“And the children?” Fitzsimmons inquired.
“Oh, the children’s all right,” the cook answered—“at least I suppose so; and, you bet, they’d have let me know fast enough if they hadn’t been. I don’t know which of the two hollers loudest.”
“Well, get my supper, for mercy’s sake, for I’m famishing,” Fitzsimmons said; and he stalked back again into the darkness.
After groping about the hall for some time and knocking over a good few things, he at length put his hands on a match-box, and lighting a candle made straight for the nursery. The children had got into bed partially undressed, and were sound asleep, with their heads well buried under the bedclothes. Fitzsimmons contrived to uncover their faces without waking them, and kissing them both lightly on the forehead, he left them and went downstairs to his study. Here he drew up a chair close to the fire and, throwing himself into it, prepared to wait till the gong sounded for supper. A slight noise in the room made him look round. Across the window recess, from which the sound apparently came, a pair of heavy red curtains were tightly drawn. Fitzsimmons rather wondered at this, because Rosalie did not usually draw the curtains before she lighted up; so he was still looking at them and wondering, when they were suddenly shaken so violently that the metal rings made a loud rattling and jarring on the brass pole to which they were attached. Fitzsimmons watched in breathless anticipation. Every second he expected to see the curtains part and some ghoulish face peering out at him. Drawn curtains so often suggest lurking horrors of that description. Instead, however, the curtains only grew more and more agitated, shaking violently as if they had the ague. Then, all of a sudden, they were still. Fitzsimmons rose and was about to look behind them, when they started trembling again, and the one nearest the fireplace began to bulge out in the middle. Fitzsimmons stared at it with a sickening sense of foreboding. At first it had no definite form, but, very gradually, it assumed a shape, the shape he felt it would, and moved nearer him. For some seconds he was too overcome with horror to do anything, but his recollections of what it had looked like in the coombe that night, and his utter detestation of it, increased his fear, and in a frenzy of rage he snatched up a revolver from the mantelpiece and fired at it. Fitzsimmons thinks it was the bullet that made it suddenly collapse; but I am inclined to think it was the sound of the report—as sound undoubtedly does, at times, bring about dematerialisation. There are, I think, certain sounds that generate vibrations in the air favourable to the manifestation of spirits, and other sounds that create vibratory motion destructive to the composition of what are termed ghosts. And here was an instance of the latter. Fitzsimmons waited for a few minutes, until he felt sure the thing was gone altogether, entirely quit of the premises, and then, revolver in hand, pulled aside the curtains.
The next moment he reeled back, stupefied with horror. Lying at full length on the floor, her white face turned towards him, with a hideous grin of agony on her lips, was Rosalie.
“Good God!” Fitzsimmons said to himself. “Good God! I’ve killed her. What in Heaven’s name can I do?”
He deliberated shooting himself; and then the cries of the children, who had been wakened by the noise, reminding him of his duties to them, he grew calmer, and telephoned at once for the nearest doctor. The latter, happening to be at home, was speedily on the spot.
“You say you shot her,” he remarked to Fitzsimmons, after he had examined the body very carefully. “You must be dreaming, sir. There’s not the slightest sign of any bullet. Moreover, the girl’s been dead at least two hours. From the look of her, I should say she died from strychnine poisoning.”
The doctor was right. The girl’s death was due to strychnine, and from the bottle that was found in her possession and a message she scribbled on the study wall, there is no doubt whatever she committed suicide. “I was a nice enough girl till I came here,” she wrote, “but it’s the coombe that’s done it. Mother warned me against it. Coombes make everyone bad.”