The Last Seance Read online

  ‘Oh! I see.’

  Curious, how his uneasiness persisted.

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘Some time after midnight.’

  His uneasiness was not allayed. Yet what was it that he feared? Surely not that Henshel would give him up to the police? No, the man was sincere enough—a red-hot Revolutionist. The fact of the matter was that he, Conrad Schaefer, had got nerves! A German soldier (Schaefer unconsciously always thought of himself as a soldier) had no business with nerves. He took up the cup beside him and drank it down, making a grimace as he did so. What filthy stuff this Boer coffee always was! Roasted acorns! He was sure of it—roasted acorns!

  He put the cup down again, and as he did so, a deep sigh came from the woman standing by his side. He had almost forgotten her presence.

  ‘Will you not sit down?’ he asked, making no motion, however, to rise from his own seat.

  She shook her head.

  ‘I have to clear away, and wash the dishes, and make my house straight.’

  Schaefer nodded an approving head.

  ‘The children are already in bed, I suppose,’ he said genially.

  There was a pause before she answered.

  ‘I have no children.’

  Schaefer was surprised. From the first moment he saw her he had definitely associated her with motherhood.

  She took up the cup and walked to the entrance door with it. Then she spoke over her shoulder.

  ‘I had one child. It died . . .’

  ‘Ach! I am sorry,’ said Schaefer, kindly.

  The woman did not answer. She stood there motionless. And suddenly Schaefer’s uneasiness returned a hundred-fold. Only this time, he connected it definitely—not with the house, not with Henshel, but with this slow-moving, grandly fashioned woman—this wife of Henshel’s who was neither English nor Dutch. His curiosity roused afresh, he asked her the question point blank. What nationality was she?

  ‘Flemish.’

  She said the word abruptly, then passed into the house, leaving Herr Schaefer disturbed and upset.

  Flemish! That was it, was it? Flemish! His mind flew swiftly to and fro, from the mud flats of Belgium to the sun-baked plateaus of South Africa. Flemish! He didn’t like it. Both the French and the Belgians were so extraordinarily unreasonable! They couldn’t forget.

  His mind felt curiously confused. He yawned two or three times, wide, gaping yawns. He must get to bed and sleep—sleep—. Pah! How bitter that coffee had been—he could taste it still.

  A light sprang up in the house. He got up and made his way to the door. His legs felt curiously unsteady. Inside, the big woman was sitting reading by the light of a small oil lamp. Herr Schaefer felt strangely reassured at the sight of the heavy volume on her knee. The Bible! He approved of women reading the Bible. He was a religious man himself, with a thorough belief in the German God, the God of the Old Testament, a God of blood and battles, of thunder and lightning, of material rewards and dire material vengeance, swift to anger and terrible in wrath.

  He stumbled to a chair (what was the matter with his legs?); and in a thick, strange voice, suppressing another terrific yawn, he asked her what chapter she was reading.

  Her blue eyes, under their level brows met his, something inscrutable in their depths. So might have looked a prophetess of Israel.

  ‘The fourth chapter of Judges.’

  He nodded, yawning again. He must go to bed . . . but the effort to rise was too much for him . . . his eyelids closed . . .

  ‘The fourth chapter of Judges.’ What was the fourth chapter of Judges? His uneasiness returned, swelled into terror. Something was wrong . . . Judges . . . Sleep overcame him. He went down into the depths—and horror went with him . . .

  He awoke, dragging himself back to consciousness . . . Time had passed—much time, he felt certain of it. Where was he? He blinked up at the light—there were pains in his arms and legs . . . he felt sick . . . the taste of the coffee was still in his mouth . . . But what was this? He was lying on the floor, bound hand and foot with strips of towel, and standing over him was the sinister figure of the woman who was not Dutch. His wits came back to him in a flash of sheer desperate fear. He was in danger . . . great danger . . .

  She marked the growth of consciousness in his eyes, and answered it as though he had actually spoken.

  ‘Yes, I will tell you now. You remember passing through a place called Voogplaat, in Belgium?’

  He recalled the name. Some twopenny-ha’penny village he had passed through with his regiment.

  She nodded, and went on.

  ‘You came to my door with some other soldiers. My man was away with the Belgian Army. My first man—not Henshel, I have only been married to him two years. The boy, my little one—he was only four years of age—ran out. He began to cry—what child would not? He feared the soldiers. You ordered him to stop. He could not. You seized a chopper—ah God!—and struck off his hand! You laughed, and said: “That hand will never wield a weapon against Germany.”’

  ‘It is not true,’ cried Schaefer, shrilly, ‘And even if it was—it was war!’

  She paid no heed, but went on.

  ‘I struck you in the face. What mother would not have done otherwise? You caught up the child . . . and dashed him against the wall . . .’

  She stopped, her voice broken, her breast heaving . . .

  Schaefer murmured feebly, abandoning the idea of denial.

  ‘It was war . . . it was war . . .’

  The sweat stood on his brow. He was alone with this woman, miles from help . . .

  ‘I recognised you at once this afternoon in spite of your beard. You did not recognise me. You said it was chance led you here—but I knew it was God . . .’

  Her bosom heaved, her eyes flashed with a fanatical light. Her God was Schaefer’s God—a God of vengeance. She was uplifted by the strange, stern frenzy of a Priestess of old.

  ‘He has delivered you into my hands.’

  Wild words poured from Schaefer, arguments, prayers, appeals for mercy, threats. And all left her untouched.

  ‘God sent me another sign. When I opened the Bible tonight, I saw what He would have me do. Blessed above women shall Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, be . . .’

  She stooped and took from the floor a hammer and some long, shining nails . . . A scream burst from Schaefer’s throat. He remembered now the fourth chapter of Judges, that dramatic story of black inhospitality! Sisera fleeing from his enemies . . . a woman standing at the door of a tent . . . Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite . . .

  And sonorously, in her deep voice with the broad Flemish accent, her eyes shining as the Israelite woman’s may have shone in bygone days, she spoke the words of triumph:

  ‘This is the day in which the Lord hath delivered mine enemy into my hand . . .’

  The Mystery of the Blue Jar

  Jack Hartington surveyed his topped drive ruefully. Standing by the ball, he looked back to the tee, measuring the distance. His face was eloquent of the disgusted contempt which he felt. With a sigh he drew out his iron, executed two vicious swings with it, annihilating in turn a dandelion and a tuft of grass, and then addressed himself firmly to the ball.

  It is hard when you are twenty-four years of age, and your one ambition in life is to reduce your handicap at golf, to be forced to give time and attention to the problem of earning your living. Five and a half days out of the seven saw Jack imprisoned in a kind of mahogany tomb in the city. Saturday afternoon and Sunday were religiously devoted to the real business of life, and in an excess of zeal he had taken rooms at the small hotel near Stourton Heath links, and rose daily at the hour of six a.m. to get in an hour’s practice before catching the 8.46 to town.

  The only disadvantage to the plan was that he seemed constitutionally unable to hit anything at that hour in the morning. A foozled iron succeeded a muffed drive. His mashie shots ran merrily along the ground, and four putts seemed to be the minimum on any green.

>   Jack sighed, grasped his iron firmly and repeated to himself the magic words, ‘Left arm right through, and don’t look up.’

  He swung back—and then stopped, petrified, as a shrill cry rent the silence of the summer’s morning.

  ‘Murder,’ it called. ‘Help! Murder!’

  It was a woman’s voice, and it died away at the end into a sort of gurgling sigh.

  Jack flung down his club and ran in the direction of the sound. It had come from somewhere quite near at hand. This particular part of the course was quite wild country, and there were few houses about. In fact, there was only one near at hand, a small picturesque cottage, which Jack had often noticed for its air of old world daintiness. It was towards this cottage that he ran. It was hidden from him by a heather-covered slope, but he rounded this and in less than a minute was standing with his hand on the small latched gate.

  There was a girl standing in the garden, and for a moment Jack jumped to the natural conclusion that it was she who had uttered the cry for help. But he quickly changed his mind.

  She had a little basket in her hand, half full of weeds, and had evidently just straightened herself up from weeding a wide border of pansies. Her eyes, Jack noticed, were just like pansies themselves, velvety and soft and dark, and more violet than blue. She was like a pansy altogether, in her straight purple linen gown.

  The girl was looking at Jack with an expression midway between annoyance and surprise.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said the young man. ‘But did you cry out just now?’

  ‘I? No, indeed.’

  Her surprise was so genuine that Jack felt confused. Her voice was very soft and pretty with a slight foreign inflection.

  ‘But you must have heard it,’ he exclaimed. ‘It came from somewhere just near here.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘I heard nothing at all.’

  Jack in his turn stared at her. It was perfectly incredible that she should not have heard that agonized appeal for help. And yet her calmness was so evident that he could not believe she was lying to him.

  ‘It came from somewhere close at hand,’ he insisted.

  She was looking at him suspiciously now.

  ‘What did it say?’ she asked.

  ‘Murder—help! Murder!’

  ‘Murder—help! murder,’ repeated the girl. ‘Somebody has played a trick on you, Monsieur. Who could be murdered here?’

  Jack looked about him with a confused idea of discovering a dead body upon a garden path. Yet he was still perfectly sure that the cry he had heard was real and not a product of his imagination. He looked up at the cottage windows. Everything seemed perfectly still and peaceful.

  ‘Do you want to search our house?’ asked the girl drily.

  She was so clearly sceptical that Jack’s confusion grew deeper than ever. He turned away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It must have come from higher up in the woods.’

  He raised his cap and retreated. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw that the girl had calmly resumed her weeding.

  For some time he hunted through the woods, but could find no sign of anything unusual having occurred. Yet he was as positive as ever that he had really heard the cry. In the end, he gave up the search and hurried home to bolt his breakfast and catch the 8.46 by the usual narrow margin of a second or so. His conscience pricked him a little as he sat in the train. Ought he not to have immediately reported what he had heard to the police? That he had not done so was solely owing to the pansy girl’s incredulity. She had clearly suspected him of romancing—possibly the police might do the same. Was he absolutely certain that he had heard the cry?

  By now he was not nearly so positive as he had been—the natural result of trying to recapture a lost sensation. Was it some bird’s cry in the distance that he had twisted into the semblance of a woman’s voice?

  But he rejected the suggestion angrily. It was a woman’s voice, and he had heard it. He remembered looking at his watch just before the cry had come. As nearly as possible it must have been five and twenty minutes past seven when he had heard the call. That might be a fact useful to the police if—if anything should be discovered.

  Going home that evening, he scanned the evening papers anxiously to see if there were any mention of a crime having been committed. But there was nothing, and he hardly knew whether to be relieved or disappointed.

  The following morning was wet—so wet that even the most ardent golfer might have his enthusiasm damped. Jack rose at the last possible moment, gulped his breakfast, ran for the train and again eagerly scanned the papers. Still no mention of any gruesome discovery having been made. The evening papers told the same tale.

  ‘Queer,’ said Jack to himself, ‘but there it is. Probably some blinking little boys having a game together up in the woods.’

  He was out early the following morning. As he passed the cottage, he noted out of the tail of his eye that the girl was out in the garden again weeding. Evidently a habit of hers. He did a particularly good approach shot, and hoped that she had noticed it. As he teed up on the next tee, he glanced at his watch.

  ‘Just five and twenty past seven,’ he murmured. ‘I wonder—’

  The words were frozen on his lips. From behind him came the same cry which had so startled him before. A woman’s voice, in dire distress.

  ‘Murder—help! Murder!’

  Jack raced back. The pansy girl was standing by the gate. She looked startled, and Jack ran up to her triumphantly, crying out:

  ‘You heard it this time, anyway.’

  Her eyes were wide with some emotion he could not fathom but he noticed that she shrank back from him as he approached, and even glanced back at the house, as though she meditated running to it for shelter.

  She shook her head, staring at him.

  ‘I heard nothing at all,’ she said wonderingly.

  It was as though she had struck him a blow between the eyes. Her sincerity was so evident that he could not disbelieve her. Yet he couldn’t have imagined it—he couldn’t—he couldn’t—

  He heard her voice speaking gently—almost with sympathy.

  ‘You have had the shell-shock, yes?’

  In a flash he understood her look of fear, her glance back at the house. She thought that he suffered from delusions . . .

  And then, like a douche of cold water, came the horrible thought, was she right? Did he suffer from delusions? Obsessed by the horror of the thought, he turned and stumbled away without vouchsafing a word. The girl watched him go, sighed, shook her head, and bent down to her weeding again.

  Jack endeavoured to reason matters out with himself. ‘If I hear the damned thing again at twenty-five minutes past seven,’ he said to himself, ‘it’s clear that I’ve got hold of a hallucination of some sort. But I won’t hear it.’

  He was nervous all that day, and went to bed early determined to put the matter to the proof the following morning.

  As was perhaps natural in such a case, he remained awake half the night, and finally overslept himself. It was twenty past seven by the time he was clear of the hotel and running towards the links. He realized that he would not be able to get to the fatal spot by twenty-five past, but surely, if the voice was a hallucination pure and simple, he would hear it anywhere. He ran on, his eyes fixed on the hands of his watch.

  Twenty-five past. From far off came the echo of a woman’s voice, calling. The words could not be distinguished, but he was convinced that it was the same cry he had heard before, and that it came from the same spot, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the cottage.

  Strangely enough, that fact reassured him. It might, after all, be a hoax. Unlikely as it seemed, the girl herself might be playing a trick on him. He set his shoulders resolutely, and took out a club from his golf bag. He would play the few holes up to the cottage.

  The girl was in the garden as usual. She looked up this morning, and when he raised his cap to her, said good morning rather shyly . . . She looked, h
e thought, lovelier than ever.

  ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ Jack called out cheerily, cursing the unavoidable banality of the observation.

  ‘Yes, indeed, it is lovely.’

  ‘Good for the garden, I expect?’

  The girl smiled a little, disclosing a fascinating dimple.

  ‘Alas, no! For my flowers the rain is needed. See, they are all dried up.’

  Jack accepted the invitation of her gesture, and came up to the low hedge dividing the garden from the course, looking over it into the garden.

  ‘They seem all right,’ he remarked awkwardly, conscious as he spoke of the girl’s slightly pitying glance running over him.

  ‘The sun is good, is it not?’ she said. ‘For the flowers one can always water them. But the sun gives strength and repairs the health. Monsieur is much better today, I can see.’

  Her encouraging tone annoyed Jack intensely.

  ‘Curse it all,’ he said to himself. ‘I believe she’s trying to cure me by suggestion.’

  ‘I’m perfectly well,’ he said irritably.

  ‘That is good then,’ returned the girl quickly and soothingly.

  Jack had the irritating feeling that she didn’t believe him.

  He played a few more holes and hurried back to breakfast. As he ate it, he was conscious, not for the first time, of the close scrutiny of a man who sat at the table next to him. He was a man of middle age, with a powerful forceful face. He had a small dark beard and very piercing grey eyes, and an ease and assurance of manner which placed him among the higher ranks of the professional classes. His name, Jack knew, was Lavington, and he had heard vague rumours as to his being a well-known medical specialist, but as Jack was not a frequenter of Harley Street, the name had conveyed little or nothing to him.

  But this morning he was very conscious of the quiet observation under which he was being kept, and it frightened him a little. Was his secret written plainly in his face for all to see? Did this man, by reason of his professional calling, know that there was something amiss in the hidden grey matter?

  Jack shivered at the thought. Was it true? Was he really going mad? Was the whole thing a hallucination, or was it a gigantic hoax?