Even as when some bodily pain ceases it is difficult to recall with any vividness what the pain was like, so next morning, as I dressed, I found myself vainly trying to recapture the horror of the spirit which had accompanied these nocturnal adventures. I remembered that something within me had sickened as I watched the movements of the rocking-chair the night before and as I heard the steps along the paved way outside, and by that invisible pressure against me knew that someone had entered the house. But now in the sane and tranquil morning, and all day under the serene winter sun, I could not realise what it had been. The presence, like the bodily pain, had to be there for the realisation of it, and all day it was absent. Hugh felt the same; he was even disposed to be humorous on the subject.
“Well, he’s had a good look,” he said, “whoever he is, and whomever he was looking for. By the way, not a word to Margaret, please. She heard nothing of these perambulations, nor of the entry of—of whatever it was. Not gardener, anyhow: who ever heard of a gardener spending his time walking about the house? If there were steps all over the potato-patch, I might have been with you.”
Margaret had arranged to drive over to have tea with some friends of hers that afternoon, and in consequence Hugh and I refreshed ourselves at the clubhouse after our game, and it was already dusk when for the third day in succession I passed homewards by the whitewashed cottage. But tonight I had no sense of it being subtly occupied; it stood mournfully desolate, as is the way of untenanted houses, and no light nor semblance of such gleamed from its windows. Hugh, to whom I had told the odd impressions I had received there, gave them a reception as flippant as that which he had accorded to the memories of the night, and he was still being humorous about them when we came to the door of the house.
“A psychic disturbance, old boy,” he said. “Like a cold in the head. Hullo, the door’s locked.”
He rang and rapped, and from inside came the noise of a turned key and withdrawn bolts.
“What’s the door locked for?” he asked his servant who opened it.
The man shifted from one foot to the other.
“The bell rang half an hour ago, sir,” he said, “and when I came to answer it there was a man standing outside, and—”
“Well?” asked Hugh.
“I didn’t like the looks of him, sir,” he said, “and I asked him his business. He didn’t say anything, and then he must have gone pretty smartly away, for I never saw him go.”
“Where did he seem to go?” asked Hugh, glancing at me.
“I can’t rightly say, sir. He didn’t seem to go at all. Something seemed to brush by me.”
“That’ll do,” said Hugh rather sharply.
Margaret had not come in from her visit, but when soon after the crunch of the motor wheels was heard Hugh reiterated his wish that nothing should be said to her about the impression which now, apparently, a third person shared with us. She came in with a flush of excitement on her face.
“Never laugh at my planchette again,” she said. “I’ve heard the most extraordinary story from Maud Ashfield—horrible, but so frightfully interesting.”
“Out with it,” said Hugh.
“Well, there was a gardener here,” she said. “He used to live at that little cottage by the footbridge, and when the family were up in London he and his wife used to be caretakers and live here.”
Hugh’s glance and mine met: then he turned away. I knew, as certainly as if I was in his mind, that his thoughts were identical with my own.
“He married a wife much younger than himself,” continued Margaret, “and gradually he became frightfully jealous of her. And one day in a fit of passion he strangled her with his own hands. A little while after someone came to the cottage, and found him sobbing over her, trying to restore her. They went for the police, but before they came he had cut his own throat. Isn’t it all horrible? But surely it’s rather curious that the planchette said Gardener. ‘I am the gardener. I want to come in. I can’t find her here.’ You see I knew nothing about it. I shall do planchette again tonight. Oh dear me, the post goes in half an hour, and I have a whole budget to send. But respect my planchette for the future, Hughie.”
We talked the situation out when she had gone, but Hugh, unwillingly convinced and yet unwilling to admit that something more than coincidence lay behind that “planchette nonsense,” still insisted that Margaret should be told nothing of what we had heard and seen in the house last night, and of the strange visitor who again this evening, so we must conclude, had made his entry.
“She’ll be frightened,” he said, “and she’ll begin imagining things. As for the planchette, as likely as not it will do nothing but scribble and make loops. What’s that? Yes: come in!”
There had come from somewhere in the room one sharp, peremptory rap. I did not think it came from the door, but Hugh, when no response replied to his words of admittance, jumped up and opened it. He took a few steps into the hall outside, and returned.
“Didn’t you hear it?” he asked.
“Certainly. No one there?”
“Not a soul.”
Hugh came back to the fireplace and rather irritably threw a cigarette which he had just lit into the fender.
“That was rather a nasty jar,” he observed; “and if you ask me whether I feel comfortable, I can tell you I never felt less comfortable in my life. I’m frightened, if you want to know, and I believe you are too.”
I hadn’t the smallest intention of denying this, and he went on.
“We’ve got to keep a hand on ourselves,” he said. “There’s nothing so infectious as
