"Mother!" called the young man for the third time. "Speak to me! Where are you?" He was stumbling about in the dark hall.
This time Eleanor heard the comforting voice of her son and tried to answer.
"Bob!" she cried faintly, and staggered toward the library door. "Bob!" she called, louder, and took a step into the shadowy room. Then, as the candle light flamed forward, she came, suddenly, face to face with a still figure, a shrouded, sinister woman in gray. It was too much. It was more than Eleanor Baxter could bear. With a stifled moan she sank down on the library floor and was conscious of nothing more until she opened her eyes weakly and found Bob bending over her.
CHAPTER XIII
FIRST AID TO THE INJURED
As regards the gray lady whose seeming apparition had spread such wide alarm, anyone curious to know something of the ghostly Ladye Ysobel Ippynge (she was believed to have been poisoned by her husband, Sir Gyles Ippynge, Knight, and first earl of Ippingford in the early part of the twelfth century) will find a true account of her pious life and tragic death in a volume entitled, "Kronicon Uxorium," in the Bodleian library of Oxford, written by the monk Abel of Ipswich and printed in London in 1529.
The pious Lady Ysobel would have been sore distressed had she known what a fearful pother her counterfeit presentment (by Hester Storm) would one day cause. What had really happened was perfectly simple, although the consequences were complicated and far-reaching. When Hester came to the bottom of the stairs she had turned out of her way in the darkness and passed close to a pedestal supporting a suit of armor that kept impressive guard there in the ancestral hall. So close had she passed that the cord of her electric lamp had caught on one of the links in the coat of mail, whereupon, in her plunge away from this ghostly restraint, she had toppled over the grim warrior, pedestal and all, with a crash and rattle of his various resounding parts that had alarmed the entire establishment. And this uproar had terrified Mrs. Baxter all the more because she was already quivering with superstitious dread after reading that creepy tale of Bulwer Lytton's, "A Strange Story"; in fact, it was to seek relief from this obsession that the agitated lady had gone downstairs for some sulphonal sleeping tablets that she had left in the conservatory. And the silent, silver-draped apparition, looming suddenly in the shadows, had done the rest.
For the Storm girl it was an incredibly narrow escape. A mere matter of seconds decided her fate. If young Baxter had carried a candle she would have been discovered. If Mrs. Baxter's candle had not been extinguished by that lady's fall she would also have been discovered. As it was, Hester had time to flee across the dark conservatory and out into the park (by the unlocked door) before Bob, blundering and stumbling through the hall and library, had reached his fainting mother.
It may be added that Hester's quick impersonation of the gray lady was not entirely inspirational. She had heard old Mrs. Pottle refer to the specter that haunted Ipping House that very evening; and, while she watched at the lodge for the Baxter automobile, her thoughts had turned to the shivery legend when she heard An Petronia, with motherly tenderness, putting to bed the four "Pottles" (who seemed wakeful) and assuring them that "the dray lady would tum and det them," if they didn't go to sleep.
It must not be supposed, however, that either the gray lady or her understudy, Hester Storm, was responsible for the series of happenings at Ipping House that ended in converting that comfortably appointed English home into as uncompromising a wilderness, as far as the relatives were concerned, as the most resourceful Swiss Family Robinson could hope to be wrecked upon. There was another agency at work; to-wit, Parker.