“I think his name is Dawlish—Benjamin Dawlish,” said the girl. “We were introduced just before dinner.”
Abbershaw nodded, and the conversation drifted on to other things, but all the time he was conscious of something faintly disturbing in the back of his mind, something which hung over his thoughts like a black shadow, vaguely ugly and uncomfortable.
It was a new experience for him, but he recognized it immediately.
For the first time in his life he had a presentiment—a vague, unaccountable apprehension of trouble ahead.
He glanced at Meggie dubiously.
Love played all sorts of tricks with a man’s brains. It was very bewildering.
The next moment he had pulled himself together, telling himself soberly not to be a fool. But wriggle and twist as he might, always the black shadow sat behind his thoughts, and he was glad of the candlelight and the bright conversation and the laughter of the dinner-table.
II
The Ritual of the Dagger
After dinner, Abbershaw was one of the first to enter the great hall or drawing-room which, with the dining-room, took up the best part of the ground floor of the magnificent old mansion. It was an amazing room, vast as a barn and heavily panelled, with a magnificently carved fireplace at each end wherein two huge fires blazed. The floor was old oak and highly polished, and there was no covering save for two or three beautiful Shiraz rugs.
The furniture here was the same as in the other parts of the house, heavy, unpolished oak, carved and very old; and here, too, the faint atmosphere of mystery and dankness, with which the whole house was redolent, was apparent also.
Abbershaw noticed it immediately, and put it down to the fact that the light of the place came from a huge iron candle-ring which held some twenty or thirty thick wax candles suspended by an iron chain from the centre beam of the ceiling, so that there were heavy shadows round the panelled walls and in the deep corners behind the great fireplaces.
By far the most striking thing in the whole room was an enormous trophy which hung over the fireplace farthest from the door. It was a vast affair composed of some twenty or thirty lances arranged in a circle, heads to the centre, and surmounted by a feathered helm and a banner resplendent with the arms of the Petries.
Yet it was the actual centrepiece which commanded immediate interest. Mounted on a crimson plaque, at the point where the lance-heads made a narrow circle, was a long, fifteenth-century Italian dagger. The hilt was an exquisite piece of workmanship, beautifully chased and encrusted at the upper end with uncut jewels, but it was not this that first struck the onlooker. The blade of the Black Dudley Dagger was its most remarkable feature. Under a foot long, it was very slender and exquisitely graceful, fashioned from the steel that had in it a curious greenish tinge which lent the whole weapon an unmistakably sinister appearance. It seemed to shine out of the dark background like a living and malignant thing.
No one entering the room for the first time could fail to remark upon it; in spite of its comparatively insignificant size it dominated the whole room like an idol in a temple.
George Abbershaw was struck by it as soon as he came in, and instantly the feeling of apprehension which had annoyed his prosaic soul so much in the other room returned, and he glanced round him sharply, seeking either reassurance or confirmation, he hardly knew which.
The house-party which had seemed so large round the dinner-table now looked amazingly small in this cathedral of a room.
Colonel Coombe had been wheeled into a corner just out of the firelight by a manservant, and the old invalid now sat smiling benignly on the group of young people in the body of the room. Gideon and the man with the expressionless face sat one on either side of him, while a grey-haired, sallow-faced man whom Abbershaw understood was a Dr. White Whitby, the Colonel’s private attendant, hovered about them in nervous solicitude for his patient.
On closer inspection Gideon and the man who looked like Beethoven proved to be even more unattractive than Abbershaw had supposed from his first somewhat cursory glance.
The rest of the party was in high spirits. Anne Edgeware was illustrating the striking contrast between Victorian clothes and modern manners, and her vivacious air and somewhat outrageous conversation made her the centre of a laughing group. Wyatt Petrie stood amongst his guests, a graceful, lazy figure, and his well-modulated voice and slow laugh sounded pleasant and reassuring in the forbidding room.
It was Anne who first brought up the subject of the dagger, as someone was bound to do.
“What a perfectly revolting thing, Wyatt,” she said, pointing at it. “I’ve been trying not to mention it ever since I came in here. I should toast your muffins with something else, my dear.”
“Ssh!” Wyatt turned to her with mock solemnity. “You mustn’t speak disrespectfully of the Black Dudley Dagger. The ghosts of a hundred dead Petries will haunt you out of sheer outraged family pride if you do.”
The words were spoken lightly, and his voice had lost none of its quiet suavity, but whether it was the effect of the dagger itself or that of the ghostly old house upon the guests none could tell, but the girl’s flippancy died away and she laughed nervously.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should just loathe to be haunted. But quite seriously, then,
