"Hush, hush!" he whispered. "Not a word, for God's sake. Watch and listen!"
He pointed into the room, and my eyes followed the direction of his hand.
In the centre, looking straight before her, rigid as a marble statue, every muscle braced for action, stood the most beautiful and majestic woman I have ever seen in my life. To the stateliness of a Greek goddess she united the beauty of a Cleopatra. Her eyes rivetted my attention; they seemed to blaze from their sockets; her expression was that of a tigress wounded and waiting for the death-stroke. But her hair was the most weird part of her appearance, for it hung in glorious profusion down to her waist, and was white as the driven snow.
When we looked she had paused for a moment, as if listening, and then came that awful blood-curdling cry again:—
"They're coming! they're coming! Will nobody save me?"
It was so horrible that my blood felt as if it were freezing into solid ice. However, before I could pull myself together, her whole demeanour had changed, and she was kneeling on the floor kissing and caressing something she believed to be beneath her. Then, gradually, her voice died away in heart-rending sobs, and at this juncture my host went in and lifted her up. She seemed to have lost all power of recognition, and allowed him to lead her in a dazed sort of way to her room.
As he passed me the manager whispered, "Wait here!"
On his return, he led me across the verandah and into the garden. When we were out of hearing of the house, and leaning on the slip-rails of the horse paddock he told me the following extraordinary story, and the glorious night and the long sighing night-breeze sweeping down from the mountains seemed a fitting accompaniment to his tale.
"Fourteen years ago," he said, "by God's ordinance and with the blessing of the Church of England, I married that woman whom you saw just now in there.
"All my family were against it from the beginning. They had no name and no story bad enough for her. One said she bore a most suspicious character; another, that she had a temper like a fiend; but the principal charge against her was that she had been a governess in a certain nobleman's household, and had been the cause of the eldest son's leaving home. However, I didn't care for anything they said; I was madly in love, and I believe I would have married her if she had been proved to have been the vilest wretch unhung.