The voice screams at me through the clear moonlight, as it screamed at me through the sea-fog.
Again and again.
It’s all round the house.
That way now, where the light just touches on the tops of the heather.
Tell the servants to have the horses ready the first thing in the morning.
We leave Vange Abbey to-morrow.”
These were wild words. If he had spoken them wildly, I might have shared the butler’s conclusion that his mind was deranged. There was no undue vehemence in his voice or his manner.
He spoke with a melancholy resignation—he seemed like a prisoner submitting to a sentence that he had deserved.
Remembering the cases of men suffering from nervous disease who had been haunted by apparitions, I asked if he saw any imaginary figure under the form of a boy.
“I see nothing,” he said; “I only hear.
Look yourself.
It is in the last degree improbable—but let us make sure that nobody has followed me from Boulogne, and is playing me a trick.”
We made the circuit of the Belvidere.
On its eastward side the house wall was built against one of the towers of the old Abbey.
On the westward side, the ground sloped steeply down to a deep pool or tarn.
Northward and southward, there was nothing to be seen but the open moor.
Look where I might, with the moonlight to make the view plain to me, the solitude was as void of any living creature as if we had been surrounded by the awful dead world of the moon.
“Was it the boy’s voice that you heard on the voyage across the Channel?” I asked.
“Yes, I heard it for the first time—down in the engine-room; rising and falling, rising and falling, like the sound of the engines themselves.”
“And when did you hear it again?”
“I feared to hear it in London.
It left me, I should have told you, when we stepped ashore out of the steamboat.
I was afraid that the noise of the traffic in the streets might bring it back to me.
As you know, I passed a quiet night.
I had the hope that my imagination had deceived me—that I was the victim of a delusion, as people say.
It is no delusion.
In the perfect tranquillity of this place the voice has come back to me.
While we were at table I heard it again—behind me, in the library.
I heard it still, when the door was shut.
I ran up here to try if it would follow me into the open air.
It has followed me.
We may as well go down again into the hall.
I know now that there is no escaping from it.
My dear old home has become horrible to me.
Do you mind returning to London tomorrow?”
What I felt and feared in this miserable state of things matters little.
The one chance I could see for Romayne was to obtain the best medical advice. I sincerely encouraged his idea of going back to London the next day.
We had sat together by the hall fire for about ten minutes, when he took out his handkerchief, and wiped away the perspiration from his forehead, drawing a deep breath of relief.
“It has gone!” he said faintly.
“When you hear the boy’s voice,” I asked, “do you hear it continuously?”
“No, at intervals; sometimes longer, sometimes shorter.”
“And thus far, it comes to you suddenly, and leaves you suddenly?”
“Yes.”
“Do my questions annoy you?”
“I make no complaint,” he said sadly. “You can see for yourself—I patiently suffer the punishment that I have deserved.”
I contradicted him at once.
“It is nothing of the sort!
It’s a nervous malady, which medical science can control and cure.
Wait till we get to London.”
This expression of opinion produced no effect on him.