by Sax Rohmer
I passed to an oak settee where Justin Grinley, his wife and small daughter were pulling crackers with Mrs Hanson, just as young Lawrence Bowman appeared from a side door.
“Have you seen Mrs Van Eyck?” he inquired quickly.
No one had seen her for some time, and young Bowman hurried off upon his quest.
Grinley raised quizzical eyebrows, but said nothing. In point of fact, Bowman’s attentions to the lady had already excited some comment; but Mrs Van Eyck was an old friend of the Rylands, and we relied upon her discretion to find a nice girl among the company—there were many—to take the romantic youth off her hands.
Father Bernard presently beckoned to me from the door beneath the musicians’ gallery.
“You have, of course, said nothing of the matters we know of?” he asked as I joined him.
I shook my head, and the monk smiled around on the gathering.
“The old sorcerer’s study is fitted up as a cozy corner, I see,” he continued, “but between ourselves, I shouldn’t let any of the young people stay long in there!” He met my eyes seriously.
“If, indeed, the enemy holds power within Devrers, I think there is no likely victim among you tonight. The legend of Devrers Hall, you must know, Mr Cumberly, is that Maccabees Nosta, or the arch enemy in person, appears here in response to the slightest evil thought, word or deed within the walls! If any company could hope to exclude him, it is the present!” This he said half humorously and with his eyes roaming again over the merry groups about the great lighted room. “But, please God, the evil has passed.”
He was about to take his leave, for he came and went at will, a privileged visitor, as others of the Brotherhood. I walked with him along the gallery, lined now with pictures from Earl Ryland’s collection. One of the mullioned windows was open.
Out of the darkness we looked for a moment over the dazzling white carpet which lay upon the lawn, to where a fairy shrubbery, backed by magical, white trees, glittered as though diamond-dusted under the frosty moon. A murmur of voices came, and two figures passed across the snow: a woman in a dull red cloak with a furred collar and a man with a heavy travelling coat worn over his dress clothes. His arm was about the woman’s waist.
The monk made no sign, leaving me at the gallery door with a deep “Good night.”
But I saw his cowled figure silhouetted against a distant window, and his hand was raised in the ancient form of benediction.
Alone in the long gallery, something of the gaiety left me. By the open window, I stood for a moment looking out, but no one was visible now. The indiscreet dalliance of Mrs Van Eyck with a lad newly down from Cambridge seemed so utterly out of the picture. The lawn on that side of the house was secluded, but I knew that Father Bernard had seen and recognised them. I knew, too, the thought that was in his mind. As I passed slowly back towards the banqueting hall, my footsteps striking hollowly upon the oaken floor, that thought grew in significance. Free as I was, or as I thought I was, from the medieval superstitions which possibly were part of the monk’s creed, I shuddered at remembrance of the unnameable tragedies which this gallery might have staged.
It was very quiet. As I came abreast of the last window, the moonlight through a stained quarrel pane spread a red patch across the oaken floor, and I passed it quickly. It had almost the look of a fire burning beneath the woodwork!
Then, through the frosty, night air, I distinctly heard the great bell tolling out, from up the beech avenue at the lodge gate.
* * *
I was anxious to know what it meant myself. But Earl, whose every hope and every fear centred in Mona Verek, out ran me easily. I came up to the lodge gates just as he threw them open in his madly impulsive way. The lodge was unoccupied, for the staff was incomplete, and a servant had fastened the gates for the night after Father Bernard had left.
The monk could not have been gone two minutes, but now in the gateway stood a tall man enveloped in furs, who rested one hand upon the shoulder of a chauffeur. It had begun to snow again.
“What’s the matter?” cried Ryland anxiously, as the man who attended to the gates tardily appeared. “Accident?”
The stranger waved his disengaged hand with a curiously foreign gesture, and showed his teeth in a smile. He had a black, pointed beard and small moustache, with fine, clear-cut features and commanding eyes.
“Nothing serious,” he replied. Something in his voice reminded me of a note in a great organ, it was so grandly deep and musical. “My man was blinded by a drive of snow and ran us off the road. I fear my ankle is twisted, and the car being temporarily disabled…”
With the next house nearly two miles away, that was explanation enough for Earl Ryland. Very shortly we were assisting the distinguished-looking stranger along the avenue, Earl pooh-poohing his protests and sending a man ahead to see that a room would be ready. The snow was falling now in clouds, and Ryland and I were covered. At the foot of the terrace stairs, with cheery light streaming out through the snow-laden air, I noted something that struck me as odd, but at the time as no more than that.
Not a flake of snow rested upon the stranger, from the crown of his black fur cap to the edge of his black fur coat!
Before I had leisure to consider this circumstance, which a moment’s thought must have shown to be a curious phenomenon, our unexpected visitor spoke.
“I have a slight face wound, occasioned by broken glass,” he said. For the first time, I saw that it was so. “I would not alarm your guests unnecessarily. Could we enter by a more private door?”
“Certainly!” cried Ryland heartily. “This way, sir.”
So, unseen by the rest of the party, we entered by the door in the tower of the south wing and lodged the stranger in one of the many bedrooms there. He was profuse in his thanks, but declined any medical aid other than that of his saturnine man. When the blizzard had somewhat abated, he said, the man could proceed to the wrecked car and possibly repair it well enough to enable them to continue their journey. He would trespass upon our good nature no longer; an hour’s rest was all that he required.
“You must not think of leaving tonight,” said Ryland cordially. “I will see that your wants are attended to.”
His man entered, carrying a bag; we left him descending again to the hall.
“Why!” cried Earl. “I never asked him his name and never told him mine!”
He laughed at his own absentmindedness, and we rejoined his guests. But an indefinable change had come over the party. The blizzard was increasing in violence, so that now it shrieked around Devrers Hall like a regiment of ghouls. The youthful members, numbering five, had been sent off to bed, and into the hearts of the elders of the company had crept a general predilection for the fireside. Our entrance created quite a sensation.
“Why,” cried Ryland, “I believe you took us for bogeys. Who’s been telling ghost stories?”
Mrs Van Eyck stretched a dainty foot to the blaze and writhed her white shoulders expressively.
“Mr Hanson has been talking about the Salem witch trials,” she said, turning her eyes to Earl. “I don’t know why he likes to frighten us!”
“There was an alleged witch burned at Ashby, near here, as recently as 1640,” continued Hanson. “I remember reading about it in a work on the subject; a young Spanish woman, of great beauty, too, called Isabella de Miguel, I believe.”
I started. The conversation was turning in a dangerous direction. Old Mr Ryland laughed, but not mirthfully.
“Quit demons and witches,” he said. “Let’s find a more humorous topic, not that I stand for such nonsense.”
Three crashing blows, sounding like those of a titanic hammer on an anvil, rang through the house. An instant’s silence followed, then a frightened chorus: “What was that?”
No one could imagine, and Earl had been as startled as the rest of us. He ran from the room, and I followed him. The wind howled and whistled with ever increasing violence. At the low arched door leading to the domestic of
fices, we found a group of panic-stricken servants huddled together.
“What was that noise?” asked Earl sharply.
His American butler, Knowlson, who formed one of the group, came forward. “It seemed to come from upstairs, sir,” he said. “But I don’t know what can have caused it.”
“Come and look, then.”
Up the massive staircase we went, Knowlson considerably in the rear. But though we searched everywhere assiduously, there was nothing to show what had occasioned the noise. Leaving Ryland peeping in at his two small nephews, who proved to be slumbering peacefully, I went up three steps and through a low archway, and found myself in the south wing. The only occupant, as far as I knew, was the injured stranger. A bright light shone under his door, and I wondered how many candles he had burning.
I knocked.
A gust of wind shrieked furiously around the building, then subsided to a sound like the flapping of wings.
The door was opened a few inches. The light almost dazzled me. I had a glimpse of the unbidden guest, and saw that he wore a loose dressing gown of an unusual shade of red.
“Has anything disturbed you?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, with much concern in his deep, organ voice, yet his black eyes were laughing. “Why do you ask?”
“We heard a strange noise,” I answered shortly. “Is your ankle better?”
“I thank you—very much,” he said. “I am awaiting my man’s report respecting the state of the car.”
There was nothing in his handsome dark face, in his deep voice, or even in his laughing eyes to justify it, but at that moment I felt certain, beyond any possibility of doubt, that the noise had come from his room. I wanted to run! In fact, I do not know how I might have acted, if Ryland hadn’t joined me.
“Sorry to have disturbed you,” came his jovial tones, “but the house is full of funny noises! By the way, I forgot to mention that my name is Wilbur Earl Ryland, and I hope you’ll stay just as long as it suits you!”
“I thank you,” was the unemotional reply. “You are more than kind. I am Count de Stano of Padua. Good night.”
He closed the door.
Again came the wind, shrieking around the end of the wing like a troop of furies; and again came an uncanny flapping. Earl caught at my arm.
“What is it?”
“Did you hear—someone laughing?”
“No,” I said unsteadily. “It was the howling of the blizzard.”
At the landing, he turned to me again.
“What had the Count burning in his room?” he muttered. “That wasn’t candlelight!”
We found a crowd awaiting us at the foot of the staircase. No one was anxious to go to bed, and arrangements were made by several of the more nervous to share rooms.
“Has the Count’s chauffeur returned?” Earl asked Knowlson.
“He’s just come into the servants’ hall now, sir. He—”
“Lock up, then.”
“He’d been out in all that snow sir!”
“Well?”
“There wasn’t a sign of any on his coat.”
The man’s voice shook and he glanced back at the group of servants, none of whom seemed disposed to return to their quarters.
“He wore another over it, ass!” snapped Ryland. “Set about your business, all of you! You are like a pack of children.”
We experienced no further alarms, save from the uncanny howling of the wind, but there were no more ghost stories. Those who went to bed ascended the great oak staircase in parties. Mr Ryland, Earl and I were the last to go, and we parted at last without reference to the matter, of which, I doubt not, all of us were thinking.
Sleep was almost impossible. My quaint little oak-panelled room seemed to rock in a tempest which now had assumed extraordinary violence. For hours I lay listening for that other sound which was not the voice of the blizzard and which, although I had belittled, I had heard as clearly as Earl had heard it.
I detected it at last, just once—a wild, demoniacal laugh.
I leaped to the floor. The sound had not been within the house, I thought, but outside. Clenching my teeth in anticipation of the icy gust which would sweep into the room, I slightly opened the heavily leaded window. The south wing was clearly visible.
Out from the small, square window of the study of Maccabees Nosta poured a beam of fiery light, staining the snowflakes as they swirled madly through its redness.
A moment it shone, and was gone.
I pulled the window fast.
Strange needs teach us strange truths. I was sure in that hour that the simple faith of Father Bernard Was greater than all our wisdom, and I would have given much for his company.
* * *
For me the pleasures and entertainments of the ensuing day were but gnawing anxieties and fruitless vigils. Who was the man calling himself de Stano? Stano was merely a play on Nosta. To what place had his chauffeur taken his car to be repaired? Why did He avoid Father Bernard, as that morning I had seen him do? De Stano claimed acquaintance with mutual friends, all of them absent. Earl was too hospitable. A man who could walk, even with the aid of a big ebony stick, could reach the station in a borrowed car and proceed on his journey.
Devrers Hall was nearly empty, but by one pretext or another I had avoided joining any of the parties. As I stood smoking on the terrace, Mrs Van Eyck came out, dressed in a walking habit which displayed her lithe figure almost orientally.
“Mr Bowman and I are walking over to the monastery. Won’t you join us, Mr Cumberly?” she said.
“Thank you, but some unexpected work has come to hand and I fear I must decline! Have you seen our new guest recently?”
“The Count? Yes, just a while ago. What a strange man! Do you know, Mr Cumberly, he almost frightens me.”
“Indeed!”
“He is a most accomplished hypnotist! Oh, I must show you! He was angry with me for being sceptical, you know, and suddenly challenged me to touch him, even with my little finger. I did, look!”
She had pulled off her glove and held out her hand. The top of one finger was blistered, as by contact with fire!
“Hypnotic suggestion, of course,” she said laughingly. “He is not always red hot.”
She laughed gaily as young Bowman came out; the two walking off together.
I re-entered the house.
None of the servants had seen the Count, and when I knocked at his door there was no reply. Passing back along the corridor I met Lister Hanson.
“Hello!” I said. “I thought you were out with the others.”
“No. I had some trivial matters to attend to; Majorie and the youngsters have gone skating.”
I hesitated.
“Is Earl with them?”
Hanson laughed.
“He has motored over to the station. Mona Verek is due some time within the next three hours.”
Should I confide in him? Yes, I decided, for I could contain my uncanny suspicions no longer.
“What is your opinion of this de Stano?” I asked abruptly.
Hanson’s face clouded.
“Curiously enough, I have not met him,” he replied. “He patently avoids me. In fact, Cumberly, very few of the folks have met him. You must have noticed that on one pretence or another he has avoided being present at meals? Though he is living under the same roof, I assure you the bulk of us have never seen him.”
It was sufficient. I at any rate felt assured of a hearing; and, drawing Hanson into my own room, I unfolded to him the incredible suspicions which I dared to harbour and which were shared by Father Bernard.
At the end of my story, the young clergyman sat looking out the window. When he turned his face to me, it was unusually serious.
“It is going back to the Middle Ages,” he said, “but there is nothing in your story that a Churchman may not believe. I have studied the dark pages of history which deal with witchcraft, demonology and possession, I have seen in Germany the testimonies of men as wise
as any we have today. Although I can see your expected incredulity and scepticism, I assure you I am at one with Father Bernard upon this matter. The Count de Stano, whoever or whatever he is, must quit this house.”
“But what weapons have we against—”
“Cumberly, if some awful thing in the shape of man is among us, that thing has come in obedience to a summons. Do you know the legend of Devrers Hall; the dreadful history of the place?”
I nodded, greatly surprised.
“You wonder where I learned it? You forget that I have dipped deeply into these matters. Directly after the party broke up, I had intended to induce Earl to leave. Cumberly, the place is unclean.”
“Is there no way of ridding it of—”
“Only by defeating the thing which legend says first appeared here as Maccabees Nosta. And which of us, being human, can hope to brave that ordeal?”
I was silent for some time.
“We must remember, Hanson,” I said, “that, regarding certain undoubtedly weird happenings in the light of what we know of Devrers, we may have deceived ourselves.”
“We may,” he agreed. “But we dare not rest until we know that we have.”
So together we searched the house for Count de Stano, but failed to meet with him. The storm of the previous night had subsided, and dusk came creeping upon a winter landscape which spoke only of great peace. The guests began to return, in parties, and presently Earl Ryland arrived, looking very worried.
“Mona’s missed her train,” he said. “There seems to be a fatality about the thing.”
Hanson said nothing at the time, but when Earl had gone upstairs to dress, he turned to me.
“You know Mona Verek, of course?”
“Quite well.”
