“Satan has come.
The Sacraments call us! Come, with your dear apostate soul, and we will
worship and dance till the moon dies and the world is forgotten!”
Just saving himself from the dreadful plunge, Vezin
struggled to release himself from her grasp, while the passion tore at
his reins and all but mastered him. He shrieked aloud, not knowing what
he said, and then he shrieked again. It was the old impulses, the old
awful habits instinctively finding voice; for though it seemed to him
that he merely shrieked nonsense, the words he uttered really had
meaning in them, and were intelligible. It was the ancient call. And it
was heard below. It was answered.
The wind whistled at the skirts of his coat as the air round him
darkened with many flying forms crowding upwards out of the valley. The
crying of hoarse voices smote upon his ears, coming closer. Strokes of
wind buffeted him, tearing him this way and that along the crumbling
top of the stone wall; and Use clung to him with her long shining arms,
smooth and bare, holding him fast about the neck. But not Use alone,
for a dozen of them surrounded him, dropping out of the air. The
pungent odour of the anointed bodies stifled him, exciting him to the
old madness of the Sabbath, the dance of the witches and sorcerers
doing honour to the personified Evil of the world.
“Anoint and away! Anoint and away!” they cried in
wild chorus about him. “To the Dance that never dies! To the sweet and
fearful fantasy of evil!”
Another moment and he would have yielded-and gone,
for his will turned soft and the flood of passionate memory all but
overwhelmed him, when—so can a small thing after the whole course of
an adventure—he caught his foot upon a loose stone in the edge of the
wall, and then fell with a sudden crash on to the ground below. But he
fell towards the houses, in the open space of dust and cobblestones,
and fortunately not into the gaping depth of the valley on the farther
side.
And they, too, came in a tumbling heap about him,
like flies upon a piece of food, but as they fell he was released for a
moment from the power of their touch, and in that brief instant of
freedom there flashed into his mind the sudden intuition that saved
him. Before he could regain his feet he saw them scrabbling awkwardly
back upon the wall, as though bat-like they could only fly by dropping
from a height, and had no hold upon him in the open. Then, seeing them
perched there in a row like cats upon a roof, all dark and singularly
shapeless, their eyes like lamps, the sudden memory came back to him of
Use’s terror at the sight of fire.
Quick as a flash he found his matches and lit the
dead leaves that lay under the wall.
Dry and withered, they caught fire at once, and the
wind carried the flame in a long line down the length of the wall,
licking upwards as it ran; and with shrieks and wailings, the crowded
row of forms upon the top melted away into the air on the other side,
and were gone with a great rush and whirring of their bodies down into
the heart of the haunted valley, leaving Vezin breathless and shaken in
the middle of the deserted ground.
“Use!” he called feebly; “Use!” for his heart ached
to think that she was really gone to the great Dance without him, and
that he had lost the opportunity of its fearful joy. Yet at the same
time his relief was so great, and he was so dazed and troubled in mind
with the whole thing, that he hardly knew what he was saying, and only
cried aloud in the fierce storm of his emotion… .
The fire under the wall ran its course, and the
moonlight came out again, soft and clear, from its temporary eclipse.
With one last shuddering look at the ruined ramparts, and a feeling of
horrid wonder for the haunted valley beyond, where the shapes still
crowded and flew, he turned his face towards the town and slowly made
his way in the direction of the hotel.
And as he went, a great wailing of cries, and a
sound of howling, followed him from the gleaming forest below, growing
fainter and fainter with the bursts of wind as he disappeared between
the houses.
“It may seem rather abrupt to you, this sudden tame
ending,” said Arthur Vezin, glancing with flushed face and timid eyes
at Dr. Silence sitting there with his notebook, “but the fact
is—er—from that moment my memory seems to have failed rather. I have
no distinct recollection of how I got home or what precisely I did.
“It appears I never went back to the inn at all. I
only dimly recollect racing down a long white road in the moonlight,
past woods and villages, still and deserted, and then the dawn came up,
and I saw the towers of a biggish town and so came to a station.
“But, long before that, I remember pausing somewhere
on the road and looking back to where the hill-town of my adventure
stood up in the moonlight, and thinking how exactly like a great
monstrous cat it lay there upon the plain, its huge front paws lying
down the two main streets, and the twin and broken towers of the
cathedral marking its torn ears against the sky. That picture stays in
my mind with the utmost vividness to this day.
“Another thing remains in my mind from that
escape—namely, the sudden sharp reminder that I had not paid my bill,
and the decision I made, standing there on the dusty highroad, that the
small baggage I had left behind would more than settle for my
indebtedness.
“For the rest, I can only tell you that I got coffee
and bread at a cafe on the outskirts of this town I had come to, and
soon after found my way to the station and caught a train later in the
day. That same evening I reached London.”
“And how long altogether,” asked John Silence
quietly, “do you think you stayed in the town of the adventure?”
Vezin looked up sheepishly.
“I was coming to that,” he resumed, with apologetic
wrigglings of his body. “In London I found that I was a whole week out
in my reckoning of time. I had stayed over a week in the town, and it
ought to have been September 15th,—instead of which it was only
September 10th!”
“So that, in reality, you had only stayed a night or
two in the inn?” queried the doctor.
Vezin hesitated before replying. He shuffled upon the mat.
“I must have gained time somewhere,” he said at length—”somewhere
or somehow. I certainly had a week to my credit. I can’t explain it. I
can only give you the fact.”
“And this happened to you last year, since when you
have never been back to the place?”
“Last autumn, yes,” murmured Vezin; “and I have
never dared to go back. I think I never want to.”
“And, tell me,” asked Dr.
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