The whole party met him with a yell. In the few moments of his absence he had wrought a startling change in his appearance. Over his shoulders he had thrown a gayly colored Indian blanket, completely hiding his trim dinner coat. He had tied a red cloth over his head and waxed the points of his iron-gray mustache until they stood stiff and erect, giving an appearance of mock ferocity to his face. A silver key-ring and his own gold signet dangled from his ears, tied on with invisible black thread. And to cap the climax he carried a long, wicked-looking carving-knife between his teeth.
Of course he was Godfrey Jason himself—the same character I had portrayed in the invitations. Fargo made him do a Spanish dance to the clang of an invisible tambourine.
Some of the gathering scattered out again, after his dramatic appearance, drifting off on various enterprises and as the hour neared midnight only four of us were left in the drawing-room. Marten stood in the center, still in his ridiculous costume. Van Hope, Nealman, Pescini and myself were grouped about him. And it might have been that in the song that followed Pescini too slipped away. I know that I didn’t see him immediately thereafter.
With a little urging Marten was induced to sing Samuel Hall—a stirring old ballad that quite fitted his costume. He had a pleasant baritone, he sung the song with indescribable spirit and enthusiasm, and it was decidedly worth hearing. Indeed it was the very peak of the evening—a moment that to the assembled guests must have almost paid them for the long journey.
“For I shot a man in bed, man in bed—
For I shot a man in bed, and I left him there for dead,
With a bullet through his head—
Damn your eyes!”
But the song halted abruptly. Whether he was at the middle of the verse, a pause after a stanza, or even in the middle of a chord I do not know. On this point no one will ever have exact knowledge. Marten stopped singing because something screamed, shrilly and horribly, out toward the lagoon.
The picture that followed is like a photograph, printed indelibly on my mind. Marten paused, his lips half open, a strange, blank look of amazement on his face. Nealman stared at me like a witless man, but I saw by his look that he was groping for an explanation. Van Hope stood peculiarly braced, his heavy hands open, beads of perspiration on his temples. Whether Pescini was still with us I do not know. I tried to remember later, but without ever coming to a conclusion. He had been standing behind me, at first, so I couldn’t have seen him anyway. I believed, however, without knowing why, that he walked into the hall at the beginning of the song.
The sound we had heard, so sharp and clear out of the night, so penetrating above the mock-ferocious words of the song, was utterly beyond the ken of all of us. It was a living voice; beyond that no definite analysis could be made. Sounds do not imprint themselves so deeply upon the memory as do visual images, yet the remembrance of it, in all its overtones and gradations, is still inordinately vivid; and I have no doubt but that such is the case with every man that heard it.
It was a high, rather sharp, full-lunged utterance, not in the least subdued. It had the unrestrained, unguarded tone of an instinctive utterance, rather than a conscious one—a cry that leaped to the lips in some great extremity or crisis. Yet it went further. Every man of us that heard it felt instinctively that its tone was of fear and agony unimagined, beyond the pale of our ordered lives.
“My God, what’s that?” Van Hope asked. Van Hope was the type of man that yields quickly to his impulses.