At a little before noon I went to Hillingham, where Lucy had begged me to call if I were at liberty. The day was of that pale and indecisive autumn kind which belongs peculiarly to London in October, neither bright nor wholly overcast. My unrest of the previous night had not left me with sleep; it had rather changed its garment and followed me into the morning under a cooler face. I had dressed with care, as if outward order might compel the same virtue in thought; yet more than once while fastening my cuff I became aware that my left hand had strayed, by some involuntary caution, away from my left wrist, as if I avoided there a touch not presently to be endured. It was foolishness, and I named it so.
The servant admitted me with a sick-room manner, though no one had yet said that Miss Westenra was ill. I was shown upstairs at once, and when I entered Lucy's bed-sitting room the atmosphere seemed stiller than the house below, as if the air had ceased to circulate and only waited.
The room was all in pale tones. White curtains hung before the long windows and moved scarcely at all. A cedar wardrobe stood against the wall, dark and aromatic amidst the softer furnishings. Upon the bed lay several numbers of Curtis's Botanical Magazine, a portfolio of water-colour studies, and one green-bound handbook of Alpine flora with leaves of paper inserted here and there. The fire had burned low and gave no more than a steady redness under ash.
She sat at the window with her back half turned to the room, her head lifted not to the folio on her knee but toward the pane itself.
"Lucy," I said.
She started, turned with so sweet a smile that my first uneasiness reproached me. Yet the smile passed too quickly; there remained about her eyes the look of one who has long listened.
"My dear Mina," she answered, rising. "You are good to come so soon."
"You have been alone too much this morning."
"No—do not alter anything yet." She looked beyond me to the glass. "I have been watching."
"What?"
At that she gave a little laugh, not freely. "You shall say I am fanciful. Sit by me first."
I sat where she placed me. Outside there was no rain, yet upon the lower pane a clear bead of moisture gathered and slipped, as if the shadow itself distilled dew. I looked up; the eaves did not drip, the gravel beyond was dry.
"You see it too," said Lucy, with her back to me.
Lucy brought the tea, though I would have spared her the trouble. In setting the cup beside me she brushed from the sill some slight scattered thing that fell inward without a sound.
"You are nervous," I said. "Tell me the truth, dear."
"I should rather tell it than keep it." She resumed her seat. "Only you must not smile at me in the physician's way."
"He was in the garden again last night."
The word introduced some third presence into the room, unnamed yet instantly acknowledged.
"Who?"
She looked surprised that I should ask. "Why, him. The same who was there in March. The same who came again in June, though I did not tell mamma then because she was low. He is more patient than last year. More patient, and nearer."
"Lucy, I do not understand you. Was this a gentleman? Someone known to the house?"
"Known?" Her fingers tightened. "No; not known. Seen. Once at the far end, between the yews and the old wall. Afterwards by the rose-beds. Last night immediately below this window."
I went to the pane. The flower-border beneath had indeed been planted with roses, though the season was all but over.
"There is no mark," I said.
"There never is by noon."
Her manner was the unsettling part. She spoke as one gives evidence of some domestic inconvenience repeated often enough to be tiresome.
"What did you see?"
"A tall figure. A cloak, I think. He stands too still—that is always the first thing. A living creature waiting below ought to move a little from weariness; but he seems to have no commerce with either."
"Did he speak?"
"No."
"Did he attempt to enter?"
"No."
"Then how—"
She interrupted with impatience. "Because he looked up as if he had been expected. Because when I laid my hand to the pane he did the same on his side, and though the glass was between us I felt the cold of it run into my arm."
To gain time, I asked, "Why did you say he was the same as in March?"
She passed her thumb over the folio. "Because then he taught me Latin."
"Latin!"
"Yes." There came into her eyes a flash of her old playful self. "You look as if I had confessed to receiving Euclid from a ghost."
"I do not smile. I wonder."
"So did I. It began over a label in one of my books. I had copied a plant-name wrongly from a German paper, and next evening when I sat here reading, there was tapped upon the pane—not loud, just enough. I looked up and saw him in the dusk. He wrote with one gloved finger upon the mist of the glass the proper ending. After that it became a game. He would come; I would hold up a card; he would correct me. Rosa canina. Helleborus niger. Little scraps. Childish, was it not?"
"How long did this continue?" I said.
"Some weeks. Then he forbade me to write while he was there. If I tried, he vanished before the line was finished."
"Why did you continue?"
Her face turned to me with that candid pity. "Because one does not often meet with a tutor who appears out of yews and moonlight. Because he knew every flower in every old book. And because—" her voice sank—"because he never blinked."
"Last night, did he write upon the glass?"
"No. He only looked upward. Yet I thought—I am ashamed to tell you what I thought."
"Tell me."
"That he was displeased with me for stopping."
A gust touched the window then, and somewhere below sounded the creak of a chain and a brief flutter of wings.
It was in stooping to lift a fallen number of the Botanical Magazine that I first distinctly saw upon the sill the objects Lucy had brushed aside. They were petals—five in all, lying separate. Their colour was a delicate mountain-rose, richer at the base and paling toward the edge, with that faintly cool bloom which belongs to blossoms bred in higher air than ours. They had not the thick substance of hothouse roses, nor the broad rounded form of the common English varieties. Each was narrower, more pointed, finely veined. I touched one with a gloved finger and found it fresh.
"Lucy," I said, "where did these come from?"
She followed my gaze with no surprise. "Those? I found them there when I woke. The sash was fastened. Are they not pretty?"
I bent nearer. The scent was almost nothing. I knew enough of flowers to suspect these were not of any ordinary English garden stock. They were not from any nursery bunch bought in Bond Street. They looked as if some colder upland had remembered itself upon her sill.
Five petals only. No calyx, no thorn, no stem.
"If Mr. Stafford has discovered a Carpathian rose-bed in the shrubbery he should publish at once."
"Carpathian?" she repeated. "Then you know them?"
"Not know—only guess. They are not our usual roses."
She drew one petal near. Its shadow fell upon the pane, and a minute bright drop formed beneath and stole downward. Outside the day was dry. Another drop followed, then ceased.
"It does that when they lie there," she whispered.
"Or perhaps when I look at them. I cannot say."
"Mr. Stafford saw me at the window before breakfast. He called up that I must not venture into the lower beds—the grass-frost had turned black in the night, and the whole strip by the roses looked singed, though there had been no fire."
"Grass-frost turned black?" I repeated.
"Yes. He was half angry and half frightened, I think, because gardeners dislike what they cannot put down to mildew or weather."
As if summoned by mention, Mr. Stafford passed below with his barrow. Lucy tapped the pane. His face, ruddy in ordinary times, had a pinched and weathered look.
"Beg pardon, miss," he called through the closed glass, "but you'll keep from the south border. The black's gone right across the grass there. And the owl's off too—clean out when I went with the meat."
"The owl gone?"
"Cage door standing open, though I'd swear I latched it. Flew like a shot toward the elms." He touched his cap and moved on.
Lucy shut the sash. "You hear?" she said.
For a little while neither of us spoke. Outside, a coster's cart went by; familiar notes entered as from a separate world.
Then Lucy turned. "I am behaving absurdly. Tell me of last night. Was everyone insufferable?"
"I did nothing so gallant."
"But you met the famous personage, did you not?"
"There was." My voice became cautious. "The evening was singular."
She turned back. "Singular! That is the very word one uses when one does not intend to tell the truth."
"I intend no falsehood."
She considered. "Certain men are often obeyed where wise men are only heard."
"I daresay."
"And did he look like our English noblemen?"
"No."
"I should like to see a man who is certain in that degree," she said dreamily. "The one in the garden is certain too. He never asks."
A chill passed through me. "Do not compare strangers so readily, Lucy."
"Why not? You compare flowers from books to petals from windows."
"I compare only what lies before me."
She smiled faintly. "What lies before me is that he has returned, and I do not know whether I dread it because he comes, or because some part of me had begun to expect him."
She leaned against the chair-back. In that instant I had the queer sensation that her attention was divided with something outside, though nothing moved there.
I do not tell Mina the whole. When he first came in March I was curious, then flattered, then obedient without knowing when obedience began. He would stand where the rose-shadow touched the glass; if I lifted my finger he answered with his, tracing words I could read though no breath but mine clouded the pane. He was tall, and cloaked, but the worst was not his height. It was that he looked always as though he had arrived before me and would remain after I was gone. Last night, when I whispered "You are here again," the owl beat itself mad in the cage below, and he did not so much as turn his head.
She moved abruptly. "You are grave, Mina."
"What sort of phrases did he teach you?"
"Plant names. Maxims from Virgil. A line from Ovid. An old learning."
"Always through the glass?"
Her hand went to her shawl. "Always."
"Never nearer?"
She looked at me with sudden directness. "No. I am not sure of anything that happens after midnight. That is why I wanted you."
I crossed to her. "If there is some prowler, your mother must be told."
She caught my wrist. "No—not mamma. The men would make it coarse."
"And bruised," she said very low.
"I am cold," she said. "Fetch my grey shawl."
I turned at once and took up the shawl from among the botanical papers. When I brought it to her she had seated herself again by the window and had, in my absence of those few seconds, lifted one of the petals between finger and thumb. The sight of that slight mountain-coloured thing in her hand affected me more sharply than reason justified. Some instinct, swifter than argument, sprang up in me.
"Lucy—no!" I caught her wrist.
The petal slipped from her fingers. She gave a startled exclamation, and in that instant the shawl dropped from my arm.
"What have you done?"
"Nothing! Mina, you frighten me."
"This bruise—when did it come?"
She tried to draw her hand away. "I do not know. Yesterday, perhaps."
Her eyes went unwillingly to the window. "Perhaps when I touched the glass last night."
I had seized her more roughly than ever in my life. Her sleeve had been drawn back, and upon the delicate inner side of her hand, near the base of the thumb, there showed a discolouration not yet yellowing but blue at the centre and dimly violet round about. Its shape arrested me—a curved mark answering to no common accident, but to the hold of fingers too cold or too intent.
"Did you strike yourself?"
"No."
"Has anyone grasped you?"
"No one."
"How should I tell you?" she said. "Perhaps against the sash. Perhaps in sleep."
"Do not smell it," Lucy said.
"Why?"
"Because I did, and afterwards I slept sitting up till dawn, and dreamed with my eyes open."
"What did you dream?"
"That the window had become a door of water, and something waited on the farther side for me to remember the right name."
I set the petal down and drew the shawl about her shoulders. She submitted like a child, and I felt again how slight she had grown.
"Come to the fire."
"No." She took my sleeve. "Not yet. If I move away too soon, it is as if I confessed myself beaten. Only take those things from the sill if they trouble you."
I gathered the remaining four petals. The pane had dried entirely. I laid all five upon a sheet of notepaper and folded the edge over. Lucy watched without protest.
"What will you do?"
"Keep them."
"Then write where they were found," she said, "or I shall fancy by evening I made them from some picture."
I wrote at her desk: Five rose-petals from Miss Westenra's window-sill, noon, Friday, 8 October. My hand was steady, though I remembered another prohibition not mine: I must not set it down.
When I turned back to her she was staring past me. A black bird—crow or rook I could not tell—had risen from somewhere near the lower lawn and flown up with a sudden violence, cutting the pale sky like a torn scrap of mourning and passing out of sight above the house.
I would have stayed longer, but Mrs. Westenra's maid came to say her mistress was asking for Lucy. The message restored for a moment the habits of the house; I was glad of the interruption, for her colour had sunk again.
At the door she detained me.
"You will not laugh at me afterwards? Nor tell everyone?"
"No."
"Nor leave me to-night without writing one line, even if only that London remains made of brick and reason?"
"I will write," I said. "And if you are at all alarmed after dusk, you must send to me instantly."
She smiled. "You always speak as if action were a sovereign remedy."
I stooped to kiss her. As I kissed her, a petal had drifted from my paper and lodged under her silver pendant.
I glanced toward the cheval-glass. I saw the pale angle of wall, the cedar wardrobe, the curtain, the glimmer of the pendant.
But beneath that glimmer, where the petal lay and Lucy's bodice should have doubled softly, there was a small vacancy—as if the silver had taken the light and returned nothing.
The petal was there under the pendant. In the mirror the pendant shone; the petal did not.
"Why do you stare so?" Lucy asked.
My mouth had grown dry. Behind her the garden lay under colourless sky; far off, a church struck the quarter.
"Write to me," she said once more.
"Yes."
I disengaged myself as gently as I could and went out into the passage. Yet before the maid closed the door, I turned by a necessity I could not master. Lucy had gone back already toward the window, her grey shawl about her shoulders. She stood half-profiled in the white light, one hand lifted to the silver at her throat, as though she too had become aware of something fallen there. The curtain breathed inward a little and settled again.
Then the door shut between us.