He stood with clasped hands and bent head, recalling those unforgotten tones, the mother's smile, even the caressing touch of taper fingers lightly resting on his brow and hair. He stood thus brooding till he was startled by a faint fluttering sound in the air near him, and looking suddenly upward he saw a white dove which had flown in at one of the open windows.
There was nothing particularly strange in such an apparition in the neighbourhood of woods full of wild pigeons; and yet the sight thrilled him. He stood watching the bird as it slowly fluttered across the room a little way above his head, now in moonlight, now in shadow—he remembered afterwards that the candles seemed at this time to give no light—and fluttered on till it was lost in the shadows at the further end of the room.
Then slowly—the bird having vanished—there grew out of the shadows a vague luminous form, first only a spot of dim tremulous radiance, and then gradually an appearance as of a woman's shape, faintly outlined—a white-robed form, dimly defined against darkest shadow. It quivered there for moments which seemed to that startled gazer a long lapse of time, and faint as the light was, it dazzled him. He could hardly endure the strange radiance, yet could not withdraw his gaze.
Faintly, as if from far distance, unlike any sound his ears had ever heard, there came these words: "Repent, Lavendale, repent! Prepare for death!"
It was his mother's voice, or a faint echo of what her voice had been in life. Those unearthly tones were at once strange and familiar—familiar enough to move him to tears, yet so strange as to overpower him with terror.
Cold sweat-drops broke out upon his forehead, and he fell swooning to the ground.
CHAPTER IX.
"AND, LO! MY WORLD IS BANKRUPT OF DELIGHT."
Lord Lavendale lay late on the morning after his arrival at the Manor. It had been late when he crept up to his room, tremulous from the effects of his fainting-fit, which he had shaken off as best he might, without help of any kind. A sleepless night was followed by a drowsy morning.