The Devil's House

by J. Storer Clouston

 

The Devil's House

BY J. STORER CLOUSTON

IT WAS on a dirty afternoon in late October that Dr. Anstruther turned out of the mud and crowds and traffic of New Bond Street into the Well known show-rooms of Messrs. Marshley & Waldron. That was when Marshley & Waldron were in their old premises, a short way up from Piccadilly, and when motor-omnibuses and cars were yet in the womb of Time, and on a day like this your trousers were splashed by the wheels of hansoms and such-like prehistoric vehicles.

"I'll just have a look round by myself, thank you."' he said to the young man who advanced, and strolled on slowly through the rooms.

The doctor was a tall, gaunt, large-boned Scotchman with a clipped gray mustache and ragged eyebrows and a dry, reserved manner; yet underneath the formidable brows and the caustic speech a very occasional twinkle in the eye and a surprizing flavor of geniality in his rare smile hinted at the reason why his friends, though few, were devoted.

It was that quality, in fact, of friendship which had first Jed him into Marshley & Waldron's. A retired Anglo-Indian and a confirmed bachelor, he had settled in the east coast hamlet of Chipping-Urby a few months after his old friend Colonel Barlow retired from the army and came to live at Urby Hall.

The pair had always been intimate cronies and by this time had grown to be inseparable; the more readily as, the doctor had no near relatives and the colonel only one, his nephew and reputed heir, Vincent Barlow, a young barrister living in London; while neighbors in that part of the world were almost non-existent.

Colonel Barlow was a man of ample means and a passionate collector, especially of rare china, but with a strong distaste for London and indeed for towns and town-life of any kind. Dr. Anstruther, on the other hand, liked to run up to town occasionally, and on these occasions used to look round the show-rooms and curiosity-shops on his friend's behalf. He himself was a collector in a modest way and an excellent and sagacious judge.

Such a valuable client was not apt to be left long alone, and he had hardly been there five minutes before Mr. Waldron himself came forward and greeted him affably, the Mr. Waldron of those days being a square-shouldered gentleman with a waxed red mustache and a pale, business-like eye.

"We happen," said he, "to have an article of vertu at present that the colonel might quite fancy. I have noticed his taste is generally for the odd and unusual; in fact, sir, one might almost say for the outré. I think that is so, doctor?"

Dr. Anstruther was a man of few words. He merely nodded and agreed that Colonel Barlow's taste did run that way.

"It's a quite remarkably outré article," said Mr. Waldron. "Quite unusually outré. In fact it's a little too much so for most people."

Both by profession and instinct the doctor was an observant man, and it struck him even at that moment that there was something a little curious in Mr. Waldron's laugh. He followed him through two or three show-rooms, and then, as they approached a wide shelf on which a space seemed to have been cleared round a single object, he was again struck, this time by a curious note in Mr. Waldron's voice.

"Tut, tut!" he exclaimed impatiently. "What bit of nonsense is this now?"

This single object was covered with a cloth thrown loosely over it, and as Mr. Waldron spoke, he plucked it off and threw it aside with an air of considerable irritation, the doctor noticed.

Dr. Anstruther himself was one of the most imperturbable and least fanciful of men, yet hardly was the cloth off when he was conscious of a curious wish that it were on again. The vase that stood revealed was tall and of a foreign and ornate design, but beyond the fact that it had, generally speaking, a kind of spiky appearance, he was hardly conscious of its details, his eye was so filled by one figure embossed on it in low relief, and the impression produced by this figure was so singular. For some moments he gazed at it in silence, and it was with a conscious effort that he turned away his eyes at last and spoke.

"I don't like it," he said. "What do they call the thing?"

"In our catalog we called it the Lutzingen Vase," said Mr. Waldron. "But that's only where it comes from—Lutzingen in Brandenberg. It has also a kind of popular name, so to speak, which means, I believe, 'The Devil's house.'"

"First part is suitable enough," muttered Dr. Anstruther, looking hard at the vase under his eyebrows, "but why 'house'?"

"Why it was called so I have no idea, but we are hoping to get some more information about its story, and if we do, I'll be happy to send it on to Colonel Barlow."

Dr. Anstruther nodded absently. His thoughts seemed singularly engrossed.

"The only figure on it," the other continued, "is this curious gentleman, who seems to be a kind of high dignitary or possibly a learned professor; his robes might do for either. The vase is certainly some centuries old, and it is hard to say exactly what he was meant for."

But it was not the robes of the squat, round-paunched figure that fascinated and repelled the doctor. It was the broad, gross, smiling face with the remarkably bulging eyes. And yet even that seemed scarcely ugly enough to give him the very odd sensation that kept running down his spine all the time he stood there and increased disagreeably every time he looked the creature straight in the eye.

"It is an evil thing," murmured Dr. Anstruther, more to himself apparently than aloud.

"Kind of odd feeling he gives one," agreed Mr. Waldron, who looked if possible even less likely to be subject to odd sensations than the doctor, being in fact the very incarnation of commercial shrewdness and assurance. "One or two of our assistants get quite scary, especially as it's growing toward evening and before we light up. That's the meaning of this foolishness."

As he spoke, he indicated the cloth with his foot.

"Nervous chickens, I call 'em," he said, "but I suppose some people are built that way."

He lowered his voice a little and added—

"The worst of this bit of silliness is that the thing might get stolen and something else put in its place, and you'd never know while this cloth was over it."

"I should hardly think it was a thing a thief would select," observed Dr. Anstruther.

Mr. Waldron tugged the end of his stiff red mustache.

"One would scarcely think so," he agreed. "But it's a queer case. I hardly know what to think."

"Humph," grunted Dr. Anstruther. "Well, to me it seems safe enough. And now I think I'll look at something else."

Frowning formidably, he looked the figure hard in the eye before he turned away, as if defying it to intimidate a veteran who had looked heathen idols and sudden death in the face for thirty years, and then the two passed into another show-room.

"It doesn't appeal to you then, sir?" inquired Mr. Waldron.

"It does not," said Dr. Anstruther emphatically. "Does it appeal to anybody?"

"It isn't my own taste certainly. In fact, speaking unprofessionally, it hardly seems to me what you'd call a healthy taste. Still, as a matter of fact, I've seen one or two who seemed hardly able to tear themselves away from it. There's a foreign chap in particular——"

Mr. Waldron broke off suddenly, and then, touching the doctor's arm, said in a lowered voice:

"There he comes now! The thing seems to be a regular magnet for the fellow—just look at him, sir."

From where they stood they could see into the other show-room, and there, slowly approaching the vase with his back half-turned toward them appeared a well-dressed young man in a black felt hat. Dr. Anstruther studied him with pursed lips and an intent professional look in his eye. More and more slowly the young man came toward the vase, stopping sometimes as if he hesitated and almost decided to flee, and then drawn on by a force too strong for him. The simile of the snake and the bird rose vividly to the doctor's mind.

"Quite interesting," he murmured. "I've seen natives attracted like that by the filthiest looking idols—women especially. Temptation takes damned queer forms. Hullo——"

He broke off and his eyes opened wide. The young man had come right in front of the vase by this time, and now, with a jerky impulsive movement, as if forced despite his judgment, he raised his hand and deferentially bared his head. It was a curiously square head, Dr. Anstruther noticed, with very close-cropped fair hair, and it bent a little forward involuntarily toward the vase.

"Great Scott!" exclaimed Mr. Waldron. "The chap is taking off his hat to it!"

His voice must have reached the young man, for he turned with a violent start and for a moment showed a pale face with wide-open blue eyes staring in their direction. It was an open, pleasant and simple face, the doctor thought in the few seconds it was turned toward them, and then the young man hastily put on his hat and hurried out of their sight.

"What a rum go!" commented Mr. Waldron.

"Very," murmured Dr. Anstruther.

ABOUT the middle of the day, a week later, Vincent Barlow rang the bell of his sitting-room in Ebury Street and asked to see his landlady. While waiting for her, he stood looking out of the window, as he had been looking before he rang, a slight frown on his usually good-humored face and his hands impatiently jingling the coins in the pockets of his tweed trousers. From his costume it seemed evident that he must be going out of town.

It was a slim, dark-haired, good-looking specimen of the briefless young barrister who turned from the window to greet his landlady when she entered.

"This is a great nuisance," he began. "I'm afraid I must ask you to give me a little lunch in my rooms before I go. My uncle has asked me to take down rather a valuable bit of china which he has been buying. Marshley & Waldron were to have sent it round here ready-packed first thing this morning, but it hasn't come and I can't start without the thing.

"I'm going round now to their place to see what has happened. If by any chance it comes while I am away, please see that the bearer understands that I haven't started for Urby Hall yet but am coming back to my rooms; and let him leave the thing here. Be very careful of it. The lord knows how much my uncle has paid for it."

He snatched up his hat and was off, and it was over an hour before he returned.

"That china vase is going to play the dickens with my week-end in the country," he told his landlady half-humorously when he got back. "It seems that some other collector is after it and has persuaded Marshley & Waldron not to send it off till he has telegraphed an offer to my uncle; so here I've got to wait till they get Colonel Barlow's answer."

About four o'clock a note came round by hand and Vincent said with resignation:

"Well, my uncle has refused the offer and the vase will be packed up and sent to meet me at Liverpool Street in time to catch the seven-forty-five. That's the only train left now—and a rotten bad one at that."

AS HE followed his porter toward the train, Vincent Barlow glanced over his shoulder at the illuminated clock and saw that it was twenty-five minutes to eight. Ahead of him, down the whole drafty length of the lamplit platform he noticed only one fellow passenger, a man in an overcoat and a black felt hat, and when this man had turned into a carriage, he and the porter were alone.

Vincent had a quick imagination and he was accustomed to, and, being young, enjoyed its tricks, yet he was sharply and a little disagreeably surprized by the acute sense of loneliness which suddenly possessed him now. That Liverpool Street platform seemed to him the most depressingly desolate spot he had ever visited, and though as a rule he was most particular in securing a carriage to himself, it gave him a fresh touch of depression to see that not only was the third-class compartment he selected empty but all the other compartments in that coach likewise.

"There seem to be very few people traveling by this train," he remarked, and then added: "Be careful with that box, porter; it contains china."

"China?" said the man. "I was wondering what was in it. It ain't one of them cremation-urns, is it, sir?"

For an instant Vincent looked at the box askance and then he laughed and said—

"Not as bad as that."

"I was wondering," said the porter with an odd look at the box.

He placed it on the seat and went away, and for a minute or two Vincent hung out of the window, watching his retreating back, and then with a conscious effort drew the window up and settled himself in a corner of the carriage.

It was a blustering October evening and even under the station roof he could hear the rushing and the sighing of invading eddies from the wind without. Now and then they made the window rattle and promised a chilly journey over the east coast flats.

Behind his youthful ardor for the gaieties of town Vincent had a deep affection for vacant country spaces and the seaboard regions, and as a rule a journey like this, out of London at dark into the dead of the country, gave him a pleasing sense of adventure.

But tonight his spirits fell with every minute he sat waiting for the train to start, and, what surprized and disconcerted him most, was that he found himself wishing that some fellow passenger would choose this compartment to keep him company.

They started at last and he wrapped his rug about his knees, lighted his pipe and tried to bury himself in a novel. Yet at each station, while they passed through the environs of the town, he caught himself instinctively glancing at the window and feeling each time a sense of disappointment that no one entered. And then when the black country succeeded the strings of lamps and the stopping-places grew few, he threw down his book and sprang to his feet.

This time it was more than a sense of loneliness that oppressed him. A nasty fancy had begun already to touch his nerves and make them quiver, and now it became intolerable. He was far from timid; his nerves were usually under admirable control, and his high spirit scorned this intruding fancy.

Yet more and more loudly a voice seemed to say to him—

"There is somebody else in this carriage."

He stood still for a moment, wrestling with the impulse, and then nothing could withhold him from dropping on to his knees and looking first under one seat and then under the other. To make sure, he even took his stick down from the rack and passed it along.

"You fool!" he said to himself; yet he caught himself breathing more easily.

He sat down again and picked up his book, but again that unnerving fancy was too strong for him. He knew for certain now it was only fancy, for, save under the seat, where could a fellow passenger hide himself in a third-class railway-carriage?

And then he found his eyes instinctively turning to that square wooden box which the porter had so carefully placed on the opposite seat. And each glance he gave it was more uncomfortable.

"Can the thing actually be an antique cremation-urn?" he wondered for an instant and then almost laughed aloud at the idea of any urn containing a concealed fellow passenger.

But then again he wondered what had made the porter ask that question and eye the box so oddly. Had he felt something of the same discomfort as he wheeled it on his barrow? If so, could his own feeling be mere fancy?

They stopped at a station, and with a vast sense of relief he let down the window and leaned out. The clean night air seemed to blow the disturbing fancy out of his head, and when they started, he left the window down and let the wind whistle into the carriage all the way to Gilswood Junction. Uncomfortable he still remained, yet the fresh drafts of air seemed to have a tonic effect, as if the fancy were morbid and its cause unclean and the pure wind from the sea disinfected the carriage.

The special feature of this evening train to which Vincent had objected was the change which its passengers had to make at Gilswood and the tedious wait of an hour before the connection for Chipping-Urby could be caught. That night, with the platforms in half-lighted darkness and the wind tearing through them as through a funnel, and hardly a passenger to be seen but himself, the prospect was even less exhilarating than usual.

As he went toward the refreshment-room, he was conscious of one or two figures passing out of the station farther up the platform, but at the moment those were all he noticed, and the refreshment-room itself struck him vividly as emptiness incarnate. He had not ventured to let his uncle's precious vase out of his sight, and so he carried the box in with him, placed it on a chair and went to the counter.

The hour of the train's departure from London had meant a chop at his rooms instead of dinner at his club, and he now bought a plate of sandwiches and a cup of cocoa and bore them to one of the tables by the wall.

"Thank Heaven, this will serve to kill some of the time!" he said to himself.

The place was a typical railway refreshment-room, large, gaunt and ill-lighted. On this particular evening it was full of drafts and flickering shadows within and besieged by the wind without. The waitress vanished after she had served him; the light was too bad for reading, and as he sat there with his sandwiches, there began to creep over Vincent the same uncomfortable, haunting fancy that had depressed him in the train.

On the chair beside him stood the wooden box, and before long he found himself with his elbow on the table and his head on his hands, staring at that square case and wondering—insistently wondering.

The creak of a chair which disturbed him seemed for an instant to be the twang of his own startled nerves. He turned his head sharply, to see a man sitting at that same table a few feet from his elbow. But for that one creak as the stranger settled himself in his chair, he might have dropped out of space.

"I am afraid I have a little startled you," said the stranger politely.

Startled though Vincent unquestionably was, his eyes wore merely the impassive steady English stare that simply says, "I don't know who you are"; that barrier which, along with the North Sea, has kept the outer World for centuries at arm's length.

But behind it he was observing. From his accent, the man was a foreigner, he noticed, and neither his clothes nor the close-cropped fair hair beneath the black felt hat had the British cut. He was young; his face was open, simple and serious; and his manner seemed to Vincent indefinitely suggestive of some secret excitement held tight on leash.

On his part, the stranger seemed to fidget a little under the young Englishman's gaze.

"I must apologize—" he began.

"Not at all," said Vincent briefly.

For a few moments the stranger said nothing more. He had ordered no refreshments and simply sat there with his elbows on the table, twisting his fingers a little. Then he remarked—

"There seems to be a curious feeling in the air tonight."

Again Vincent was startled, for there was that in the young man's tone which suggested they shared a confidence, and he was only too well aware how vivid this curious feeling was to himself. Yet his voice remained cool and his eyes guarded.

The young man was manifestly growing nervous and his fingers were twining and intertwining faster, but a look of stolid resolution had mounted to his eyes and stayed there. When he spoke again, his voice was deliberate with the deliberation of strong control.

"You have noticed it too," he said quietly, "and you have been wondering. Yes, it is strange and seems not easy to account for."

A subtle hint in his eye more than his voice that he was not so mystified himself broke a little into Vincent's reserve.

"Can you account for it?" he found himself asking.

"It is because you are taking away something that you should not take."

Vincent was sitting at the side of the oblong table and the stranger at the end. Between them, under Vincent's elbow, was the chair on which the box was resting. Both glanced at it, the stranger eagerly and yet with a little shudder, Vincent quickly and only for an instant. The next, his eyes were on the stranger's.

"You seem to know my name," he observed dryly.

"Yes," said the other, talking quietly now and with his restraint ebbing away as he spoke, "I know all about you, Mr. Barlow. It is the vase which you are taking to your uncle. It was I that telegraphed to buy it back from him today—for he ought not to have it. But he has refused—refused me any price.

"My own name is Helmolt. I am not myself rich but I am what you call of a good family—von Helmolt we are really called; and I have many friends and relations with influence and with money. But I could not get them to realize till it was too late and when they sent me at last the money to buy the vase, then it was too late—just too late!"

There was something so urgent and sincere in the young man's flow of words that Vincent's mouth relaxed.

"Bad luck," he murmured.

Von Helmolt's blue eyes began to light up.

"You sympathize?" he cried eagerly. "Ah, I shall tell you more! This vase is a national relic. It should never have gone out of its own country. And now it must return to its country."

"How?" asked Vincent dryly.

The other grew even more insistently earnest.

"You and I shall try to think of a way, Mr. Barlow," he said, lowering his voice. "Put yourself in the position of me. Imagine an English relic, something historic, something unique, something of not so great value in itself but of so much sentiment and value to you."

He glanced at the box as he spoke, and it was curious to note the mixture of gloating and yet of something like shrinking that seemed to affect him for an instant.

"Then imagine it going away from England, and how would you feel? That is how I feel."

Though Vincent had treated his profession lightly enough, he had yet acquired something of its scepticism and something of its mask.

"I see," was his only remark.

"If you see, surely you can also feel a little."

Again Vincent looked at him without discernible expression.

"Well?" he asked.

"Well, Mr. Barlow, I offer you three hundred pounds for that vase."

"Unfortunately it isn't mine to sell."

"Four hundred pounds!"

"I tell you, Mr. von Helmolt, it isn't mine to sell."

"Five hundred pounds! Come now, Mr. Barlow, I know all about you. You have debts; you need money. You can give your uncle whatever share of that five hundred pounds you choose. It covers nearly ten times what he paid, so there will be plenty for you both. Or, if you like, the box might simply get stolen——"

"I think I hear my train," said Vincent.

As he rose, the other laid his hand beseechingly on his arm.

"But surely, my friend——"

Vincent shook the hand off with a sharp movement of his arm, so sharp that it struck against the chair between them and the box upon it rattled and slid an inch or two toward the edge.

The most extraordinary change came over Helmolt.

"For God's sake!" he cried in an agonized voice.

But on the instant Vincent had seized the rope round the box, and the man's cry died into a gasp of relief.

"If you were to break that vase——"

Again he broke off and looked at Barlow half-imploringly and half-menacingly.

"If you break it, or any one breaks it—beware! That which is in it—⁠ Oh, my God, but it must not get broken! It must not!"

Vincent looked at him with a kindlier expression. The man was mad, he felt certain, and he said to him soothingly:

"That's all right, I shall be careful. Don't worry about it."

A distant rumble rose faintly above the voices of the wind. This time he knew it actually was the train, and with a nod and a "good evening" he crossed the room toward the platform.

Glancing over his shoulder as he went through the swinging door, he saw Helmolt with his feet planted apart and his head a little thrust forward, staring, it seemed, at the box he carried rather than at himself.

"Obviously mad," he said to himself with the confidence of youth.

SHORTLY after seven o'clock Dr. Anstruther left his house to dine at the hall. He had to pass through the straggling street of the little village on his way, where the greatest house was the small ancient tavern obscurely styled "The Yellow Mouse" (a quadruped surmised by the learned to be descended from the "Maunch d'or" in the arms of the early lords of Urby).

In the light of a young moon its signboard hung black above the side-walk, and beyond, a dark figure approached. Every inhabitant of the village was well known to the doctor by this time, and this man was not one of them, he decided.

As they drew nearer, there seemed to be something vaguely familiar in the figure—a young man in an overcoat and a dark felt hat, he seemed to be; and then before they had approached near enough to see more distinctly, the stranger turned into The Yellow Mouse. A curious suspicion shot through the doctor's mind.

It was barely half-past seven when he passed through the lodge-gates, and as he still had plenty of time, he strolled slowly up the avenue. Two lines of tall beech-trees nearly met over his head, but their leaves were fast thinning and the crescent moon gave light enough to see glimpses of the park on either hand, and, more dimly, the gray old house ahead.

He noticed that the air was unusually still for the time of year in those regions. Under the trees the evening, indeed, felt even close.

"If it were July, one would expect thunder," he thought.

So constantly did Dr. Anstruther dine at the hall and so unvarying was the routine that it gave him a sharp shock of surprize to find himself shown into the drawing-room. Save on the very rare occasions when there were a party of other guests, it had always been the library; but tonight a fire was burning here, and, what surprized him afresh, a paper and a couple of magazines seemed to show that the colonel had been sitting there during the afternoon.

"Some repairs must be going on in the library," he deduced.

Colonel Barlow entered, a middle-sized, wiry-looking man with a weather-beaten face and a quiet, resolute eye. A mouth and chin firm to the point of obstinacy gave a hint of the qualities that had given him a fighting-reputation still remembered in India, and since then made him the most pertinacious and indefatigable of collectors.

Yet tranquil good humor was the chief impression given by his face in repose, and still more so when he spoke and smiled.

"You've moved into the drawing-room, I see," said his friend, and once again he was surprized, this time to find his remark barely answered.

Colonel Barlow murmured something vague about "a change," and then, as usual in that house, dinner was announced with military punctuality.

The colonel detested the trammels of conventionality and made it a rule that his servants should not stand about in the dining-room overhearing the conversation. When he wanted to talk, he liked to talk freely, and tonight he began abruptly—

"Vincent has been down here for the week-end."

"You told me he was coming."

"His manners are not improving."

"His manners!"

The doctor stared at his host.

"What's the matter with them?"

"He has been spending too much money," said the colonel shortly. "And when I told him what I thought of his extravagance, he was rude to me. I can't stand rudeness, Anstruther, even from Vincent."

Dr. Anstruther got a very sharp and a very unpleasant shock of surprize this time. The mere fact of a quarrel between this uncle and nephew, usually the best of friends and mutually attached, was astonishing. His host's petulant irritation was, knowing the man so well, perhaps even more unexpected.

"What actually happened?" he asked quietly.

Colonel Barlow hesitated. He was a reserved man and strongly averse from the discussion of matters that touched him nearly, but gradually in the course of the dinner he let fall the incidents of his nephew's visit and their unfortunate conversation.

And as they came out, Dr. Anstruther wondered the more. There seemed to have been no reasonable grounds at all for any serious difference; either on the part of uncle or nephew. There was no story, in fact, to tell, unless something were being held back.

Yet there seemed to be the less reason to suspect this, since his host's resentment seemed gradually to fade away, till by the time the mahogany table was cleared, after the custom of the house, and the port was passed, it had quite vanished, and he was his old quiet self again. It was as if the fumes of something disagreeable had dissipated at last.

Both men were abstemious drinkers and heavy smokers, and as a rule after a glass of port they adjourned at once to the library, but tonight Colonel Barlow passed the decanter thrice and then had the cigars brought into the dining-room. And all the while Dr. Anstruther was conscious that he had not yet talked of all he meant to. At last he said, a little abruptly—

"Well, Anstruther, I bought that vase after all."

"I thought you would—just to show your independence of my opinion."

The doctor smiled a little as he spoke, but there was no smile in response.

"It is—" began the colonel, and then hesitated. "It's a devilish queer article."

Dr. Anstruther nodded.

"I suspected that would attract you."

"It doesn't attract me now——"

Again Colonel Barlow broke off and then added:

"And yet in a way it does. Come and have a look at it."

He jumped up suddenly and walked quickly to the door, like a man bracing himself to do something he shrank from, the doctor noticed, and it struck him forcibly that in all his long friendship with Barlow he had never seen him act quite like this before.

Entering the library at Urby Hall after a pleasant dinner with his old friend and with an evening's talk ahead always appealed to Dr. Anstruther as one of the happy moments of life. The innumerable multitude of books in their ordered rows, the wide blazing fire making the gilt letters twinkle, the shaded lamps, the old leathern easy-chairs and the aroma of excellent cigars seemed to him to leave nothing else for fancy to desire. But tonight as he crossed the threshold he realized on the instant, without a word said by either, why the colonel had been sitting in the drawing-room, why he had lingered over dinner, even why he had quarreled with his nephew.

His eyes turned at once and instinctively to the left, again without a word to prompt him, and he saw the vase from his first step into the room. It stood on top of the long bookcase that ran down that side of the room, a little above the level of his head, and from that height the squat gross figure seemed to look down at him with a smile at once intimately familiar and contemptuous.

And behind the smile there exuded an atmosphere for which he could not find a name which should sum up what he could only call its beastliness.

Colonel Barlow closed the door, and both men went to the fire and then turned and stood side by side with their backs to it, gazing at the vase.

"Well, Barlow, frankly I don't call it pretty," said the doctor at last, and as he spoke, he had an odd feeling that his criticism was overheard; as if he were half-aware of some one behind the curtains or under the table.

"It's the most hideous thing I ever bought."

"Too outré, as Mr. Waldron calls it, even for you?"

"Yes," said the colonel curtly, and then in a moment added with a touch of impatience most unusual in his voice, "Well, if you've looked at it long enough, let's sit down."

They sat down with their backs to the vase, and each in turn tried to start the conversation, but it lapsed after a sentence or two. Nearly five minutes of dead silence followed, and then, though he had tried to turn his thoughts in every other direction, Dr. Anstruther found himself asking suddenly—

"Did you have your talk with Vincent in his room?"

The colonel nodded.

"With that thing standing there?"

"Yes," said the colonel, looking straight into the fire.

The doctor said nothing more, but he was amazed to catch himself accepting a bit of old china as a perfectly adequate explanation of why two of the most good-humored men of his acquaintance should lose their tempers.

All at once Colonel Barlow threw his cigar away and jumped up as if to get a pipe from the mantelpiece. He put out his hand to the pipe-rack and then withdrew it, turned round and abruptly exclaimed:

"I'm going to turn the damned thing round. I can't stand the look of that creature."

Dr. Anstruther saw him go to the book-shelf and put up his hand.

"I can reach it better," he suggested, jumping up too.

But it was one of the colonel's few little weaknesses that he disliked being thought short of stature. He did not even condescend to rise on tiptoe, but with an impatient movement tried to turn the vase well above his head.

"Steady!" exclaimed the doctor.

The vase was swaying already and before he could stride across the room the thing had happened. Colonel Barlow just managed to break its fall or it would have shivered into a hundred fragments. As it was, it broke with a crash and lay in three great pieces on the floor.

"My God!" said the colonel, and if the doctor did not say it, he thought it.

And it was not the mere accident that affected them. Recalling his feeling afterward, it seemed to Dr. Anstruther—and Colonel Barlow confessed to the same sensation—as if the nasty atmosphere of that room had become concentrated a hundred-fold. And then both men found themselves breathing easily and even smiling at each other over the pieces of china. It was as if a cloud had burst in thunder and a fresh, clean breeze sprung up.

"That's a lesson to a young man to be careful," said the colonel with his usual good-humored philosophy.

"Yes," said the doctor dryly, "you can't give that vase away as a wedding present."

"I can't afford to do this sort of thing often," added the colonel, though with singularly little appearance of annoyance for a man who had just broken an exceedingly valuable curio.

They picked up the pieces and laid them on top of the bookcase again, and it struck Dr. Anstruther as a curious circumstance that the squat figure seen in two halves, though ugly as ever, seemed to have quite lost his peculiar repulsiveness. And when he remarked on this, his friend agreed with him.

When they returned to the fire and lighted their pipes and fell into their accustomed leather chairs, their talk started straightway on its familiar lines.

"We'll shoot the North Side on Friday," began the colonel.

"'Lining that high hedge for the first drive as usual, I suppose?" said the doctor.

WHEN Dr. Anstruther left a few minutes after midnight, the young moon was then low in the sky and it was appreciably darker in the avenue. The glimpses of the park were dimmer, the shadows through which he walked were blacker, and the air, it seemed to him, had grown still closer. The doctor, in fact, soon threw off his overcoat and strode down toward the lodge-gates with his white shirt-front making a little light spot in the gloom.

For some reason his thoughts went back suddenly and vividly to his old days in a certain frontier station, when the tribes were restless and sentries were being sniped by daylight and suffered a still gorier fate at night.

"A nice mark this shirt would make, if there were a Pathan behind one of those trees," he thought; and then, to his annoyance, he caught himself glancing suspiciously to the right and left in turn and even quickening his stride a trifle.

"I am growing senile," he said to himself, and the next instant stopped dead with a sudden contraction in the region of his heart.

A dark figure was actually standing within five paces of him, a figure that first seemed to loom up to a gigantic height, and then, as he kept his eyes hard and frowning upon it, appeared to shrink to a lesser stature than his own. Neither said a word, but he was conscious both of an intense scrutiny and of a swift return of that same repellent sensation he had felt in the library.

"You'll know me next time, my man," he rapped out in his harshest voice—and Dr. Anstruther's voice could be very formidable. "Who are you?"

Without a sound the figure slunk away, so swiftly that in another instant it had utterly vanished into the shadows, and yet so silently that he did not even hear a footfall. He strode to where he judged it to have stood and said to himself:

"The fellow must have been standing on the grass, though I could have sworn he was nearer. Who the devil can it have been?"

To give chase was so obviously futile that after peering into the shadows for a minute or two he resumed his walk down the avenue. More and more slowly he paced, till, when he reached the lodge-gates, he stopped short for the space of several minutes. The stranger had apparently been coming in the opposite direction and had certainly gone on toward the hall, and the more he reflected on this, the stronger grew the doctor's reluctance to leave his friend's house unwatched and unwarned.

To stand by the avenue and expose himself seemed unlike the conduct of a thief; still, it had been a suspicious incident.

And then the spirit of the old hunter decided the matter. He put on his overcoat again to hide his shirt-front, pulled his soft hat down over his face and retraced his steps, walking on the grass this time.

All the way up the avenue he saw not a glimpse of a living thing and heard not a sound, though the night was so still that the breaking of the slightest twig would have been audible to his keen ears. The house, as he drew near, was a dark mass unbroken by a glimmer of light and to all appearances quiet as the grave.

Skirting the gravel, and all the while divided between the fear of making himself look foolish for his pains and an insistent haunting sense that all was not well with that house tonight, he passed round the corner and entered a flower-garden that lay beneath the library windows.

And there he stopped dead. Through a chink in the curtain he could see a ray of light escaping from one of those windows. Knowing his friend's habits to a nicety, he could count on the colonel's smoking one last small pipe after his own departure and then going off to bed. He had had time enough by now to finish his pipe and be off, and the light then meant he was a little later than usual.

Keeping on the grass, Dr. Anstruther stole along till he was almost opposite the window, and then he stopped again abruptly. He could see now that the window was a few inches down at the top, and in the dead silence of that still, heavy night a murmur of voices had reached him, faint but unmistakable.

Dr. Anstruther ought to have felt reassured. There were several possible solutions of the problem of who the second person could be—the colonel's old soldier butler, for instance, or the housekeeper with a report of a servant ill. And it was manifest that there were no high words or quarreling. Yet, instead of reassurance, a dreadful, nameless uneasiness seized upon the doctor and kept him there with his muscles instinctively braced like an animal ready to spring.

Faintly he heard the murmur of voices, so faintly at that distance and through the curtains that it was impossible even to tell which party was speaking; yet the doctor had the strangest fancy that he knew one from the other by a curious feeling which seemed to affect him when one spoke.

He was telling himself that this was the idlest freak of imagination, when he heard, low but quite plainly, a laugh, and at that—imagination or no imagination—his scalp tingled and for the instant he could not have moved even if he would.

Dead and utter silence followed for minute after minute, and then out went the light; the window became of the same blackness as the creeper-covered wall, and Dr. Anstruther turned away at last. An instinct as strong as that which had brought him back seemed to tell him that the danger had passed from the house.

It struck him then that if a stranger—that figure in the avenue perchance—had entered the house and conversed with his friend, he might see him emerge from the front door. And so he hastened out of the garden and round the corner of the house, but though he stood under the shadows for several minutes, he saw nothing.

Then it occurred to him that if there had been a visitor. Colonel Barlow would most probably have shown him out before extinguishing the library lights, and so he set off again.

"I must never let Barlow know I've been spying on him," he said to himself, for he knew that one of the few things his old friend would find it hard to forgive was anything like an attempt to surprize a confidence he had not given spontaneously himself. And, indeed, no man could feel a stronger sympathy for this sensitive reticence than Dr. Anstruther, for his own sentiments were precisely the same.

As he went down the drive, he glanced at his watch and noticed that it was then quarter past eleven.

SOME shooting-details to be arranged made Dr. Anstruther's excuse for walking up to the hall next morning after breakfast. Even from himself he tried to conceal the truth that he was devoured with something between apprehension and curiosity to learn what had happened last night, for in his estimation curiosity was a vulgar vice and apprehension a foolish weakness.

But even if he did not see through himself as he hastened to Urby Hall at twice his usual pace, he realized it quickly enough when he found his old friend smoking a pipe in his library, apparently as imperturbable as ever. The intense relief came almost as a shock.

Yet he had only been in the library a couple of minutes when it became clear to his watchful eye that the colonel's composure was not unlike his own—a veteran's contempt for ruffled nerves. They talked of shooting briefly, and both fell silent, and then abruptly Colonel Barlow said, with a forced laugh—

"I was half-thinking of coming to see you professionally today, Anstruther."

"What's the matter?"

"Something I ate or drank must have upset me, I suppose. I don't often have nightmares, but I had a bad one last night—soon after you left me, in fact."

"Soon after I left?" repeated the doctor in rather an odd voice.

"I must have fallen asleep in my chair. I mean," added the colonel, correcting himself quickly, "I did fall asleep in my chair."

"And you had a dream—a nightmare—before you went up-stairs, and—er—before you put the lights out and so on?"

Colonel Barlow nodded.

Extraordinary thing," he said.

"Very," agreed Dr. Anstruther.

The colonel began pacing the room as he smoked—with unusually quick steps, his friend noticed.

"It was damnably vivid. That infernal vase seemed to have put it into my brain—and its infernal name."

"Its name?" repeated the doctor.

Colonel Barlow stopped his walk sharply and looked for an instant at his friend. He seemed to hesitate and then resumed his pacing and said, in a curiously confused and indirect way for him:

"Connection of ideas, I suppose. If the thing hadn't been absolutely impossible, I'd almost have—⁠ Do you know it wasn't till this morning that I thoroughly realized it was only a dream?"

He stopped at the turn of his walk and for a moment was silent. Then in a lowered voice he began—

"Do you know, Anstruther, I actually dreamed——"

At that moment the butler entered.

"Mrs. Summerton wishes to see you, sir," he announced.

The colonel had been so carried away by what was in his mind that for a moment he looked at his butler in silence.

"Mrs. Summerton of the Yellow Mouse, sir," added the man.

The colonel turned to his friend.

"Will you excuse me for a few minutes, Anstruther?"

"Beg pardon, sir," put in the butler, "but I think Mrs. Summerton would like to see Dr. Anstruther too, he being a magistrate likewise."

"Oh," said the colonel, "she wants to see us as magistrates, does she? Well, show her in."

The woman who entered was elderly, pale, and very respectably dressed; a woman of a naturally quiet and superior type, one would judge at once, and yet, as evidently, a woman who had come through some very disturbing and very recent experience. And hardly had the door closed behind her before she swayed, threw out an arm to find support, and dropped into a chair.

A LITTLE later she told them this story:

"He came by the morning train yesterday—a German gentleman he was, sir, or leastways a German. Helmolt was his name, he said, and he wanted a room at the Yellow Mouse. As you know, sir, we don't have many strangers in Chipping-Urby. I hadn't had not one of his class—that's to say judging of his class to look at him from his clothes and such like—not since my husband died a year ago come January, and there's only myself and my niece Lizzie in the house now. Of course there's the lad George, too, but he doesn't live on the premises, and no experience he's had of waiting on gentlemen either.

"So naturally, sir, I was a little doubtful at first if the gentleman would find satisfaction; and I says to him quite plainly what was in my mind.

"'Oh, I won't give you no trouble, Mrs. Summerton,' says he, and, to be sure, he was as good as his word. Indeed, sir, a nicer, more modest-like gentleman I never had to do with than this Mr. Helmolt—down to last night."

"What was he like?"

"Oh, quite a young man, sir, with his hair that close-cropped I'd have thought he'd been a convict, if he hadn't have been a foreigner. Very fair he was, with blue eyes and such a quiet, civil, well-brought-up young man, too. He found my poor husband's flute and played tunes on it and played with the kitten too all the time he was in the house. I says to Lizzie, 'Never did I see a young man with more peaceable tastes!'"

"Did he wear a black felt hat and tight trousers and shoes that looked as if they were made of brown paper?" asked the doctor.

"He did indeed, sir! That's the very things he did wear. Oh, I quite took pity on him when I saw how foreign he was. He asked such funny questions too; one would have called him inquisitive if he'd been English. A lot about you, sir, he asked—" she was turning now to Colonel Barlow—"and whether you was very rich, and about your curiosities. Whether did you keep them long or sell them again, and if I'd heard of your buying anything in particular lately. But I just answered so he was none the wiser by the end.

"And then in the afternoon off he goes for a walk and was away that long I'd have thought he'd have walked miles, but George tells me that old Thomas Walker tells him that all the distance he went was up to the hall here and rambled round the park and stood for nigh an hour on end behind the big yew hedge, staring at the house, like as if he'd fallen into a trance."

"By gad!" exclaimed the colonel. "I saw the fellow myself from this very window. I spotted him as he was walking away. I remember wondering who he was and thinking he was too respectable-looking to be up to mischief."

"Behind the yew hedge?" said the doctor, half to himself. "He'd be looking toward the library then."

"Yes, sir, and so he would," said Mrs. Summerton, "though he says nothing to me or Lizzie of where he'd been. When he came back, he had tea, and after that he seemed to get restless-like, and at last out he goes again. It was beginning to get dark by then, and quite dark it was when he came back, saving only for the moon. And from what George can hear, do you know where he'd been, sir? Up to the hall again and staring at the house."

"Again?" exclaimed Colonel Barlow. "What the deuce was the attraction?"

"When did he get back the second time?" asked Dr. Anstruther.

"Some time after seven o'clock, sir."

"Ah!" said the doctor. "I thought that was the man. I saw him turning into The Yellow Mouse. What happened then?"

"Well, sir, he just went in to the little parlor up-stairs. I'd given him the little parlor to himself, for there was no one else staying in the house and I thought he'd like to be private and comfortable-like, and there he was for the rest of the evening—up till the time he came out."

Mrs. Summerton's tone fell and she shivered a little.

"You are sure he was in the parlor all the time?" asked the doctor.

"Oh, quite sure, sir. Lizzie was in and out once or twice, bringing him his supper and seeing to the fire. Besides, we'd have heard him if he'd gone out.

"Well, sir, it got to be late at last and there was no customers in and George had gone away, and I had just been to lock the front door and was thinking about going to bed, when something made me look over my shoulder as I had almost got back to the kitchen. It was kind of shadowy behind me, for I'd put out the lamp in the front passage, but I'll swear to my dying-day, sir, I saw a black figure of a man crossing the front passage very quick, as if he'd come through the front door, and disappearing up the stairs. And I'd just locked the front door myself—and never a sound of his footsteps did I hear. How I got back into the kitchen without falling down in a faint I don't rightly know, sir."

"What o'clock was this?" asked the doctor with a curious intensity in his voice.

"I happened to notice, sir, it was just quarter-past eleven when I left the kitchen."

Dr. Anstruther nodded in silence, and as if to himself, and the colonel asked—

"Did you see his face?"

"No I did not, sir, and thankful I was too, for what I did see made me more of a tremble than ever I've been before in my life."

"But was it actually anybody? Did you see him again?"

"I never saw or heard but one man in the house, sir," she said in a low voice, "and whether there actually was two or which it was I saw, that I don't know. But I'll tell you the very truth, sir, just as it happened.

"When I got into the kitchen, Lizzie was for laughing at my notions and saying it was either the shadows or perhaps the strange gentleman up-stairs come down for a moment and then gone up again. So at last I let myself be persuaded I was foolish and yet I wanted to make sure, so I took a lamp in my hand and went into the passage and up the stairs to see if I could hear if there was voices or anything in the little parlor."

"Was there?" asked the colonel.

"No, sir. There was just dead silence; I can swear to that. But just as I was near the top of the stairs, his door opened a chink and I saw him plainly peering out. Oh, sir, the difference in his eyes!"

She paused for an instant and shivered afresh.

"It was not like the same young man at all. And then he spoke—just one word, but it was enough. I was holding the lamp before me and it was quite dark behind me and so his eyes would be dazzled and he wouldn't be able to see rightly who it was. That's how he came to make the mistake.

"'Lizzie!' he says, and if you heard a girl being addressed at night in a voice like that, sir, you'd know the man didn't mean much good.

"I gave a little scream—I couldn't help myself—and so he knew then who it was. He said just one word that time, too; it was in his own language but I knew it was a curse-word, and then he banged the door again, and I was just able to get down without dropping that lamp, and no more, sir!"

"And then?" asked the colonel quietly.

"Then, sir, I put off going up those stairs again to my bedroom just as long as I could, and all the while I was wondering if I could say anything to Lizzie. For she's a kind of innocent high-spirited girl and I feared she'd just laugh at my fancies.

"For he'd only just said her name, mind you, sir; and could I explain to her how he'd said it? Then says she, 'I'm that sleepy, auntie, I'm going off to my bed,' and so we both went up then. And I'd been in my room about ten minutes when suddenly I heard the girl scream!"

"Yes?" said the colonel, still quietly.

"I was at my door just in time to open it to her, and it was all the two of us could do to get it shut and locked in his face. You can guess yourself, sir, what he'd been after, but you'll hardly guess what he did when she struggled with him. He just hit her on the eye with his fist and it was all black and swelled up by the time she'd got to me."

"My God!" murmured the colonel, very quietly indeed this time.

The Gurkhas who had fought under him could have told you instantly what that quiet meant.

"Oh, how he swore, sir, and shook the door. And then suddenly it grew even worse. He was quite still for minutes and minutes on end—it seemed hours to me, sir—and we could hear him breathing and feeling about the door with his fingers.

"And then we thought we heard him going down-stairs, but we weren't sure, and there was nothing we could do except put the chest of drawers against the door and just wait. My room's at the back of the house, sir, and there's no one who could have heard us if we'd cried for help.

"Then at last, when it had been quite quiet for a long time, we heard the cat cry out once down below, and then gentle sounds of his moving about and other queer sounds that we couldn't understand till morning. And that was the way the night passed with us, sir."

"And in the morning?"

"When we knew that neighbors would be about at last, we ventured out. He was gone then, but he'd done what was almost the worst thing of all. He had heated the poker and burned some writing on my nice mahogany table. It's the one thing in my house I'm proud of, sir. And I'd told him it was, too. And on the table was a bucket of water and Lizzie's kitten—the one he'd been playing with—was tying drowned at the bottom of it."

"Do you know where he's got to?" the colonel rapped out like a rifle-shot.

"He had slipped out of the house without our hearing him and caught the early train to London."

"Damn!" murmured the colonel with the profoundest disappointment.

"And not a penny has he paid me—and my table is ruined!"

"What did he write on it?" asked Dr. Anstruther.

Mrs. Summerton took a sheet of note-paper from her pocket.

"I wrote it down, sir, for I knew I couldn't carry it in my head."

On the paper they read:

 

My compliments and farewell to you and Barlow and dirty little England. They can keep their vase now. And you can keep your slut.

 

"And such a quiet peaceable young man he seemed!" cried the poor woman. "Do you think, sir, was he taken suddenly mad?"

The two men were looking at each other.

"The vase—that was what he was after!" exclaimed the colonel.

The doctor nodded.

"I knew that," he murmured.

"This happened after it was broken!"

Again the doctor nodded.

Colonel Barlow turned to Mrs. Summerton and led her to the door, talking gentry.

"I'll make the damage good," he said as she went out, "and if I can catch the fellow——"

HE CAME back to his friend and both were silent for a space. Then the colonel said in a very serious voice.

"What I dreamed last night was that Satan himself walked into my library and tried to tempt me. It was a damned queer form of temptation too—not the usual thing one reads of. I was to be the swept and garnished house and he was to inhabit me. I dreamed I told him I'd get my dog-whip to him, and then I dreamed he laughed and went away."

Dr. Anstruther seemed for an instant about to say something and then held his peace.

"I didn't tell you last night, Anstruther," continued the colonel, "that I'd heard from Marshley & Waldron and they'd told me the legend about the vase. The gentleman in question is said to have been imprisoned in it—shut up in that beastly figure—some hundreds of years ago, and if the vase was broken, he'd get out. I didn't tell you because—er—well, the whole thing was beastly and had got a bit on my nerves. When I had the dream, I thought of course that that yarn had put it into my brain."

Again Dr. Anstruther made no answer, and in a moment the colonel said—

"If one believed in such things, one would say he had found his swept and garnished house."

This time Dr. Anstruther nodded emphatically.

COLONEL BARLOW saw the local police at once and they communicated with London, but by the time Mr. Helmolt's address had been discovered, he had departed for his native land.

"Where they will regret the breaking of that vase some day," observed Dr. Anstruther grimly. "Or were we all off our heads—or simply dreaming?"

"Time will show," said Colonel Barlow.