Mona suffered herself to be led in, and to be given wine, and generally taken care of: but curiously inconsistent, for all her nervous fears, she preferred to be alone. Then, bidding her relative good-night, she retired to her room, and having fastened the shutters and locked the door, she sat down to think.
Her thoughts flew straight off to one who now was the main object of them. Where was he at that moment? Returning to her, travelling at all speed over a peril-haunted region to return to her, alone perhaps, as he had hinted might be the case; and more than one unspoken prayer went up that it might not be so, or for his safety if it were. Then her recollections went farther back. She recalled many to whom she stood in the same light as she now did to that one—from their point of view, that is—yet none had succeeded in stirring her heart, in causing her pulses to beat quicker, or, if so, for no more than a moment, so to say. She recalled many an impassioned pleading, many a haggard face, grief-stricken, disappointed, down to that of Lambert only the other day, and wondered if they had felt as she would feel were any evil to overtake that one now. How cold, how callous, how inconsiderate she had been to others, she recognised now; and as her thoughts turned to him she felt that, but for the certainty of seeing him again, of all the blissfulness of their reunion, and that in a day or two at the furthest, her life would have been lived—lived and done with for all time.
The house was in dead silence, as in the solitude of her room at last she began to prepare for bed. She had just finished brushing out the thick waves of her hair, when a dull rumble, as of many feet, not far from the window, turned her pale and tottering. Her heart beat like a hammer, and the splendid outlines of her breast, now uncovered, rose and fell with the quick regularity of the roll of surf upon a level beach. Then with the stamping tread there arose a low moaning noise, long-drawn and unspeakably dismal in the dead midnight silence.
“What a despicable coward I am!” she exclaimed, now with a faint smile. Then, with a glance at her magnificent limbs, “I am large framed, and strong, yet the least little thing makes me quake and quiver like a scared child.”
She threw open the shutters, and, as she did so, again went up that unearthly, deep-throated moaning, ending in a short shrill bellow. But she knew the sound. The cattle had returned about the homestead, and were collecting at the spot where a sheep or goat was daily slaughtered for the use of the household and the farm hands. In the faint moonlight she could see the beasts bunched together, their noses down to the blood-soaked spot, sniffing and pawing up the ground as they emitted their dismal mutterings; then they would start off, with tail in air and horns lowered, and career a little way across the veldt, and return, as though the fell fascination was greater than the terror which had first appalled them, to resume their weird, hollow groaning as before. The dogs, well accustomed to this performance, forbore to notice it, beyond a low growl or two. Besides, they held the horns of the excited beasts in wholesome respect.
Closing the shutters again, Mona returned into the room. Just as she was about to get into bed, her glance was attracted by something. A great dark object was moving across the floor. Repressing an impulse to shriek aloud, she lowered her candle so as to dispel the shadow in which the thing moved, for it was under the table, and then with a shuddering horror she saw that it was a huge tarantula.
The evil-looking beast was of enormous dimensions. Outspread, it was the size of a man’s hand, and its great hairy legs and dull, black, protruding eyes gave it the aspect of a demoniacal looking animal rather than a mere insect, as it came shoggling across the floor; then stopped suddenly, as its instincts warned it of danger.
All in a quiver of loathing and repulsion, she snatched up a large book of bound-up music, and dropped it upon the hideous insect. She left it where it lay, not caring to investigate farther; knowing, too, that the thing would be crushed and flattened out of all life and shape beneath the heavy volume. Where did it come from? Tarantulas were quite rare in that high, open, bracing veldt, though plentiful enough in the lower and hotter bush country. But even there she had never seen one anything like this for size.
The nervous fears which had beset her throughout the evening had brought something like exhaustion in their train. No sooner was the light out, and her head upon her pillow, than she was fast asleep. Yet sound though her slumbers were, a thread of uneasiness ran through them. Outside, in the faint moonlight, the cattle still clustered about the bloodstained spot, and even in her sleep she could still hear the pawing of their hoofs, and the unceasing refrain of their dismal and hollow groanings, half-soothing, half-terrifying in the mesmeric effect which they produced upon the ever-changing waves of her consciousness, that hovering border-line between wakefulness and the dream world. She murmured the name of her absent lover, and again, in her sleeping visions she was soothing him to rest in the still midnight, as he lay in feverish pain, but a few hours after she had drawn him back from death.
Then the great tarantula she had slain seemed to come into her slumbers. She saw the upheaval of the broad book under which it lay crushed, and the hideous thing step slowly forth; and as it did so it spread itself out, black, gigantic, to ten times its original size. It advanced to the side of the bed, and leaped up on to the counterpane and crouched there, glowering at her with its dull black eyes, its great hairy feelers moving, its nippers working threateningly. She felt as one under a demoniacal spell, without even power of movement enough to tremble. Then she feared no longer for herself, for that which the grisly monster threatened seemed to be her absent lover. Now she sees him, sees him faintly and dimly as through darkness; and he, too, is unconscious. It is as though she sees him in a grave, amid the gloomy shadows of the nether world, far down in the dim depths of the black river of Death.