it’s very odd,” she said, with a half laugh, as she gazed at the painted drapery unredeemed by any ornament. “That smash must have affected my nerves. I’m positive she was wearing the atrocity I mentioned. Possibly it’s under the plaid—the sly creature! She may have the grace to be ashamed of it! Oh, what on earth’s the matter with the light?”

As she spoke the electric light gave a sudden quick quiver.

“Very trying,” assented the doctor. “It’s really scan——”

The light gave another flicker, and at the same moment the room seemed also to shake itself and go out for the fraction of a second.

Lady Rosemary turned to her companion triumphantly.

“I was right about the brooch,” she said. “You can see it for yourself.”

But the doctor did not reply. To her astonishment Rosemary found that she was looking into a strange face—the face of a girl, whose complexion was thickened and pock-marked, and whose hair was strained back from the roots.

She rubbed her eyes, and then opened them again. Still the vision persisted. Again and again she repeated her action, pressing her fingers into her eye-balls—as a dreamer struggles to get free from the grip of a nightmare. But no awakening rewarded her.

Then, realising the futility of her efforts, she looked around her. The picture gallery was gone, and she was in a great, bare room, low of ceiling, and uneven of flooring, its planks strewn with rushes. In an ingle-nook a fire was burning that threw a long procession of shadows on to the {{wg:arras|arrassed}} walls—shadows that chased each other round the room in a never-ending string—now rising to giant stature, now dwindling to mis-shapen pigmies. In a deep alcove she caught the outlines of a monumental bed.

Outside was a sound of pitiful wailing, as of a lost soul that strove to force its way within—as naked boughs from the trees rapped their bony knuckles on the glass, and maddened drops of rain dashed themselves hopelessly against the pane. A scene of dread and desolation.

There were many forms moving about that dim room, but Lady Rosemary could not take them in at first. Her attention was attracted by a nearer object. Lying on her shoulder, fastening together the folds of a tartan-plaid, was the large silver brooch, whose description she had supplied to Pepper with the accuracy of a lost-property official.

She drew a breath of wonder. Acting on an impulse, she crossed to the dim oval mirror that hung slanting on the wall. She looked at herself. Then she fell back with a cry. Small wonder that the pictured eyes of the portrait had touched a chord of memory, for they had gazed at her from the depths of many a clouded glass. With a pang of dismay she realised that they were her own eyes. Lady Rosemary Vine and the portrait in the gallery were one and the same.

A terrible suspicion stole over her, steeping her in fear—undiluted fear that ate into her heart like acid. When the gallery light had flickered out it had gone, not to come back. At least, not to her. She had slipped off somewhere from the environment of time and space, and was sandwiched here between these dreadful, strange surroundings.

Rosemary stood holding her head between her hands. Her mind worked rapidly, at raging pressure, and, as if to make amends for its former passive state, it was rapidly travelling in two opposite directions. For a giddy second of time Rosemary lived in the Present and the Past. She knew that she was back in an hour of a past existence—one of those hours that is locked up securely within every brain, whence it can only slip out in the mangled, flattened shape of a dream or a blurred and colourless pigment of imagination. And she also knew that she had been hurled back on the vivid crest of a lurid, palpitating Moment, vibrant and thrilling with suppressed issues—one of those moments that break from the ever-flowing galvanic current of events in electric sparks of fire.

With a loosening of her knees she realised it, and the cowardice that was embodied in her twentieth-century embodiment cried out in fear at the knowledge.

“I must get back—I must get back!” she moaned.

What was coming? The elusive memory poured into her mind for a moment, flooding it with blind terror, then withdrew, leaving only the residue of trembling anticipation.

A sudden red glare from outside lit up the sky, and against the lurid light Rosemary saw, outlined on the window, the dark tracery of a crown and a shield.

The torchlight telegraphed its meaning. The Event was drawing nearer. The stranded woman dug her nails into her palms in her longing to escape.

Then something brushed against her. She felt the soft caress of fur, and heard the ghost of a murmured apology. Into the fifteenth-century room stole the perfume of a Bond Street essence.

There was a slight jar at the contact, and for the fraction of a second the weird room quivered and broke, and she saw dimly—as one sees a reflection on a rain-spattered pane—the picture gallery. She saw shadowy forms that drifted by like wraiths, their enormous hats and mammoth muffs accentuated by the fog of years.

Then her eyes were drawn to a figure that stood and looked at her with a blank stare of scorn—a form in kingfisher-blue, that wore her own gown.

Rosemary stretched out her hands, and exerted all her strength in a stupendous effort to snatch at her own time again—to get back to her dear familiar century. Yet, as she cried out, the low dark walls snapped down with the fiendish spring of a trap, and she was back in the hateful room—screaming, screaming!

But not alone! Other voices were shrieking round her in a hideous chorus of fear. Rosemary saw that the dreaded Moment had made gigantic strides onward. The red torchlight from without had deepened in intensity, so that the shadows that fled across the walls were tipped with blood.

As the confusion deepened, Rosemary saw that the dim forms that had peopled the room had sharpened to distinct personalities. Girls, with tightly coiffured heads and quaint costumes, ran to and fro aimlessly, wringing their hands. One seized hold of her for a moment, and at the convulsive contact Rosemary realised with a new fear that she was no longer a passive spectator. She was in the scene herself.

Then in the midst of the confused tangle of forms she had an appalling vision of a man, distraught and half clad, whose fair hair clustered under the brow of a poet.

As she caught the hunted glare of his eyes she felt the swift pang of remorse she had experienced in the midst of the exhilaration and excitement of her first otter hunt. One against many! A pang contracted her heart.

The shadows wiped out the face, and she noticed, with dull curiosity, that two of the maidens were grovelling on the floor, groping among the rushes, which they piled up in high heaps. Then she found she was with them, helping them to raise a plank that gave under her shaking fingers.

Haste, haste! Not an instant to be lost! As it suddenly heaved up in the air, ominous sounds were heard outside—the shuffling of footsteps, the metallic grate of steel on steel, and the yelping of murderous voices.

Again the wild terror swamped her in a tidal wave of dreadful anticipation. She knew that she had lived this moment before, and that it presaged some terrible event. In that far-off Past it was linked with a part that she only had played.

“I must get back quickly, quickly, before it happens!” she said over and over again.

She knew that the picture gallery was near her—around her. Piercing the red shadows of her prison with burning eyes she thought she discerned the filmy outlines of a hat—the hat of a modern woman. But she could not reach it. It was outside!

In a wild fury she strained and tore at the plank. As it finally opened a dark cavity was disclosed. Into the depths they pushed a man—the man with the hunted eyes and dread white face. The bay of the voices outside grew deeper, and the man looked around him at the sound with the stare of a trapped animal. This was the quarry.

Deeper into the hole he lowered himself, until his face swam out of sight into the darkness. As the fierce cries without grew yet nearer Rosemary gave a sudden shiver. For, flake by flake, the caked scales of years were rubbing from her memory. Another second, and she would—remember.

Then a woman, who knelt on the floor desperately raking together the rushes, looked straight at her, with impelling eyes, full of terror and command. Her voice throbbed through the air with its burden of entreaty.

“Catherine, keep the door!”

She called to the fifteenth-century Catherine. But it was the twentieth-century Rosemary who obeyed the command. For, at the words, the woman knew.

It was inevitable. It had happened before. Therefore it must happen now.

She fled to the heavy door—to fall back in dismay. There was neither bolt nor bar. The voices were so near they seemed to split her ear-drums—she could almost feel the hot breath of the panting murderers.

Then, with a shriek, she thrust her arms through the staples of the door.

Something snapped. A pain, like a red-hot iron, ran up her arm.

“——dalous the way these lights keep flickering,” finished the doctor.

It was over. Her tense second had been lived between the breath of two syllables.

Lady Rosemary found that she was back in the picture gallery. The warm air was around her, the fashionable crowd hemmed her in on every side, and the odour of hot toast stole from the direction of the tea room.

“Isn’t it?” she assented placidly.

The second had passed her by and left her unscathed. She was totally unconscious that to her had been vouchsafed the mystery of a revelation. The revelation of a wandering soul, which, sent spinning through countless ages in its quest of development to Life or Death, had been arrested, for an infinitesimal fraction of space, in its course of retrogradation, and whirled back to the moment when it had attained the zenith of its powers.

But she was unconscious of:the manifestation. Not a pang disturbed her placid face. The pity of it!

“Well, have you placed this righteous-looking creature?” she asked the doctor.

“Just reached her. Wonder who she’s by? By Jove, the man can paint eyes! You’d be hypnotised if you looked at her too long. Now, here she is. Catherine Douglas. Tradition says she barred the door against the murderers of James I. of Scotland with her arm.”

“Horrors!” Lady Rosemary stifled a yawn. “What a perfectly ghastly idea! Pity she lived then. She was wasted in those days. She’d make a ripping Suffragette nowadays. Imagine her scrapping with a policeman!”

Her speech jarred on Pepper.

“She was a noble woman,” he said warmly. “What modern woman would have the courage to bear the pain of having her arm forcibly snapped in two. Just think——”

A faint cry from Lady Rosemary interrupted him.

“Don’t, don’t,” she said faintly. “I wish you would stop. You make me think I can feel it. A dreadful pain is shooting up my arm!”

Pepper smiled indulgently.

“Those nerves!” he said. “Those petted, pampered nerves! My dear lady, when you cannot even bear to hear—Hello!”

While he spoke Lady Rosemary had suddenly lurched forward, her face blanched and her eyes closed. He was just in time to catch her as she slid heavily to the floor.

“Almost inexplicable!” he remarked, two minutes later. “Of course, the motor smash is the explanation. It admits of no other. But the extraordinary part is that a woman of her type, who cannot bear a finger ache without chloroform, should have been walking about this gallery chatting to me for over an hour without being conscious of any serious hurt.”

Then his face grew suddenly thoughtful as he added slowly

“Her arm is broken!”