III
“There’s many a fine walk hereabouts,” said the old man seated in the arm-chair in the corner of the Threshers’ Inn bar-parlour.
Dillon nodded encouragingly.
“There’s Ganton-on-the-Hill,” continued the ancient. “You can see the sea from there in clear weather; and many’s the time I’ve heard the guns in France from Upper Crobury of a still night. Then, four mile away, there’s the haunted Grange, though nobody’s allowed past the gate. Not as nobody wants to be,” he added, reflectively.
“The haunted Grange?” questioned Dillon. “Where is that?”
“Hollow Grange?” said the old man. “Why, it lies——”
“Oh, Hollow Grange—yes! I know where Hollow Grange is, but I was unaware that it was reputed to be haunted.”
“Ah,” replied the other, pityingly, “you’re new to these parts; I see that the minute I set eyes on you. Maybe you was wounded in France, and you’re down here to get well, like?”
“Quite so. Your deductive reasoning is admirable.”
“Ah,” said the sage, chuckling with self-appreciation, “I ain’t lived in these here parts for nigh on seventy-five years without learning to use my eyes, I ain’t. For seventy-four years and seven months,” he added proudly, “I ain’t been outside this here county where I was born, and I can use my eyes, I can; I know a thing I do, when I see it. Maybe it was providence, as you might say, what brought you to the Threshers to-day.”
“Quite possibly,” Dillon admitted.
“He was just such another as you,” continued the old man with apparent irrelevance. “You don’t happen to be stopping at Hainingham Vicarage?”
“No,” replied Dillon.
“Ah! he was stopping at Hainingham Vicarage and he’d been wounded in France. How he got to know Dr. Kassimere I can’t tell you; not at parson’s, anyway. Parson won’t never speak to him. Only last Sunday week he preached agin him; not in so many words, but I could see his drift. He spoke about them heathen women livin’ on an island—sort of female Robinson Crusoes, I make ’em out, I do—as saves poor shipwrecked sailors from the sea and strangles of ’em ashore.”
Dillon glanced hard at the voluble old man.
“The sirens?” he suggested, conscious of a sudden hot surging about his heart.
“Ah, that’s the women I mean.”
“But where is the connection?”
“Ah, you’re new to these parts, you are. That Dr. Kassimere he keeps a siren down in Hollow Grange. They see her—these here strangers (same as the shipwrecked sailors parson told about)—and it’s all up with ’em.”
Dillon stifled a laugh, in which anger would have mingled with contempt. To think that in the twentieth century a man of science was like to meet with the fate of Dr. Dee in the days of Elizabeth! Truly there were dark spots in England. But could he credit the statement of this benighted elder that a modern clergyman had actually drawn an analogy between Phryné Devant and the sirens? It was unbelievable.
“What was the unhappy fate,” he asked, masking his intolerance, “of the young man staying at the Vicarage?”
“The same as them afore him,” came the startling reply; “for he warn’t the first, and maybe”—with a shrewd glance of the rheumy old eyes—“he won’t be the last. Them sirens has the powers of darkness. I know, ’cause I’ve seen one—her at the Grange; and though I’m an old man, nigh on seventy-five, I’ll never forget her face, I won’t, and the way she smiled at me!”
“But,” persisted Dillon, patiently, “what became of this particular young man, the one who was staying at the Vicarage?”
The ancient sage leant forward in his chair and tapped the speaker upon the knee with the stem of his clay pipe.
“Ask them as knows,” he said, with impressive solemnity. “Nobody else can tell you!”
And, having permitted an indiscreet laugh to escape him, not another word on the subject could Dillon induce the old man to utter, he strictly confining himself, in his ruffled dignity, to the climatic conditions and the crops.
When Dillon, finally, set out upon the four-mile walk back to the Grange, he realised, with annoyance, that the senile imaginings of his bar-parlour acquaintance lingered in his mind. That Dr. Kassimere dwelt outside the social life of the county he had speedily learnt; but for this he had been prepared. That he might possibly be, not a recluse, but a pariah, was a new point of view. Trivial things, to which hitherto he had paid scant attention, began to marshal themselves as evidence. The two village “helpers,” he knew, received extravagant wages, because, as Phryné had confessed, they had “found it almost impossible to get girls to stay.” Why?
Of the earlier guest, or guests, who had succumbed to the siren lure of Phryné, he had heard no mention. Why? Save at meal-times he rarely saw his host, who frankly left him to the society of Phryné. Again—why? Dr. Kassimere, in his jealously locked laboratory, was at work day and night upon his experiments. What were these experiments? What was the nature of the doctor’s studies?
He had now been for nearly three weeks at Hollow Grange, and never had Dr. Kassimere spoken of his work. And Phryné? The sudden, new thought of Phryné was so strange, so wonderful and overwhelming, that it reacted physically; and he pulled up short in the middle of a field-path, as though some palpable obstacle blocked the way.
Why had he set out alone that day, when all other days had been spent in the girl’s company? He had deliberately sought solitude—because of Phryné; because he wanted to think calmly, judicially, to arraign himself before his own judgment, remote from the witchery of her presence. He had tried to render his mind a void, wherein should linger not one fragrant memory of her delicate beauty and charm, so that he might return unbiased to his judgment. He had returned; he was judged.
He loved Phryné madly, insanely. His future, his life, lay in the hollow of her hands.