“Oh, she is only trying to frighten me, the beast!” poor Geraldine thought; and, unable for another second to bear the cruel silence, she timidly stretched out a hand to touch her sister—when, to her infinite relief, her fingers touched the white rabbit fur with which Julia’s dressing-gown was delicately trimmed.
“You beast, Julia!” she sobbed and laughed. Never a word, however, came from the still shape. Geraldine, impatient of the continuation of a joke which seemed to her in the worst of taste, raised her hand from the fur, that she might touch her sister’s face; but her fingers had risen no further than Julia’s throat when they touched something wet and warm, and with a scream of indescribable terror Geraldine fainted away.
When Mr. Biggot-Baggot admitted himself into the house early the next morning, his eyes were assailed by a dreadful sight. At the foot of the stairs was a pool of blood, from which, in a loathsome trail, drops of blood wound up the stairway.
Mr. Biggot-Baggot, fearful lest something out-of-the-way had happened to his beloved daughters, rushed frantically up the stairs. The trail of blood led to his daughters’ room; and there, in the doorway, the poor gentleman stood appalled, so foul was the sight that met his eyes. His beloved Geraldine lay on the bed, her hair snow-white, her lips raving with the shrill fancies of a maniac. While on the floor beside the bed lay stretched, in a pool of blood, his beloved Julia, her head half-severed from her trunk.
The tragic story unfolded only when the police arrived. It then became clear that Julia, her head half-severed from her body, and therefore a corpse, had yet, with indomitable purpose, come upstairs to warn her timid sister against the homicidal lunatic who, just escaped from an Asylum nearby, had penetrated into the house. However, the police consoled the distracted father not a little by pointing out that the escape of the homicidal lunatic from the Asylum had done some good, insomuch as there would now be room in an Asylum near her home for Geraldine.
III
When the gentleman from America had read the last line of The Phantom Foot-steps he closed the book with a slam and, in his bitter impatience with the impossible work, was making to hurl it across the room when, unfortunately, his circling arm overturned the candle. The candle, of course, went out.
“Aw, hell!” said Mr. Puce bitterly, and he thought: “Another good mark to Sir Cyril Quillier! Won’t I Sir him one some day! For only a lousy guy with a face like a drummer’s overdraft would have bought a damfool book like that.”
The tale of The Phantom Foot-steps had annoyed him very much; but what annoyed him even more was the candle’s extinction, for the gentleman from America knew himself too well to bet a nickel on his chances of remaining awake in a dark room.
He did, however, manage to keep awake for some time merely by concentrating on wicked words: on Quillier’s face, and how its tired, mocking expression would change for the better were his, Puce’s, foot to be firmly pressed down on its surface: and on Julia and Geraldine. For the luckless twins, by the almost criminal idiocy with which they were presented, kept walking about Mr. Puce’s mind; and as he began to nod to the demands of a healthy and tired body he could not resist wondering if their home town had been Wigan or Bolton and if Julia’s head had been severed from ear to ear or only half-way....