“You dear, you dear,” she said.
And then Aunt Susan, after her excursion into realities, hurried to the kitchen, the excellent housekeeper again.
There must have been something in the conjunctivity of the twins—except, indeed, at the vicarage at Chartries—which disposed the beholder to indefensible levity. London had felt their spell, and even Cambridge, it appeared, that home of sweet and sober seriousness, went a little off its head about them. The spell, whatever it was, lay in their combination. Helen alone, it is true, could rouse that impulse of social gaiety which is evoked so easily by a girl’s beauty and high spirits, and Martin could make other people enjoy themselves by the sight of his own enormous power that way; but it was when they were together that resistance was clearly hopeless, and it is worthy of record that to-night, after dinner, Dr. Arne and a professor of poetry, with their respective wives and the twins played “Ghosts” in the garden. Why these elderly people did it they could not have told you; but Martin proposed “Ghosts,” Helen explained it in three sentences, and the studious shades were awakened and appalled by wild shrieks.
For the night was dark and moonless, and while five out of these six foolish people hid in asparagus beds, behind tree-trunks, in the wood-shed, and in other black and dreadful places, the professor of poetry (selected by lot) was in honour bound to make the complete circuit of the garden, conscious that at any moment a ghost with curdling yells might spring out on him, or even worse, scuttle quickly up behind him, or perhaps, worst of all, he might suddenly be conscious of a small, crouching figure by his side which accompanied him in awful silence, ready to break forth into who knew what hideous and babbling speech? Thus one eye had to be kept on this dreadful object, while simultaneously the whole attention had to be on the alert in case of some new reverent from the bushes. The professor was a man on whom, as far as was known, the imputation of cowardice had never yet been laid, but at the first attempt to make the black circuit of the garden he found he could not possibly face the corner by the wood-shed, his nerves being already utterly unstrung by a vague form that groaned among the gooseberry bushes. He paused while still a few yards distant from this dreadful being, and then fled with flying coat-tails back to the house, where in the safety of the lit drawing-room he wiped the dews of strangling anguish from his forehead and called lamentably on his courage.
“‘Not a glimmer from the worm, in the darkness thick and hot,’” he half moaned to himself. “Oh, this will never do! I am aware it is probably only Dr. Arne, and I am not really frightened of him. Come, come.”
And, with his heart in his mouth, he set out again on his fascinating and abhorred errand, murmuring again, “‘In the darkness thick and hot. In the darkness thick and hot. In the dark——’ Oh, dear me, what is that?”
The poor professor suffered for his momentary panic, for Helen had, in his hour of weakness in the drawing-room, changed her place to behind a large flower-tub, which had concealed nobody before. Consequently, he approached it inattentively, without caution or misgiving, to be confronted, shuddering, by a flapping form which gasped and panted.
He made a fruitless appeal.
“Dear Miss Helen,” he said, “I can’t go on. I really do not think it would be right. My work will suffer. But is it Dr. Arne among the gooseberry bushes or is it Martin? I think I could run as fast as Dr. Arne, but if——“
Hoots of unearthly laughter assailed him on the other side.