His eyes narrowed under his bushy brows and his yellow teeth glowed through the mass of hair.
“She said you was to meet her by ten in the back room of the burned mill,” he said slowly in his rusty sepulchral voice. “She told me to tell you.”
A faint throb of anticipation tugged at the doctor’s mind.
“Deborah?” he asked. Wagner said:
“Missus Westcott.”
Dreeme’s mind stopped dead. Automatically he said:
“Tell her I won’t come.”
“She said she guessed you would all right,” replied the hoarse voice.
To think now. Leaning over the well. The white nape of her neck. Heavy boots dragged across the floor.
“What does she want?” he asked softly. There was no response. Boots dragging. A puffing. Dreeme floundered in a sea of amazement. He repeated his question loudly.
“What does she want, I say?”
This silence! Collecting his wits, he peered about the dimly lighted study. Empty, of course. He had gone out. Gone right by him. Dreeme walked over to the table and sat down in the easy chair by it. A tiny white moth dipped and volplaned about the smoky chimney. Now what was this? He would have to think about it. He leaned back in his chair and pulled at his cold pipe.
The faint ticking of the clock was like the tiny regular beating of a miniature tomtom. The minutes danced to it, shaking their small feet in an unending circle. They tripped by him, hands joined, and infinitesimal tapping heels maintaining a regular time that measured off the softly-flowing hours. He watched the vain moth dashing its white wings desperately against the smoky chimney. Sooner or later it would get scorched and flutter to the table, a charred and crumbling pinch of powder. Life was a curious thing. Breathed into a bit of dust it became a moth. Or a man. Something was happening to him now. His two years of dreary silence were breaking down and he was beginning to grow morbid about things in general. He was getting nervous, acutely aware of invisible tentacles that seemed to reach out of this darkness that encircled him on all sides and touch him softly. Humphrey Lathrop had said that it was nerves. But perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps it was a sixth sense slowly coming to birth inside him, a sense nourished by his loneliness that was reaching out into new dimensions. He was pursuing phantoms, hunting through the sun-shot fields about Marlborough for invisible essences that drifted deliberately and had a particular semblance of their own. He was going to solve an intense and formidable riddle. He was going to track down the secret of an atmosphere, the aura of a community. It sounded absurd enough but it was only the absurd things that mattered greatly after all if a man desired to be more than an eating, sleeping, laboring animal. To be a man, and all that that meant, was to walk arm in arm with phantoms, to discourse with shadowy substances, to resolve high mystical riddles. Ah! The moth shrivelled against the hot glass and dropped to the table. So that was that! He turned it over tenderly with a paper-knife and then pushed it to the floor.
Now then! He looked at the ticking clock from which the joined minutes were tripping their fantastic and regular dance. It was nine-thirty. Then it would be in half an hour. His thoughts, held tightly by the leash of his will, were set free and they sprang forward like a pack of ravenous hunting dogs. Up the Leeminster Road they sped and his spectral self followed them as an eager hunter follows his baying hounds. For an instant the face of Deborah flashed in the dark air and then it disappeared, left far behind by this rout of yelping coursers. He had said that he would not go. But she knew that he would, that his curiosity would carry him as far as the mill at least. What she wanted he did not know but he could suspect it. She was assuredly a lonely caged-in creature. She stood at windows and watched the night-sky and wondered about the life that went boiling so turbulently by on the great highroads to the west and the east of her locked doors. She sat in a room lined with books beside a cloven-headed man and a secret sat there with them and she had nobody to share that secret with her, no one, that is, except the man himself who was the secret. Perhaps she wanted to tell him things, to pour out the subterranean stream of her consciousness. He could imagine her muffled voice speaking in the darkness of the mill. It was not strange that she had sent for him, after all. It would have been stranger if she had maintained her silence. Dreeme rose slowly from his chair and blew the light out. Well. …
II
She was seated in an embrasure formed where a portion of the brick wall had fallen away and dropped into the yellow-scummed water of the millpond. He could see the dark silhouette of her head as it turned sideways against the smoky light of the moon, and for a moment he paused in the doorway watching her, noting the regularity of her boldly-cut features and the cold sensuousness of her rounded lips. It was almost symbolic to find her so, no more than a silhouette, a face seen in a single aspect, a profile clean-cut and set against unsteady light that flowed with the rippling of milky waters. She was like this. She was the outline of a mystery, a part of that riddle that somehow he must solve if he was to have any peace of mind. It was dark and gloomy in the mill. Its fire-blackened walls retained the horror of an old debacle. Two men had been incinerated here. She said:
“I was sure you would come.”
She had not turned
