His hand moved lazily to his hip pocket to get a cigarette, but half way to it he abandoned the attempt as too much trouble, wriggling down instead more comfortably among the cushions.
He wasn’t sleepynot a bit. His brain had never been more active and his thoughts turned for a moment to his friends at Cardinals Folly. They, too, would be wide awake, braced, no doubt, under De Richleau’s determined leadership, to face an attack from the powers of evil. De Richleau must be feeling pretty sleepy he thought. Neither of them had had more than three hours that morning after their exhausting night. They hadn’t got to bed much before dawn the night before either, and the Duke had been up, according to Max, at seven in order to be at the British Museum directly it opened. Say six hours in sixty. That wasn’t much, but De Richleau was an old campaigner and he would stick it all right, Rex had no doubt.
He glanced at the clock, thinking it almost time that Tanith should rejoin him, but saw that the slow-moving hand had only advanced two minutes. ‘Amazing how time drags when one is watching it,’ he thought, and his mind wandered on to the reflection that he had been mighty wise not to drink anything but that one glass of sherry and the burgundy for dinner. He would probably have been horribly drowsy by now if he had been fool enough to fall for the cocktails or the port. But he wasn’t sleepynot a bit.
His mind began to form little mental pictures of some of those strange episodes which he had lived through in the last two daysold Madame D’Urfe smoking her cigar and then Tanith; Max arranging the cushions in De Richleau’s electric canoe at Pangbourne, and then Tanith again. That plausible old humbug Wilkes serving the Clos de Vougoet with meticulous care mighty fine thing he made out of this pub no doubtand then Tanith once more, sitting opposite him at table, with the soft glow of the shaded electric lamp lighting her oval face and throwing strange shadows in the silken web of her golden hair.
He glanced at the clock againanother minute had crawled by, and then he pictured Tanith as he had seen her only a few moments before, bending to kiss him, her face warm and flushed by the firelight, and those strange, deep, age-old eyes of hers smiling tenderly into his beneath their heavy, half-lowered lids. It must be this strange wonderful love for her, he thought, which kept him so alive and alert, for ordinarily his healthy body demanded its fair share of sleep and he would have been nodding his head off by this time. He could still see those glorious golden eyes of hers smiling into his. The face above them was indistinct and vague, but they remained clear and shining in the shadows on the far side of the fireplace. The eyes were changing now a littlelosing their colour and fading from gold to grey and then to a pale-ish blue. Yet their brightness seemed to increase and they grew bigger as he held them with his mental gaze.
He thought for a second of glancing at the clock again. It seemed that Tanith had left him ages ago now, but judging by the time it had taken for that long hand to crawl through three minutes space he felt that it could hardly yet have covered the other two. Besides, he did not want to lose the focus of those strange, bright eyes which he could see so plainly when he half closed his own.
Rex wasn’t sleepynot a bit. But time is an illusion, and Rex never afterwards knew how long he sat awake there in the semi-darkness. Perhaps during the first portion of his watch some strange power deluded his vision and the clock had in reality moved on while he only thought that the minutes dragged so heavily. In any case, those eyes that watched him from the shadows were his last conscious thought, and next moment Rex was sound asleep.
CHAPTER XXVII
WITHIN THE PENTACLE
While Rex slumbered evenly and peacefully before the dying fire in the lounge of the Pride of Peacocks, Richard, Marie Lou, the Duke and Simon waited in the pentacle, on the floor of the library at Cardinals Folly, for the dreary hours of night to drag their way to morning.
They lay with their heads towards the centre of the circle and their feet towards the rim, forming a human cross, but although they did not speak for a long time after they had settled down, none of them managed to drop off to sleep.
The layer of clean sheets and blankets beneath them was pleasant enough to rest on for a while, but the hard, unyielding floorboards under it soon began to cause them discomfort. The bright flames of the burning candles and the steady glow of the electric light showed pink through their closed eyelids, making repose difficult, and they were all keyed up to varying degrees of anxious expectancy.
Marie Lou was restless and miserable. Nothing but her fondness for Simon, and the Duke’s plea that the presence of Richard and herself would help enormously in his protection, would have induced her to play any part in such proceedings. Her firm belief in the supernatural filled her with grim forebodings, and she tried in vain to shut out her fears by sleep. Every little noise that broke the brooding stillness, the creaking of a beam as the old house eased itself upon its foundations, or the whisper of the breeze as it rustled the leaves of the trees in the garden, caused her to start wide awake again, her muscles taut with alarm and apprehension.
Richard did not attempt to sleep. He lay revolving a number of problems in his mind. Fleur d’amour’s birthday was in a couple of weeks’ time. The child was easy, but a present for Marie Lou was a different question. It must be something that she wanted and yet a surprise. A difficult matter when she already had everything with which his fine fortune could endow her, and jewellery was not only banal but absurd. The sale of the lesser stones among the Shulimoff treasure, which they had brought out of Russia, had realised enough to provide her with a handsome independent income and her retention of the finer gems alone equipped her magnificently in that direction. He toyed with the idea of buying her a two-year-old. He was not a racing man but she was fond of horses and it would be fun for her to see her own run at the lesser meetings.
After a while he turned restlessly on to his tummy, and began to ponder this wretched muddle into which Simon had got himself. The more he thought about it the less he could subscribe to the Duke’s obvious beliefs. That so-called Black Magic was still practised in most of the Continental capitals and many of the great cities in America, he knew. He had even met a man, a few years before, who had told him that he had attended a celebration of the Black Mass at a house in the Earls Court district of London, yet he could not credit that it had been anything more than a flimsy excuse for a crowd of intellectual decadents to get disgustingly drunk and participate in a wholesale sexual orgy. Simon was not that sort, or a fool either, so it was certainly queer that he should have got himself mixed up with such beastliness.
Richard turned over again, yawned, glanced at his friend whom, he decided, he had never seen look more normal, and wondered if, out of courtesy to the Duke, he could possibly continue to play his part in this tedious farce until morning.
The banishing rituals which De Richleau had performed upon Simon the previous night at Stonehenge had certainly proved successful, and he had had a good sound sleep that afternoon. His brain was now quick and clear as it had been in the old days and, although Mocata’s threats were principally directed against himself, he was by far the most cheerful of the party. Despite his recent experience, his natural humour bubbling up very nearly caused him to laugh at the thought of them all lying on that hard floor because he had made an idiot of himself, and Richard’s obvious disgust at the discomforts imposed by the Duke caused him much amusement. Nevertheless, he recognised that his desire to laugh was mainly due to nervous tension, and accepted with full understanding the necessity for these extreme precautions. To think, for only a second, of how narrow his escape had been was enough to sober instantly any tendency to mirth and send a quick shudder through his limbs. He was only anxious now, having dragged his friends into this horrible affair, to cause them as little further trouble as possible by following the Duke’s leadership without question. With resolute determination he kept his thoughts away from any of his past dealings with Mocata and set himself to endure his comfortless couch with philosophi
c patience.
To outward appearances De Richleau slept. He lay perfectly still on his back breathing evenly and almost imperceptibly, but he had always been able to do with very little sleep. Actually lie was recruiting his forces in a manner that was not possible to the others. That gentle rhythmic breathing, perfectly but unconsciously timed from long practice, was the way of the Raja Yoga, which he had learned when young, and all the time he visualised himself, the others, the whole room as blueblueblue, the colour vibration which gives love and sympathy and spiritual attainment. Yet he was conscious of every tiny movement made by the others; the gentle sighing of the breeze outside, and the occasional plop of burning logs as they fell into the embers. For over two hours he barely moved a muscle but all his senses remained watchful and alert.
The night seemed never-ending. Outside the wind dropped and a steady rain began to fall, dripping with monotonous regularity from the eaves on to the terrace. Richard became more and more sore from the hard floor. He was tired now and bored by this apparently senseless vigil. He thought that it must be about half-past one, and daylight would not come to release them from their voluntary prison before half-past five or six. That meant another four hours of this acute and momentarily increasing discomfort. As he tossed and turned it grew upon him with ever-increasing force how stupid and futile this whole affair seemed to be. De Richleau was so obviously the victim of a gang of clever tricksters, and his wide reading on obscure subjects had caused his imagination to run away with him. To pander to such folly any longer simply was not good enough. With these thoughts now dominating his mind Richard suddenly sat up.
‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’m sick of this. A joke’s a joke, but we’ve had no lunch and precious little dinner, and I haven’t had a drink all day. Some of you have got far too lively an imagination, and we are making utter fools of ourselves. We had better go upstairs. If you’re really frightened of anything happening to Simon, we could easily shift our beds into one room and all sleep within a hand’s reach of each other. Nobody will be able to get at him then. But frankly, at the moment, I think we’re behaving like a lot of lunatics.’
De Richleau rose with a jerk and gave him a sharp look from beneath his grey slanting devil’s eyebrows. ‘Something’s beginning to happen,’ he told himself swiftly. ‘They’re working upon Richard, because he’s the most sceptical amongst us, to try and make him break up the pentacle.’ Aloud he said quietly: ‘So you’re still unconvinced that Simon is in real danger, Richard?’
‘Yes, I am.’ Richard’s voice held an angry aggressive note quite foreign to his normal manner. ‘I regard this Black Magic business as stupid nonsense. If you could cite me a single case where so-called magicians have actually done their stuff before sane people it would be different. But they’re charlatansevery one of them. Take Cagliostrohe was supposed to make gold but nobody ever saw any of it, and when the Inquisition got hold of him they bunged him in a dungeon in Rome and he died there in abject misery. His Black Magic couldn’t even procure him a hunk of bread. Look at Catherine de Medici. She was a witch on the grand scale if ever there was onebuilt a special tower at Vincennes for Cosimo Ruggeri, an Italian sorcerer. They used to slit up babies and practise all sorts of abominations there together night after night to ensure the death of Henry of Navarre and the birth of children to her own sons. But it didn’t do her a ha’porth of good. All four died childless so that at last, despite all her bloody sacrifices, the House of Valois was extinct, and Henry, the hated Bearnais, became King of France after all. Come nearer home if you like. Take that absurd Eliphas Levi who was supposed to be the Grand High Whatnot in Victorian times. Did you ever read his book, The Doctrine and Ritual of Magic? In his introduction he professes that he is going to tell you all about the game and that he’s written a really practical book, by the aid of which anybody who likes can raise the devil, and perform all sorts of monkey tricks. He drools on for hundreds of pages about fiery swords and tetragrams and the terrible aqua poffana, but does he tell you anything? Not a blessed thing. Once it comes to a showdown he hedges like the crook he was and tells you that such mysteries are far too terrible and dangerous to be entrusted to the profane. Mysterious balderdash my friend. I’m going to have a good strong nightcap and go to bed.’
Marie Lou looked at him in amazement. Never before had she heard Richard denounce any subject with such passion and venom. Ordinarily, he possessed an extremely open mind and, if he doubted any statement, confined himself to a kindly but slightly cynical expression of disbelief. It was extraordinary that he should suddenly forget even his admirable manners and be downright rude to one of his greatest friends.
De Richleau studied his face with quiet understanding and as Richard stood up he stood up too, laying his hand upon the younger man’s shoulder. ‘Richard,’ he said. ‘You think I’m a superstitious fool, don’t you?’
No!’ Richard shrugged uncomfortably. ‘Only that you’ve been through a pretty difficult time and, quite frankly, that your imagination is a bit overstrained at the moment.’
The Duke smiled. ‘All right, perhaps you are correct, but we have been friends for a long time now and this business tonight has not interfered with our friendship in any way, has it?’
‘Why, of course not. You know that.’
‘Then, if I begged of you to do something for my sake, just because of that friendship, you would do it, wouldn’t you?’
‘Certainly I would,’ Richard’s hesitation was hardly perceptible and the Duke cut in quickly, taking him at his word.
Good! Then we will agree that Black Magic may be nothing but a childish superstition. Yet I happen to be frightened of it, so I ask you, my friend, who is not bothered with such stupid fears to stay with me tonightand not move outside this pentacle.’
Richard shrugged again, and then smiled ruefully… .
‘You’ve caught me properly now so I must make the best of it; quite obviously if you say that, it is impossible for me to refuse.’
‘Thank you,’ De Richleau murmured as they both sat down again, and to himself he thought: ‘That’s the first move of the game to me.’ Then as a fresh silence fell upon the party, he began to ruminate upon the strangeness of the fact that elementals and malicious spirits may be very powerful, but their nature is so low and their intelligence so limited that they can nearly always be trapped by the divine spark of reason which is the salvation of mankind. The snare was such an obvious one and yet Richard’s true nature had reasserted itself so rapidly that the force, which had moved him to try and break up their circle for its benefit, had been scotched almost before it had had a chance to operate.
They settled down again but in some subtle way the atmosphere had changed. The fire glowed red on its great pile of ashes, the candles burned unflickeringly in the five points of the star, and the electric globes above the cornices still lit every corner of the room with a soft diffused radiance, yet the four friends made no further pretence of trying to sleep. Instead they sat back to back, while the moments passed, creeping with leaden feet towards the dawn.
Marie Lou was perplexed and worried by Richard’s outburst, De Richleau tense with a new expectancy, now he felt that psychic forces were actually moving within the room. Stealthy invisiblebut powerful; he knew them to be feeling their way from bay to bay of the pentacle, seeking for any imperfection in the barrier he had erected, just as a strong current swirls and eddies about the jagged fissures of a reef searching for an entrance into a lagoon.
Simon sat crouched, his hands clasped round his knees staring, apparently with unseeing eyes, at the long lines of books. It seemed that he was listening intently and the Duke watched him with special care, knowing that he was the weak spot of their defence. Presently, his voice a little hoarse, Simon spoke:
‘I’m awfully thirsty. I wish we’d got a drink.’
De Richleau smiled, a little grimly. Another of the minor manifestationsthe evil was working upon Simon now but only to gi
ve another instance of its brutish stupidity. It overlooked the fact that he had provided for such an emergency with that big carafe of water in the centre of the pentacle. The fact that it had caused Simon to forget its presence was of little moment. ‘Here you are, my friend,’ he said, pouring out a glass. ‘This will quench your thirst.’
Simon sipped it and put it aside with a shake of his narrow head. ‘Do you use well-water, Richard?’ he asked jerkily. ‘This stuff tastes beastly to me brackish and stale.’
‘Ah!’ thought De Richleau. ‘That’s the line they are trying, is it? Well, I can defeat them there,’ and taking Simon’s glass he poured the contents back into the carafe. Then he picked up his bottle of Lourdes water. There was very little in it now for the bulk of it had been used to fill the five cups which stood in the vales of the pentagrambut enoughand he sprinkled a few drops into the water in the carafe.
Richard was speakinginstinctively now in a lowered voice assuring Simon that they always used Burrows Malvern for drinking purposes, when the Duke filled the glass again and handed it back to Simon. ‘Now try that.’
Simon sipped again and nodded quickly. ‘Um, that seems quite different. I think it must have been my imagination before,’ and he drank off the contents of the glass.
Again for a long period no one spoke. Only the scraping of a mouse behind the wainscot, sounding abnormally loud, jarred upon the stillness. That frantic insistent gnawing frayed Marie Lou’s nerves to such a pitch that she wanted to scream, but after a while that, too, ceased and the heavy silence, pregnant with suspense, enveloped them once more. Even the gentle patter on the window-panes was no longer there to remind them of healthy, normal things, for the rain had stopped, and in that soundless room the only movement was the soft flicker of the logs, piled high in the wide fireplace.
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