“The thunder, of course,” I answered lightly, but I suppose there must have been something in my manner that betrayed me, for my eye had just fallen on a faded brown stain close to the card table and flowing away from it—first a blotch and then three or four trickles—which I knew to be blood stains.
O’Driscoll advanced towards me, put his hand on my shoulder, and looking into my eyes asked earnestly, “Did you hear the scream?”
“Yes.”
“And did you see anything?—I know you did.”
There was no longer any reason for hesitating to avow that I had seen something. “Sit down,” I said. He dropped into an armchair. I sat on the side of the bed and told him of my vision as I have set it down here. He listened without comment until the end, and then he said: “So it’s true, after all.”
“What?” I asked.
His story was brief. Some years previous he was in the garden giving directions to an old gardener who had known the place all his life, and when he came to a certain corner, “That,” said the gardener, to O’Driscoll, “is where they found the skeletons years agone.”
“What skeletons?” asked O’Driscoll.
“There was a man whose head had been cut off, for ’twas lying beside his ribs, and there were three fingers that they said were lady’s fingers, for on one of them was a gold ring with a jewel in it, and people used to say,” the gardener added, “that sometimes on a wild stormy night, when there was thunder, that the ghosts of a gentleman and a lady used to be seen about the house, but he himself had never seen them, nor had he known anyone who had seen them.”
My friend not unreasonably concluded that the story of that apparition was an invention subsequent to the discovery of the skeletons, and had given no credence to it. Since he had become tenant of the house there had been many nights of thunderstorm as fierce as, if not fiercer than, that which had just passed, but he had never seen anything and never heard anything until he heard the piercing scream that had brought him to my door.