"Tuberose didn't always go to funerals," he corrected her teasingly, as she made a face at him. "I remember them growing in my Aunt Bathsheba's garden. Creamy looking posies, kind of kin to a gardenia, seems to me! Thick-petalled, like white plush, and holding their sweet smell everlastingly. But Mr. Locke's perfumery isn't just that, either. There was something else grew in that garden—I can't call to mind what I mean. Basil, maybe?"
"The basil plant, that feeds on dead men's brains," quoted Phil with a mock shiver. "You are happy in your ideals, Drawls!"
He laughed.
"Well, that garden smelled pretty fine when the dew was just warming up in the sun, mornings—and so does this little gilt ball! I'll guess Mr. Locke's lady never got it from France. Smells like old New England."
There was no reason why a vague chill should creep over me, or the sunshine seem to darken as if a thin veil drifted between me and the surrounding brightness. Let me say again that no place could have been more unlike the traditional haunted house. There hung about it no sense of morbidity or depression. Yet, what was I to think? I was not sick or mad; and the Thing had come to me twice. I turned from the married lovers and made my way to the veranda, where I might be alone to consider the pomander whose perfume was like a diaphanous presence walking beside me.
Seated there, in one of the deep willow-chairs Phillida had cushioned in peacock chintz and marked especially mine by laying my favorite magazines on its arm, I studied my new trophy of the night. There was a satisfaction in its material solidity. It was real enough, resting in my palm.
Yes; but it was not ordinary among its quaint kind! As I picked out the design of the gold-work, that fact was borne in upon my mind. Here was no pattern of scroll or blossom or cupids and hearts. The small sphere was belted with the signs of the Zodiac, beautiful in minute perfection. All the rest of the globe was covered with lace-fine work repeating one group of characters over and over. I was not learned enough to tell what the characters were, but the whole plainly belonged to those strange, outcast academies of astrology, alchemy—magic, in short. It contained what appeared to be a pinkish ball; originally a scented paste rolled round and dried, I judged by peering through the interstices of the gold.
Had the old-world trinket been left to bewilder me? Why, and by whom? What interest had my lady of the dark in elaborately deceiving me? Why muffle her identity in mystery? Why the indefinable quaintness of language, the choice of words that made her speech so different from even the college-bred Phillida's?
She urged me to leave the house. If she, or anyone associated with her wanted the place left vacant for some reason, why did not the Thing and the warning come to others of our household group? Vere, Phillida, the Swedish woman, Cristina—all had lived here for weeks without any experiences like mine. I had not been told to leave my room, but the house. The danger, then, was only for me?
Well, was I to run away, hands over my eyes, at the first alarm?