The butler had just lighted the big lamp in the hall--electricity had not yet found its way into the old house--and the warm cheerfulness of the homely scene went far to rehabilitating Simon's convalescent nerve.

Ghosts did not fit into this atmosphere. Bates did--Bates was almost as satisfying as a cabbage. Of course, Ocky would promptly do her best to spoil it--! He could have dispensed willingly with the examination to which she immediately subjected the servant.

"Bates, has any one called?"

"No, Miss Ocky."

"No one at all?"

"No, Miss Ocky." His wrinkled face showed his surprise at the repet.i.tion.

"How about the back door? Any one come there?"

"No one, Miss Ocky."

"Well, have you seen any one around the grounds? A man dressed like a monk? Wearing a mask?"

"A monk? In a mask?" The old man smiled indulgently at this quaint whimsy, which might have come more suitably from the little girl with flying pigtails whom he used to chase out of his pantry than from this sensible, middle-aged woman who was waiting with apparent seriousness for his answer. "A monk in a mask? Good gracious, no, Miss Ocky!"

"All right." Miss Copley sent a significant glance at Varr, which he acknowledged by wrinkling his nose disdainfully. "By the way, Bates--I left a pound of coffee a little ways down the short-cut, you might step out and get it before dinner."

"Yes, Miss Ocky."

"You ought to find it right in the middle of the path."

"Yes, Miss Ocky."

Bates waited, and when nothing further appeared to be forthcoming he betook himself wonderingly to his usual habitat in the rear quarter of the house. Monks in masks, indeed! And why did any one want to leave a pound of coffee down a trail with rain commencing to fall? He shook his head despondently over a Miss Ocky returned from foreign parts so changed from the Miss Ocky of the old days.

She seemed inclined to renew the ghostly topic of conversation when left alone with her brother-in-law, but Simon gave her no chance. He stalked off down the hall and entered his study, a small room that opened off the comfortable, old-fashioned parlor. He closed the door from the hall behind him, and also, for the sake of greater privacy, the door that communicated with the living-room. Then he seated himself at a roll-top desk and turned up the wick of the lamp that was burning dimly in a wall bracket, close at hand.

He had remembered, as he left Miss Ocky to her eerie fancies, the note which he had retrieved from the cleft stick. She had driven the recollection of it from his mind by her idle chatter about ghosts! He took the slip of paper from his pocket and unfolded it.

A few typewritten lines jumped to his eye, and he nodded as if that were as he had expected. Before reading the text, however, he leaned back in his chair and strove to recall the exact circ.u.mstances under which he had discovered the missive. He had been hurrying--no, blast it, he had been scuttling like a scared rabbit!--along the trail and had run into the stick, which had been jabbed into the ground where he could not fail to notice it--and at the very spot where the figure in black had been standing! Apparition--pooh! If there was one thing certain about the whole silly business it was that the note had been put there by that--that creature. Simon did not profess to be versed in the lore of spooks, but he could not vision an amba.s.sador from another world leaving behind him a tangible message composed on an earthly typewriter--! Pooh, and again, _pooh_!

He paused at this stage of his reflections to grin at the thought of Ocky, denied the knowledge of this consolatory bit of evidence. He hadn't mentioned it to her, and he wouldn't. Let her go on believing in ghosts! He was hugely pleased to think that there really existed one thing that could get under the skin of that hard-boiled human!

He was still smiling grimly as he finally began to read the message--but the smile had faded away before he finished.

"_Woe unto thee, stiff-necked son of Belial! Woe unto thee, oppresor of the defensless! Woe unto thee, who hast ground the faces of the poor, who hast turned the hopes of thy neighbers to ashes! Woe! Woe!

Woe! Take heed to thy ways and mend them, lest thou be destroyed by the thunderbolts of wrath!_"

A hand-written signature in a sprawling fist concluded the communication; heavy, labored characters, inscribed in a crimson fluid by a blunt pen, formed two words: "The Monk."

Simon Varr read the thing through twice. He laid it on the desk before him and stared at it as though it had some power to hypnotize him. A pulse of anger beat in his temple, but it was a more subdued anger than his quick temper usually produced. His mental processes had ceased to function normally as they sank beneath a wave of bewilderment such as had submerged them in the woods. Feebly, they came again to the surface.

This message was an event entirely outside the range of his previous experience. He had heard of anonymous letters, naturally, and he knew that the correct and courageous thing to do was to ignore them as if they did not exist. But anonymous letters, as he understood them, were brought by the postman and placed on the breakfast table with the morning mail; they weren't planted in the middle of a lonely copse by gentlemen attired as Spanish Inquisitioners!

The letter on his desk seemed to leer at its recipient and challenge him to ignore it.

What did it mean? Who had sent it? Was it a genuine warning and threat, or was it merely an elaborate hoax? He pondered the latter possibility quite at length--and thanked his stars that he had not told Ocky about it. Simon Varr was not the man to relish a jest against himself, and if Ocky ever heard about it and it subsequently proved to be the work of a practical joker--well, she would never let him forget that he hadn't gone after the pound of coffee!

But the theory that it might be a hoax grew more and more implausible as he contemplated it. He was positive he knew no one capable of such a prank, and to suppose that any stranger had gone to so much trouble to play a trick on him was absurd.

He had no lack of enemies--he knew that. Had one of them chosen this fantastic method of declaring war on him? In that case he could certainly afford to ignore the letter as coming from a source unworthy of serious consideration. A worth-while enemy does not give a warning; he strikes. The cheapest thing about a rattlesnake is its rattle.

Varr started to run over a list of recognized foemen who might have done this ill-natured deed, but presently desisted; their name was legion.

He did not overlook a third, quite reasonable theory. The whole business might have sprung from the unbalanced mind of a lunatic--some person who believed himself appointed to right the wrongs of the world--the victim of religious mania. That would account for the choice of a monastic costume in which to masquerade--and it would also account for the queer language of the letter, savoring as it did of the Bible. Again, the type of person most likely to suffer from that form of mental affliction would be a poorly educated person--and Simon entertained grave doubts as to the orthography of some of the words in the letter.

He reached into a pigeonhole of the desk and took out a small dictionary that he always kept at hand. He selected the dubious spellings that had caught his attention and ran them down one by one.

"Oppresor" was wrong. "Defensless" was fearful. "Neighbor" started out brilliantly but came a cropper at the end. And that curious phrase, "Who hast"; what about that? Simon was a trifle hazy over this, so he gave the writer the benefit of the doubt. It sounded queer, though. Anyway, he had established to his satisfaction that the fellow was illiterate--navely pa.s.sing by the fact that he had himself resorted to a dictionary to confirm his belief.

He congratulated himself frankly on one score--he had laid the ghost!

He could admit now--though with a blush of shame--that he had been badly shaken for just a few minutes, what with his own nerves and Ocky's confounded chattering! A man without a face! A "familiar" from the Spanish Inquisition! What rot a man's imagination can trick him into crediting. But that was over and done with now; he was back on solid ground, self-confident, secure--

He jumped quite half a foot in his chair at a m.u.f.fled tap on the door--and swore at Bates for announcing dinner.

_IV: The Legend of the Monk_

Four people sat down to dinner that evening in the big dining-room across the hall from the parlor and Varr's study. The walls of the dining-room were plentifully equipped with sconces bearing lamps, but Simon, in some moment of petty economy, had once decreed that these should be lighted only on formal occasions. The only illumination this evening came from the candles on the table, which stood in the center of the room, and beyond the area reached by their rays the shadows deepened into impenetrability. At one end of the room a narrow slit of light at top and bottom marked the position of the swinging door which gave access to the pantry.

From this point to the sideboard, and thence to the table, and back again, moved Bates on noiseless feet as he busied himself with the service of the meal. In his black clothes, the instant he slipped out of the magic lighted circle he was swallowed completely by the shadows, to reappear presently with spectral abruptness in another segment of activity. Several times he startled Simon by silently materializing from the void at his elbow, and on each occasion the tanner found some excuse to vent his anger in a curt rebuke to the servant.

The four who dined were of diametrically opposed temperaments. Across the table from Varr sat his wife, Lucy, a pale, gentle soul who under happier circ.u.mstances might have retained more of her youthful freshness and beauty than she had. She appeared washed-out and bloodless, so that her sister had remarked to herself that living with Simon Varr must be not unlike a.s.sociating permanently with a vampire.

His own abundant vitality sapped the life-juice from those about him, leaving the desiccated bodies an easy prey to his appet.i.te for dominance.

At Varr's left was his son, Copley, a young man who had come of age that summer. He was tall and straight, aquiline of feature, brown-eyed and with dark chestnut hair that persisted, to his annoyance, in a tendency to curl. He was a likable chap, popular with young and old of both s.e.xes. His good looks came from his mother, together with the equable disposition that promised to be his as he grew older and learned better to control his emotions. When a youngster he had been willful at times and p.r.o.ne to flashes of fiery temper, a heritage, beyond doubt, from his father's chronic irascibility, but the discipline of boarding-school and college had taught him to restrain at least its outward manifestations. From Simon, too, he had inherited a flair for business--an invaluable a.s.set, thought Miss Ocky, for a man sentenced for life to this twentieth century America.

She was studying him now as she sat across the table from him, just as she studied the other two when opportunity served. They were all three practically strangers to her. The boy had not even been expected when she went to China with the Oriental Languages committee from her college, and in the twenty-three years that had elapsed before her return two months ago, time had worked changes. She would never have recognized her bright, joyous sister in this tired woman of the listless air. As for her brother-in-law--well, perhaps it was not quite accurate to say that he was a stranger to her; she had known Simon Varr at the period of his courtship and marriage and he was still Simon Varr, only a little more so! Detestable creature. She held him accountable, quite justly, for the blight that lay upon Lucy.

And upon Bates, too, for that matter. Miss Ocky had always had a warm place in her heart for the faithful old man, reposing in him the trust and confidence that her father had shown in the same quarter. Bates was something more than the ordinary servant, he came close to being a throw-back to the feudal retainer type of other days in his loyalty and devotion to his house, just as his former master, Sylvester Copley, had approximated in his time the character of a country gentleman. Bates was getting on in years, of course, which would account for much of his increased graveness and pa.s.sivity, but not all. Unless Miss Ocky's suspicions were wide of the mark, he, too, had come under the deadening influence of Varr's dominance--ah! but _had_ he _entirely_? At the very moment she was thinking about it, Simon had uttered a terse comment, as biting as acid, upon some negligible feature of the dinner-service. No faintest flicker of his facial muscles gave any hint that Bates had heard the remark, but his eyes revealed that he had, and for the fraction of a second they glinted oddly red in the candlelight. Was there a spark of manhood in his breast that still glowed when breathed upon?

They dined in silence for the most part. Simon was never a brilliant conversationalist, and to-night his thoughts were busy with matters far afield. Young Copley was taciturn and moody, preoccupied by reflections of no very agreeable nature, to judge by his glum manner.

Lucy Varr, helping herself but scantily from the dishes pa.s.sed, preserved her customary pose of nervous diffidence. Only Miss Ocky tried to dispel the settled atmosphere of depression by occasionally shooting point-blank questions at one or another of her companions--and toward the end of the meal she did manage to stir up a little excitement.

"Copley," she addressed the quiet young man across the table. "You've been out in the great world for several days, what's going on in New York? Haven't you brought back any news to us country folk?"

"New York?" He roused himself by a palpable effort. "No, Aunt Ocky, I didn't pick up anything in New York that would interest you. Nothing much good at the theaters just now. But if you want a piece of local news I may have one for you. It would be more interesting to you three than to me. When I got off the train this afternoon there was another chap who swung off just ahead of me, and I noticed him particularly because he was so different from anything you'd expect to drop off the four-sixteen. Tall and well-set-up, dressed like the mirror of fashion, smooth and polished--and followed by a valet, if you please, carrying his grips and a bag of golf clubs! Imagine a sight like that in Hambleton! I thought he'd made a mistake in his station, until I saw him walk right across the platform to where Adams, the baggage-master, was standing. He said something and held out his hand, and old Adams grabbed it and shook it as if he was greeting a prodigal son. I thought the valet looked a bit shocked! Then this chap tucked himself and his man and his baggage into one of Brown's jitneys and drove off like a lord!"

"Who in the world could it have been?" wondered his mother, awakened to a mild interest at the account of such grandeur in Hambleton. "Did you ask, Copley?"

"I have my share of vulgar curiosity, mother; I did. As soon as he disappeared I pounced on old Adams and asked him the name of his swell friend. He told me that it was Leslie Sherwood, the son of the man who died last winter--_hullo_!"

He broke off short and looked into the darkness behind him, whence had come the crash of china as Bates dropped a tray of coffee cups.

Silence succeeded the tragedy, during which they could hear the butler's muttered e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns of horror and distress as he bent to retrieve the debris.