A strangely-bitter regret for what he had lost smote the heart of Captain Cavendish. It might have been. He might have brought that black-eyed divinity as his wife to England, but for Paul Wyndham. Why had she preferred that man to him?
"I wonder if she loves him?" he said aloud.
"Who?—her husband? Do you know, Cavendish, she puzzles me there. She treats him with fearfully frigid politeness, but she never ceases to watch him. If he were any kind of man but the kind he is, I should say she was jealous of him. He is a capital fellow, anyhow, and I like him immensely."
They rode through the iron gates as he spoke, which clanged noisily behind them. The night was not very bright, for the moon struggled through ragged piles of black cloud, and only glimmered with a wan and pallid light on the earth. The trees loomed up black against the clear sky, and cast vivid and unearthly shadows across the dusty road. A sighing wind moaned fitfully through the wood, and the trees surged and groaned, and rocked to and fro restlessly. It was a spectral night enough, and the young lieutenant shivered in the fitful blast.
"I feel as if I had taken a shower-bath of ice-water," he said. "Wasn't it somewhere near here that Val Blake saw the ghost? Good Heavens! What's that?"
As he spoke, there suddenly came forth from the shadow of the tree, as if it took shape from the blackness, a figure—a woman's figure, with long disordered fair hair, and a face white as snow. Captain Cavendish gave an awful cry as he saw it; the cry startled his horse—only a half-tamed thing at best—and, with a loud neigh, it started off like an arrow from a bow. The horse of Lieutenant Blank, either taking this as a challenge, or frightened by the sudden appearance of the woman, pricked up its ears and fled after, with a velocity that nearly unseated his rider. The lieutenant overtook his companion as they clattered through the streets of the town, and the face of Captain Cavendish was livid.
"For Heaven's sake, Cavendish!" cried the young man, "what was that? What was that we saw?"
"It was Nathalie Marsh!" Captain Cavendish said, in an awful voice. "Don't speak to me, Blank! I am going mad!"
He looked as if he was, as he galloped furiously out of sight, waking the sleeping townsfolk with the thunder of his horse's hoofs. He had heard the story of the ghost, and had laughed at it, with the rest; but he had heard it in broad daylight, and the most timid of us can laugh at ghost-stories then. He had not been thinking of her, and he had seen her—he had seen her at midnight—true ghostly hour—on the lonesome Redmon road, with her death-white face and streaming hair! He had seen her—he had seen the ghost of Nathalie Marsh!
Mr. Johnston, the sleepy valet, sitting up for his master, recoiled in terror as that master crossed the threshold of the room. Captain Cavendish only stared vaguely as the man spoke to him, and strode by him and into his room, with an unearthly glare in his eyes and the horrible lividness of death in his face. Mr. Johnston stood appalled outside the door, wondering if his master had committed a murder on the way home—nothing less could excuse his looking like that. Once, half an hour after, Captain Cavendish opened his door, still "looking like that," and ordered brandy, in a voice that did not sound like his own; and Mr. Johnston brought it, and got the door slammed in his face afterward.