THE ORDER FROM LONDON
Henry Lennox suffered as he had not suffered even during the horrors of war.For the first time in his life he felt fear.He lowered the unconscious man to the ground, and knew that he was dead, for he had looked on sudden death too often to feel in any doubt.Others, however, were not so ready to credit this, and after he hastened downstairs with his evil message, both Sir Walter and Masters found it hard to believe him.
When he descended, his uncle and May were standing at the dining room door, waiting for him and Peter Hardcastle.Mary had just joined them.
"He's dead!" was all the youth could say; then, thoroughly unnerved, he fell into a chair and buried his face in his hands.
Again through his agency had a dead man been discovered in the Grey Room.In each case his had been the eyes first to confront a tragedy, and his the voice to report it.The fact persisted in his mind with a dark obstinacy, as though some great personal tribulation had befallen him.
Mary stopped with her cousin and asked terrified questions, while Sir Walter, calling to Masters, hastened upstairs, followed by Septimus May.The clergyman was also agitated, yet in his concern there persisted a note almost of triumph.
"It is there!" he cried."It is close to us, watching us, powerless to touch either you or me.But this unhappy sceptic proved an easy victim." "Would to God I had listened to you yesterday," said Sir Walter."Thenthis innocent man had not perhaps been snatched from life.""You were directed not to listen.Your heart was hardened.His hour had come.""I cannot believe it.We may restore him.It is impossible that he can be dead in a moment."They stood over the detective, and Masters and Fred Caunter, with courage and presence of mind, carried him out into the corridor.
The butler spoke.
"Run for the brandy, Fred," he said."We must get some down hisneck if we can.I don't feel the gentleman's heart, but it may not have stopped.He's warm enough."The footman obeyed, and Hardcastle was laid upon his back.Then Sir Walter directed Masters.
"Hold his head up.It may be better for him."They waited, and, during the few moments before Caunter returned, Sir Walter spoke again.His mind wandered backward and seemed for the moment incapable of grasping the fact before him.
"Almost the last thing the man said was to ask me why ghosts haunted the night rather than the day."Lennox and Mannering to bring him news when the telegram dispatched to Scotland Yard was answered, and prepared to leave them.
As he rose, he marked his old spaniel standing whimpering by his side."What is the matter with Prince?" he asked.
"He has not had his dinner," said Mary.
"Let him be fed at once," answered her father, and went out alone.
She rose to follow him immediately, but Mannering, who had stopped and was with them, begged her not to do so.
"Leave him to himself," he said."This has shaken your father, as well it may.He's all right.Make him take his bromide to-night, and let nobody do anything to worry him."The master of Chadlands meantime went afield, walked half a mile to a favorite spot, and sat down upon a seat that he had there erected.A storm was blowing up from the south-west, and the weather of his mind welcomed it.He alternated between bewilderment and indignation.His own life-long philosophy and trust in the ordered foundations of human existence threatened to fail him entirely before this second stroke.It seemed that the punctual universe was suddenly turned upside down, and had emptied a vial of horror upon his innocent head.
Reality was a thing of the past.A nightmare had taken its place, a nightmare from which there was no waking.He considered the stability of his days - a lifetime followed upon high principles and founded on religious convictions that had comforted his sorrows and countenanced his joys.It seemed a trial undeserved, that in his old age he should be thrustupon a pinnacle of publicity, forced into the public eye, robbed of dignity, denied the privacy he esteemed as the most precious privilege that wealth could command.Stability was destroyed; to count upon the morrow seemed impossible.His thought, strung to a new morbidity, unknown till now, ran on and pictured, with painful, vivid stroke upon stroke, the insufferable series of events that lay before him.
Life was become a bizarre and brutal business for a man of fine feeling.He would be thrust into the pitiless mouth of sensation-mongers, called to appear before tribunals, subjected to an inquisition of his fellow-men, made to endure a notoriety infinitely odious even in anticipation.Indeed, Sir Walter's simple intellect wallowed in anticipation, and so suffered much that, given exercise of restraint, he might have escaped altogether.He was brave enough, but personal bravery would not be called for.He sat now staring dumbly at an imaginary series of events abominable and unseemly in every particular to his order of mind.He was so concerned with what the future must hold in store for him that for a time the present quite escaped his thoughts.
He returned to it, however, and it was almost with the shock of a new surprise he remembered that Peter Hardcastle, a man of European repute, had just died in his house.But he could not in the least realize the new tragedy.He had as yet barely grasped the truth of his son-in-law's end, and still often found himself expecting Tom's footfall and his jolly voice.That such an abundant vitality was stilled, that such an infectious laugh would never sound again on mortal ear he yet sometimes found it hard to believe.
But now it seemed that the impact of this second blow rammed home the first.He brooded upon his dead son-in-law, and it was long before he returned to the event of that day.A thought struck him, and though elementary enough, it seemed to Sir Walter an important conclusion.There could be no shadow of doubt that Tom May and Peter Hardcastle had died by the same secret force.He felt that he must remember this.
