I held my breath to listen.
“There, there!” she resumed, pointing to the heavens; “do you see? You are there, and my father, and—and—Oh! that terrible face, those serpent eyes, the dead man’s skull! Save me! save me!”
She bowed her head upon my bosom, and I led her gently back towards the house. As we gained the door which she had left open, the starlight shining across the shadowy gloom within, she lifted her face from my breast, and cast a hurried fearful look round the shining garden, then into the dim recess beyond the threshold.
“It is there—there!—the Shadow that lured me on, whispering that if I followed it I should join my beloved. False, dreadful Shadow! it will fade soon,—fade into the grinning horrible skull. Brother, brother, where is my Allen? Is he dead—dead—or is it I who am dead to him?”
I could but clasp her again to my breast, and seek to mantle her shivering form with my dripping garments, all the while my eyes—following the direction which hers had taken—dwelt on the walls of the nook within the threshold, half lost in darkness, half white in starlight. And there I, too, beheld the haunting Luminous Shadow, the spectral effigies of the mysterious being, whose very existence in the flesh was a riddle unsolved by my reason. Distinctly I saw the Shadow, but its light was far paler, its outline far more vague, than when I had beheld it before. I took courage, as I felt Lilian’s heart beating against my own. I advanced, I crossed the threshold,—the Shadow was gone.
“There is no Shadow here,—no phantom to daunt thee, my life’s life,” said I, bending over Lilian.
“It has touched me in passing; I feel it—cold, cold, cold!” she answered faintly.
I bore her to her room, placed her on her bed, struck a light, watched over her. At dawn there was a change in her face, and from that time health gradually left her; strength slowly, slowly, yet to me perceptibly, ebbed from her life away.
(1) A missile weapon peculiar to the Australian savages.