The night was still clear, but it was no longer frozen into that rigid immobility which had earlier produced so strange an effect of expectancy. There was a perceptible movement of air from the west, the familiar voices of the poplars maintained a perpetual background of sound, and when he had come through the plantation to the edge of the lake, he could hear the minute clashing of the reeds as the chasing ripple of the water set them gently swaying. The air of mystery had fled. He no longer felt the least influence of fear. The dread that he might presently see something that heavily floated, rocking and pressing against the rushes, was more the dread of annoyance.
But there was no one in sight. Nothing moved on all the long curving reaches of the bank. There was no sound in the night other than the faint crash of the reeds, the soft chuckle of the water and the steady insistence of the sibilant poplars.
And search as he would up and down the brooding sweep of the dark water, damascened here and there by the yellow silver of moonlight reflected from the crest of the increasing ripple, he could see no slender raft of floating drapery, nor any sign of a sodden form, nearly immersed, sagging inertly towards the bank.
He desisted presently, and sat down to consider the whole situation. The sense of exasperation had faded under the influence of the night’s peace, and he fell into a calmer consideration of the problem that was vexing him. He saw that he must take the initiative, state his case before Vernon could get a word in. He would treat the affair as an instance of the kind of thing that gets worked up into what these people absurdly called “evidence.” The coincidence of this stranger, (whoever she was,) turning up on the very evening on which that unhappy girl had drowned herself—if she had sunk, they would have an awful job to recover the body; the lake was over forty feet deep in places—was just another of those coincidences that had probably been responsible for most of the superstitions about the appearance of the spirit at the moment of death. And in this case it was obviously absurd to argue that it was the spirit of Phyllis Messenger they had seen. And heard! That was a good point. Finally and conclusively, there was the tulle scarf; real and solid enough. No one had ever heard of a spirit leaving such material evidence behind it. What had he done with that scarf, by the way? He had had it in his hand when he had entered the drawing-room. He’d probably laid it down there, somewhere. He must make enquiries about that as soon as he got in. It might help him to trace the identity of the stranger.
He had wandered a quarter of a mile or so away from the path through the plantation, and he jumped up now, with the intention of getting back at once to the house, in order to make sure of that valuable piece of evidence. But as he came out of his preoccupation, his attention was arrested by the distant murmur of little detached sounds, the separated notes of human voices, musical in their remoteness, faintly impinging upon the textured whisperings of the night.
They are still looking for that poor girl, he thought with a twinge of remorse for his own loss of interest in the search. But even as he started to join them, he realised that the sounds were retreating, fading imperceptibly into the depths of the night. Have they found her, I wonder, he murmured to himself, thinking still of a desecrated and draggled body; and then he heard himself being distantly hailed in the strong, cheerful voice of his friend Greatorex.
“Ahoy there, Harrison; Harrison, ahoy!” he was shouting.
It was not in the least the voice one would expect from a man who had so recently stood in the presence of the dead.
“Ahoy! Hallo! Where are you?” Harrison shouted in return.
The next minute he saw the tall, athletic figure of Greatorex coming towards him along the bank of the lake.