THE PLOT
The sequel to the events of this evening may be told very briefly and of it the reader can form his own judgment. I narrate it as it happened.
That night I did not sleep at all well. It may have been because of the excitement of the great shoot in which I found myself in competition with another man whom I disliked and who had defrauded me in the past, to say nothing of its physical strain in cold and heavy weather. Or it may have been that my imagination was stirred by the arrival of that strange pair, Har?t and Mar?t, apparently in search of myself, seven thousand miles away from any place where they can have known aught of an insignificant individual with a purely local repute.
Or it may have been that the pictures which they showed me when under the influence of the fumes of their "tobacco"--or of their hypnotism--took an undue possession of my brain.
Or lastly, the strange coincidence that the beautiful betrothed of my host should have related to me a tale of her childhood of which she declared she had never spoken before, and that within an hour the two principal actors in that tale should have appeared before my eyes and hers (for I may state that from the beginning I had no doubt that they were the same men), moved me and filled me with quite natural foreboding. Or all these things together may have tended to a concomitant effect. At any rate the issue was that I could not sleep.
For hour after hour I lay thinking and in an irritated way listening for the chimes of the Ragnall stable-clock which once had adorned the tower of the church and struck the quarters with a damnable reiteration. I concluded that Messrs. Har?t and Mar?t were a couple of common Arab rogues such as I had seen performing at the African ports.
Then a quarter struck and I concluded that the elephants' cemetery which I beheld in the smoke undoubtedly existed and that I meant to collar those thousands of pounds' worth of ivory before I died. Then after another quarter I concluded that there was no elephants' cemetery--although by the way my old friend, Dogeetah or Brother John, had mentioned such a thing to me--but that probably there was a tribe, as he had also mentioned, called the Kendah, who worshipped a baby, or rather its effigy.
Well now, as had already occurred to me, the old Egyptians, of whom Iwas always fond of reading when I got a chance, also worshipped a child, Horus the Saviour. And that child had a mother called Isis symbolized in the crescent moon, the great Nature goddess, the mistress of mysteries to whose cult ten thousand priests were sworn--do not Herodotus and others, especially Apuleius, tell us all about her? And by a queer coincidence Miss Holmes had the mark of a crescent moon upon her breast. And when she was a child those two men, or others very like them, had pointed out that mark to each other. And Ihad seen them staring hard at it that night. And in her vapour-invoked dream the "Heavenly Child," /alias/ Horus, or the double of Horus, the /Ka/, I think the Egyptians called it, had awakened at the sight of her and kissed her and given her the necklace of the goddess, and--all the rest. What did it mean?
I went to sleep at last wondering what on earth it /could/ mean, till presently that confounded clock woke me up again and I must go through the whole business once more.
By degrees, this was towards dawn, I became aware that all hope of rest had vanished from me utterly; that I was most painfully awake, and what is more, oppressed by a curious fear to the effect that something was going to happen to Miss Holmes. So vivid did this fear become that at length I arose, lit a candle and dressed myself. As it happened I knew where Miss Holmes slept. Her room, which I had seen her enter, was on the same corridor as mine though at the other end of it near the head of a stair that ran I knew not whither. In my portmanteau that had been sent over from Miss Manners's house, amongst other things was a small double-barrelled pistol which from long habit I always carried with me loaded, except for the caps that were in a little leather case with some spare ammunition attached to the pistol belt. I took it out, capped it and thrust it into my pocket. Then Islipped from the room and stood behind a tall clock in the corridor, watching Miss Holmes's door and reflecting what a fool I should look if anyone chanced to find me.
Half an hour or so later by the light of the setting moon which struggled through a window, I saw the door open and Miss Holmes emerge in a kind of dressing-gown and still wearing the necklace which Har?t and Mar?t had given her. Of this I was sure for the light gleamed upon the red stones.
Also it shone upon her face and showed me without doubt that she was walking in her sleep.
Gliding as silently as a ghost she crossed the corridor and vanished.
I followed and saw that she had descended an ancient, twisting stairway which I had noted in the castle wall. I went after her, my stockinged feet ****** no noise, feeling my way carefully in the darkness of the stair, for I did not dare to strike a match. Beneath me I heard a noise as of someone fumbling with bolts. Then a door creaked on its hinges and there was some light. When I reached the doorway I caught sight of the figure of Miss Holmes flitting across a hollow garden that was laid out in the bottom of the castle moat which had been drained. The garden, as I had observed when we walked through it on the previous day on our way to the first covert that we shot, was bordered by a shrubbery through which ran paths that led to the back drive of the castle.
