He had as yet not gauged the extent of his niece’s knowledge of natural history, and would have given much to have had a real live bat in his possession at that moment, that he might privily have set it loose when they gained the room. She, however, seemed not inclined to question the probability of bats hawking around at large in what was nearly mid-winter!
“Now,” he said, holding up the light, and making a careful inspection of the room, “we’ll find him probably, hanging on somewhere in the corner. No,” after an exhaustive search. “Oh well, he’s probably gone out by the way he came. Better keep the window nearly up to the top—then he can’t get back again.”
“Do you think it was really that, Uncle Seward?” Melian asked.
“Why of course,” he answered with the uneasy consciousness of skating on thin ice. “Unless it was a common or house mouse which had found its way in through somewhere. But now you go to bed again, child, and I’ll come up and turn in too. Then you’ll know there’s some one right near you, and all you’ve got to do is to knock on the partition in case you get another scare. It’s not a very thick one, and I shall hear at once. But you mustn’t get another scare, if only that there’s nothing on earth to get scared at. Look—you can see all over the room now. It’s just an ordinary room—old, but with no secret panels or anything of that kind, and I’m only just the other side of that partition. You’ll sleep like a humming top now, I should think.”
“I believe I will,” she answered, feeling more reassured by his tone of decisive confidence, the recent glass of port, to one unaccustomed, contributing largely to that end. “Tell me, Uncle Seward, do you think me an awful fool? I wouldn’t like that?”
“My dear child, of course I don’t. All women get nervy at times—not only women either—for the rest the plum pudding, and the subject of conversation. Now good-night, darling, you’ll be as jolly as Punch in the morning. And remember, there’s only the partition between us.”
Even as her uncle had predicted, the girl laid her head on the pillow perfectly reassured and calmed, and in no time was breathing softly and evenly in a dreamless sleep. But this did not fall to Mervyn’s lot. The incident had banished all sleep from his mind. He had laughed off the situation, and effectually soothed Melian—in fact he was surprised to think how completely he had succeeded. But what if something of the sort recurred, and he found that it got too much upon the girl’s nerves, and that, too, just as he flattered himself that everything was going on so well? There were reasons why he did not want to leave Heath Hover; reasons over and above his undoubted attachment to the place—and they were very vital reasons indeed; perhaps not wholly unconnected with Inspector Nashby.
He put up the window sash and leaned out. The night, was wild and rather heavy, and a moist earthy odour came up from the saturation of the fallen leaves in the wet woodland. Away on the bank, up towards the head of the long pond, a fox barked several times. He liked the sound, he liked all the sounds of the lonely night, and when an owl floated out on noiseless pinions and hooted beneath the murky sky—he could just make out its shadowy shape—that too, fitted in with his mood. There was a moon, a feeble one, and concealed behind the prevailing mistiness, but in such light as it afforded he could pick out the boardings which held up the steps of the footpath leading up to the sluice. And on one of these the round stone stood out just discernible.
Just discernible! To his gaze—to his then mood—it seemed the one thing discernible—it and the thing that it held—the thing that it entombed. And the pointed roundness of that thing seemed to rise from the earth and gleam dull white in the lack-lustre of the night.
There it had lain for weeks, and for weeks, almost nightly, as now, he had gazed out upon the tomb of it—just as he was doing now—with a strange, uneasy, but wholly compelling fascination. Why had he left it there all this time? Any chance movement, on anybody’s part, might dislodge the stone. Why, his niece had slipped on it, the first day she had been at Heath Hover! The time had come to bury this thing—this accursed thing—far away from any possibility of it being unearthed—at any rate in his lifetime. After that it would not matter.