The Brightener. Williamson Charles Norris

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СКАЧАТЬ without locking it, and flung a furious glance around. The creature had actually dared to place a brandy bottle conspicuously upon my dressing table, among gold-handled brushes and silver gilt boxes, and, as a crowning impertinence, had left a tumbler beside the bottle, a quarter full of strong-smelling brown stuff. Close by lay my lovely crystal flask of "Campagna Violets," empty. I could get no more anywhere, and it had cost five pounds! I could hardly breathe in the room. Oh, evidently a stewardess must have gone stark mad, or else some practical joker had waited to play the coup until the stewardesses were in bed!

      As I thought this, my eyes as well as my nostrils warned me of something strange. The rose-coloured silk curtains which, when I went to dinner, had been gracefully looped back at head and foot of my pretty bed (a real bed, not a mere berth!) were now closely drawn with a secretive air. This made me imagine that it was a practical joke I had to deal with, and my fancy flew to all sorts of weird surprises, any one of which I might find hidden behind the draperies.

      I trust that I have a sense of humour, and I can laugh at a jest against myself as well as any woman, perhaps better than most. But to-night I was in no mood to laugh at jests, and I wondered how anybody had the heart (not to mention the cheek!) to perpetrate one after the shock we had experienced. Besides, I couldn't think of a person likely to play a trick on me. Certainly my host wouldn't do so. Shelagh, my best and most intimate pal, was far too gentle and sensitive-minded. As for the other guests, none were of the noisy, bounding type who take liberties even with distant acquaintances, for fun.

      All this ran through my mind, as a cinema "cut-in" flashes across the screen; and it wasn't until I'd passed in review the characters of my fellow guests that I summoned courage to pull back the bed-curtains. When I did so, I gave a jerk that slipped them along the rod as far as they would go. And then – I saw the last thing in the world I could have pictured.

      A woman, fully dressed, was stretched on the pink silk coverlet fast asleep, her head deep sunk in the embroidered pillow.

      It was all I could do to keep back a cry – for this was no woman I had seen on board, not even a drunken or sleep-walking stewardess. Yet her face was not strange to me. That was the most horrible, the most mysterious part! There was no mistake, for the face was impossible to forget. As I stared, almost believing that I dreamed, another scene rose between my eyes and the dainty little cabin of the Naiad.

      It also was a scene in a dream. I knew it was a dream, but it was torturingly vivid. I was a prisoner on a German submarine, in war-time, and signals from my own old home – Courtenaye Abbey – flashed into my eyes. They flashed so brightly that they set me on fire. I wakened from the nightmare with a start. A strong light dazzled me, and, striking my face, lit up another face as well. Just for an instant I saw it; then the revealing ray died into darkness. But on my retina was photographed those features, in a pale, illumined circle.

      A second sufficed to bring back to my brain this old dream and the waking reality which followed, that night at the Abbey, long ago – the night which Shelagh and I called "Spy Night." For here, in my cabin on the yacht Naiad, on the crushed pillow of my bed, was that face.

      As I realized this, without benefit of any doubt, a faint sickness swept over me. It was partly horror of the past; partly physical disgust of the brandy-reek – stronger than ever now – hanging like an unseen canopy over the bed; and partly cold fear of a terrifying Presence.

      There she lay, sunk in drugged and drunken sleep, the Woman of Mystery, in whose existence no one but Shelagh and I had ever quite believed: the woman who had visited us in our sleep, and who – almost certainly – had fired the Abbey, hoping that we and the Barlows might suffocate in our beds.

      The face was just the same as it had been then: "beautiful and hideous at the same time, like Medusa," I had described it; only now it was older, and though still beautiful, somehow ravaged. The hair still glowed with the vivid auburn colour which I had thought "unreal looking"; but now it was tumbled and unkempt. Loose locks strayed over the dainty pillow, and at the bottom of the bed, pushed tightly against the footboard by a pair of untidy, high-heeled shoes, was a dusty black toque half covered with a very thick motor-veil of gray tissue. There was a gray cloak, too, in a tumbled mass on the pink coverlet, and a pair of soiled gloves. Everything about the sleeper was sordid and repulsive, a shuddering contrast to the exquisite freshness of the bed and room – everything, that is, except the face. Its half-wrecked beauty was still supreme, and even in the ruin drink or drugs had wrought, it forced admiration.

      "A German spy– here in my cabin – on board Roger Fane's yacht!" I said the words slowly in my mind, not with my tongue. Not a sound, not the faintest whisper, passed my lips. Yet suddenly the long, dark lashes on bruise-blue lids began to quiver. It was as if my thought had shaken the woman by the shoulder, and roused what was left of her soul.

      I should have liked to dash out of the room and with a shriek bring everyone on board to my cabin. But I stood motionless, concentrating my gaze on those trembling eyelids. Something inside me seemed to say: "Don't be a coward, Elizabeth Courtenaye!" It was exactly like Grandmother's voice. I had a conviction that she wanted me to see this thing through as a Courtenaye should, shirking no responsibility, and solving the mystery of past and present without bleating for help.

      The fringed lids parted, shut, quivered again, and flashed wide open. A pair of pale eyes stared into mine – wicked eyes, cruel eyes, green as a cat's. Like a cat, too, the creature gathered herself together as if for a spring. Her muscles rippled and jerked. She sat up, and in chilled surprise I thought I saw recognition in her stare.

      CHAPTER VI

      THE WOMAN OF THE PAST

      "Oh, you've come at last!" she rasped, in a harsh, throaty voice roughened by drink. "I know you. I – "

      "And I know you!" I cut her short, to show that I was not cowed.

      Sitting up in bed, hugging her knees, she started at my words so that the springs shook. Whatever it was she had meant to say, she forgot it for the moment, and challenged me: "That's a lie!" she snapped. "You don't know me yet – but you soon will."

      "I've known you since you came into my room at Courtenaye Abbey the night you tried to burn down the house," I said. "You were spying for the Germans in the war. Heaven knows all the harm you may have done. I can't imagine for whom you're spying now. Anyhow, you can't frighten me again. The war's over, but I'll have you arrested for what you did when it was on."

      The woman scowled and laughed, more Medusa-like than ever. I really felt as if she might turn me to stone. But she shouldn't guess her power.

      "Pooh!" she said, showing tobacco-stained teeth. "You won't want to arrest me when you hear who I am, Lady Shelagh Leigh!"

      "Lady Shelagh Leigh!" It was on my lips to cry, "I'm not Shelagh Leigh!" But I stopped in time. The less I let her find out about me, and the more I could find out about her before rousing the yacht, the better. I spoke not a word, but waited for her to go on – which she did in a few seconds.

      "That makes you sit up, doesn't it?" she sneered. "That hits you where you live! Why did you think I chose your cabin? I didn't select it by chance. I confess I was taken back at your remembering. I thought I hadn't given you time for much study of my features that other night. But it doesn't matter. You can't do anything to me. I'll soon prove that! But I had a good look at you, there in your friend's old Devonshire rat-trap. I knew who you both were. It was easy to find out! And the other day, when I heard that Lady Shelagh Leigh was likely to marry Roger Fane, I said to myself, 'Gosh! One of the girls I saw at the darned old Abbey!'"

      "Oh, you said that to yourself!" I echoed. And, though my knees failed, I kept to my feet. To stand towering above the СКАЧАТЬ