The Hound of Death - Agatha Christie [29]
‘Oh! sir, oh! sir, you haven’t heard then?’
‘Heard what?’
‘Miss Alistair, the pretty lamb. It was her tonic. She took it every night. The poor captain is beside himself, he’s nearly mad. He took the wrong bottle off the shelf in the dark…They sent for the doctor, but he was too late–’
And swiftly there recurred to Macfarlane the words: ‘I’ve always known there was something dreadful hanging over him. I ought to be able to prevent it happening–if one ever can–’ Ah! but one couldn’t cheat Fate…Strange fatality of vision that had destroyed where it sought to save…
The old servant went on: ‘My pretty lamb! So sweet and gentle she was, and so sorry for anything in trouble. Couldn’t bear anyone to be hurt.’ She hesitated, then added: ‘Would you like to go up and see her, sir? I think, from what she said, that you must have known her long ago. A very long time ago, she said…’
Macfarlane followed the old woman up the stairs, into the room over the drawing-room where he had heard the voice singing the day before. There was stained glass at the top of the windows. It threw a red light on the head of the bed…A gipsy with a red handkerchief over her head…Nonsense, his nerves were playing tricks again. He took a long last look at Alistair Haworth.
IV
‘There’s a lady to see you, sir.’
‘Eh?’ Macfarlane looked at the landlady abstractedly. ‘Oh! I beg your pardon, Mrs Rowse, I’ve been seeing ghosts.’
‘Not really, sir? There’s queer things to be seen on the moor after nightfall, I know. There’s the white lady, and the Devil’s blacksmith, and the sailor and the gipsy–’
‘What’s that? A sailor and a gipsy?’
‘So they say, sir. It was quite a tale in my young days. Crossed in love they were, a while back…But they’ve not walked for many a long day now.’
‘No? I wonder if perhaps–they will again now…’
‘Lor! sir, what things you do say! About that young lady–’
‘What young lady?’
‘The one that’s waiting to see you. She’s in the parlour. Miss Lawes, she said her name was.’
‘Oh!’
Rachel! He felt a curious feeling of contraction, a shifting of perspective. He had been peeping through at another world. He had forgotten Rachel, for Rachel belonged to this life only…Again that curious shifting of perspective, that slipping back to a world of three dimensions only.
He opened the parlour door. Rachel–with her honest brown eyes. And suddenly, like a man awakening from a dream, a warm rush of glad reality swept over him. He was alive–alive! He thought: ‘There’s only one life one can be sure about! This one!’
‘Rachel!’ he said, and, lifting her chin, he kissed her lips.
The Lamp
I
It was undoubtedly an old house. The whole square was old, with that disapproving dignified old age often met with in a cathedral town. But No. 19 gave the impression of an elder among elders; it had a veritable patriarchal solemnity; it towered greyest of the grey, haughtiest of the haughty, chilliest of the chill. Austere, forbidding, and stamped with that particular desolation attaching to all houses that have been long untenanted, it reigned above the other dwellings.
In any other town it would have been freely labelled ‘haunted,’ but Weyminster was averse to ghosts and considered them hardly respectable except at the appanage of a ‘county family’. So No. 19 was never alluded to as a haunted house; but nevertheless it remained, year after year, TO BE LET OR SOLD.
II
Mrs Lancaster looked at the house with approval as she drove up with the talkative house agent, who was in an unusually hilarious mood at the idea of getting No. 19 off his books. He inserted the key in the door without ceasing his appreciative comments.
‘How long has the house been empty?’ inquired Mrs Lancaster, cutting short his flow of language rather brusquely.
Mr Raddish (of Raddish and Foplow) became slightly confused.
‘E–er–some time,’ he remarked blandly.
‘So I should think,’ said Mrs Lancaster drily.
The dimly lighted hall was chill with a sinister chill. A more imaginative woman