A little group of four people sat down to the table beneath the crimson-shaded light.
Lord Malvin, the most famous scientist and most courtly gentleman of his time. Sir William Gouldesbrough, the hero of this famous party--to-morrow, when Donald Megbie had done his work, to be the hero of the civilized world.
Lady Poole. Sweet Marjorie Poole, in the grip of circumstances that were beyond her thinking.
And no one of the four--not even Sir William Gouldesbrough, F.R.S.--gave a thought to the man in the living tomb--to Guy Rathbone who was, even at that moment, tied up in india-rubber and aluminium bonds for the amusement of Mr. Guest, the pink, hairless man of Regent's Park. Mr.
Guest was drunk of whisky, and sat happy, mocking his prisoner far down in the cellars of Sir William's house.
Other folk were drunk of success and applause in Portland Place.
But Donald Megbie was awake in the Inner Temple, and his thoughts were curious and strange.
Donald Megbie had left the party too early in the evening. He was drunk of nothing at all!
CHAPTER XVI
STRANGE OCCURRENCE IN THE TEMPLE
Like most writers, Donald Megbie was of a nervous and sensitive temperament. Both mental and physical impressions recorded themselves very rapidly and completely upon his consciousness.
He arrived at the Inner Temple with every nerve in a state of excitement, such as he had hardly ever known before.
He walked down the dim echoing ways towards the river, his chambers being situated in the new buildings upon the embankment.
A full moon hung in the sky, brilliant and honey-coloured, attended by little drifts of amber and sulphur-tinted clouds.
But the journalist saw nothing of the night's splendour. He almost stumbled up the stairs to the first floor.
A lamp was burning over the door of his rooms, and his name was painted in white letters upon the oak. He went in and turned on the electric light. Then, for a moment, he stood still in the hall, a richly-furnished place surrounded on all sides by doors painted white.
His feet made no sound upon the thick Persian carpet, and the whole flat was perfectly still.
He felt uneasy, curiously so, as if some calamity was impending. The exhilaration of his stirring talk with Sir William Gouldesbrough--so recent, so profoundly moving--had now quite departed. His whole consciousness was concentrated upon a little box of metal in the pocket of his overcoat. It seemed alive, he was acutely conscious of its presence, though his fingers were not touching it.
"By Jove!" he said to himself aloud, "the thing's like an electric battery. It seems as if actual currents radiated from it." His own voice sounded odd and unnatural in his ears, and as he hung up his coat and went into the study with the cigarette-case in his hand, he found himself wishing that he had not given his man a holiday--he had allowed him to go to Windsor to spend a night at his mother's house.
A bright fire glowed in the grate of red brick. It shone upon the book-lined walls, playing cheerily upon the crimson, green and gold of the bindings, and turned the great silver inkstand upon the writing-table into a thing of flame.
Everything was cheerful and just as usual.
Megbie put the box down on the table and sank into a huge leather arm-chair with a sigh of relief and pleasure.
It was good to be back in his own place again, the curtains drawn, the lamps glowing, the world shut out. He was happier here than anywhere else, after all! It was here in this beautiful room, with its books and pictures, its cultured comfort, that the real events of his life took place, those splendid hours of solitude, when he set down the vivid experiences of his crowded life with all the skill and power God had given him, and he himself had cultivated so manfully and well.
Now for it! Tired as his mind was, there lay a time of deep thinking before it. There was the article for to-morrow to group and arrange. It was probably the most important piece of work he had ever been called upon to do. It would startle the world, and it behoved him to put forth all his energies.
Yet there was something else. He must consider the problem of the cigarette-case first. It was immediate and disturbing.
How had this thing come into Sir William's possession? What communication had Gouldesbrough had with Guy Rathbone? That they were rivals for the hand of Miss Poole Megbie knew quite well. Every one knew it. It was most unlikely that the two men could have been friends or even acquaintances. Indeed Megbie was almost certain that Rathbone did not know Sir William.
Was that little shining toy on the table a message from the past? Or was it rather instinct with a present meaning?
He took it up again and looked at it curiously.
Immediately that he did so, the sense of agitation and unrest returned to him with tremendous force.
Megbie was not a superstitious man. But now-a-days we all know so much more about the non-material things of life that only the most ignorant people call a man with a belief in the supernatural, superstitious.
Like many another highly educated man of our time, Megbie knew that there are strange and little-understood forces all round us. When an ex-Prime Minister is a keen investigator into the psychic, when the principal of Birmingham University, a leading scientist, writes constantly in dispute of the mere material aspect of life--the cultured world follows suit.
Megbie held the cigarette-case in his hand. All the electric lights burned steadily. The door was closed and there was not a sound in the flat.
Then, with absolute suddenness, Megbie saw that a man was standing in front of him, at the other side of the fireplace, not three yards away.
He was a tall man, clean-shaven, with light close-cropped hair and a rather large face. The eyes were light blue in colour and surrounded by minute puckers and wrinkles. The nose was aquiline, the mouth clean-cut and rather full. The man was dressed in a dark blue overcoat, and the collar and cuffs of the coat were heavily trimmed with astrachan fur.
The room was absolutely still.
Something like a grey mist or curtain descended over Megbie's eyes. It rolled up, like a curtain, and Megbie saw the man with absolute clearness and certainty. He could almost have put out his hand and touched him.
Measured by the mere material standard of time, these events did not take more than a second, perhaps only a part of a second.
Then the writer became aware that the room was filled with sound--sudden, loud and menacing. It was a sound as of sudden drums at midnight, such a sound as the gay dances in Brussels heard on the eve of Waterloo, when the Assembly sounded in the great square, and the whole city awoke.
In another moment, Megbie knew what the sound in his ears really was.
His own heart and pulses were racing and beating like the sudden _traillerie_ of drums.
In a flash he recognized the face and form of his visitor--this outward form and semblance of a man which had sprung up and grown concrete in the night! The phantom--if indeed it was a phantom--wore the dress and aspect of Eustace Charliewood, the well-known man about town who had killed himself at Brighton a few years ago!
Megbie had never spoken to Charliewood--so far as he could remember--but he knew him perfectly well by sight, as every one in the West End of London had known him, and he was a member of one of the clubs to which the dead man had belonged.
The Thing that stood there, the Thing or Person which had sprung out of the air, wore the earthly semblance of Eustace Charliewood.
Megbie shouted out loud. A great cry burst from his lips, a cry of surprise and fear, a challenge of that almost dreadful _curiosity_ that men experience now and then when they are in the presence of the inexplicable, the terrible and the unknown.
Then Megbie saw that the face of the Apparition was horribly contorted.
The mouth was opening and shutting rapidly in an agony of appeal. It seemed as though a torrent of words must be pouring from it, though there was not a sound of human speech in the large warm room.
Great tears rolled down the large pale cheeks, the brow was wrinkled with pain. The hands gesticulated and pointed, flickering rapidly hither and thither without sound. And continually, over and over again, the hands pointed to the gleaming silver case for cigarettes which Donald Megbie clasped tightly in his right hand.
The silent agitated Thing, so close--ah, so close! was trying to tell Donald something.
It was trying to say something about the cigarette-case, it was trying to tell Megbie something about Guy Rathbone.
And what? What was this fearful message that the agonized Thing was so eager and so horribly impotent to deliver?