“You—you dared to come away and leave her to their mercy, you coward!” he groaned.
Landon paled and shuddered, but he fronted the other’s wrath fearlessly, answering quietly:
“I am not angry at your harsh epithets, for—my God! how can you understand?”
“Explain then before I leave this house to go to her assistance!” thundered Beresford, in deadly anger, overcome by the thought of Floy in the power of her relentless enemies.
What would they do to her, his hapless darling? Would they kill her, or, perhaps, more terrible still, force her into an abhorred marriage with Otho Maury?
His senses whirled with his misery, and he was on the verge of falling, when Landon caught him, pushing him back into his seat.
“Listen to me one moment,” he cried, and continued: “I have done that any man could do, but I have failed to follow the wretches to their lair. In that grim old house there is some malign influence that drives the bravest man back to the threshold half mad with horror. What is it? It is haunted; that is why! No, I have seen nothing, but—the spirits of the damned haunt that house as surely as we two live and breathe. If you could hear them, Mr. Beresford, those sounds of woe that echo through the long corridors and empty rooms, that fiend’s laugh that chills your blood like ice, and drives you back, shuddering from the threshold, out into the cool darkness of the summer night so sweet and peaceful, you would no longer cry out coward; you, too, would turn and fly.”
“Not I, Landon; not I. All the hordes of hell assembled could not frighten me back from my darling in peril!”
“You think so. Let me tell you what I have seen. I have watched them go in before me, Otho and his sister, and as I retreated they would rush past me in terror great as mine. I have seen her three nights fall swooning on the wet grass. He would revive her, coax her, and hand in hand, encouraging each other, they would re-enter, perhaps overcoming their fears, and remain for hours, always leaving before daylight and skulking home unseen. Braver than I, you say? Yes, but they were two, I was only one. At last I could bear it no longer; I came away. I ask no recompense; I resign the terrible quest.”