Then the writer became aware that the room was filled with sound—sudden, loud and menacing. It was a sound as of sudden drums at midnight, such a sound as the gay dances in Brussels heard on the eve of Waterloo, when the Assembly sounded in the great square, and the whole city awoke.
In another moment, Megbie knew what the sound in his ears really was. His own heart and pulses were racing and beating like the sudden traillerie of drums.
In a flash he recognized the face and form of his visitor—this outward form and semblance of a man which had sprung up and grown concrete in the night! The phantom—if indeed it was a phantom—wore the dress and aspect of Eustace Charliewood, the well-known man about town who had killed himself at Brighton a few years ago!
Megbie had never spoken to Charliewood—so far as he could remember—but he knew him perfectly well by sight, as every one in the West End of London had known him, and he was a member of one of the clubs to which the dead man had belonged.
The Thing that stood there, the Thing or Person which had sprung out of the air, wore the earthly semblance of Eustace Charliewood.
Megbie shouted out loud. A great cry burst from his lips, a cry of surprise and fear, a challenge of that almost dreadful curiosity that men experience now and then when they are in the presence of the inexplicable, the terrible and the unknown.
Then Megbie saw that the face of the Apparition was horribly contorted.
The mouth was opening and shutting rapidly in an agony of appeal. It seemed as though a torrent of words must be pouring from it, though there was not a sound of human speech in the large warm room.
Great tears rolled down the large pale cheeks, the brow was wrinkled with pain. The hands gesticulated and pointed, flickering rapidly hither and thither without sound. And continually, over and over again, the hands pointed to the gleaming silver case for cigarettes which Donald Megbie clasped tightly in his right hand.
The silent agitated Thing, so close—ah, so close! was trying to tell Donald something.