"I had to guess what; I knew it quite well as I listened; the secret trouble that had been upon her like a fright perpetual."
Lady Ellis threw her piercing eyes upon the soft and simple ones of the little Frenchwoman. All this was as food for her curious mind. "A perpetual fright!" she repeated musingly. "I never heard of such a thing. What was it connected with?"
"I don't know, unless it was connected with that horror of the plateau. Miladi, I used to think it might be."
Casting her thoughts back some few weeks, Lady Ellis remembered the little episode of her proposing to go on the plateau, and Mr. Thornycroft's words as he opposed it. She turned this to use now with mademoiselle in her clever way.
"Mr. Thornycroft was speaking to me about this--this mystery connected with the plateau, but we were interrupted, and I did not gather much. It is a mystery, is it not, mademoiselle?"
"But, yes; it might be called a mystery," was the answer.
"Will you recite it to me?"
Mademoiselle knew very little to recite; but that little she remembered with as much distinctness as though it had happened yesterday. One light evening in the bygone years, shortly after she came to the Red Court, she went out in the garden and strolled on to the plateau. There were no preventive railings round it then. It was fresh and pleasant there; the sea was calm, the moonbeams fell across the waves; and a vessel far away, lying apparently at anchor, showed its cheery white light. Mademoiselle strolled back towards the house, and was about to take another turn, when she saw a figure on the edge of the plateau, seemingly standing to look at the sea. To her sight it either wore some white garment, or else the rays of the moon caused it to appear so. At that moment Richard Thornycroft came up. In turning to speak to him mademoiselle lost sight of the plateau, and when she looked again, the figure was gone. "Was it a shadowy sort of figure?" Richard asked her, in a low voice, when she expressed her surprise at the disappearance; and mademoiselle answered after a moment's consideration that she thought it was shadowy. Mr. Richard looked up at the sky, and then down at her, and then far away; his countenance (it seemed to mademoiselle that she could see it now) wearing a curious expression of care and awe. "It must have been the ghost," he said; "it is apt to show itself when strangers appear at night on the plateau." The words nearly startled mademoiselle out of her seven senses; "ghosts" had been her one dread through life. She put her poor trembling fingers on Richard's coat sleeve, and humbly begged him to walk back with her as far as the house. Richard did so; giving her scraps of information on the way. He had never seen the figure himself, perhaps because he had specially looked for it, but many at Coastdown had seen it; nay, some even then living at the Red Court. Why did the ghost come there? Well, it was said that a murder had been committed on that very spot, the edge of the plateau, and the murderer, stung with remorse, killed himself within a few hours, and could not rest in his grave. Mademoiselle was too scared to hear all he said; she heard quite enough for her own peace; and she went into the presence of Mrs. Thornycroft, bursting into tears. When that lady heard what the matter was, she chided Richard in her gentle manner. "Was there need to have told her this?" she whispered to him with a strange sorrow, a great reproach, in her sad brown eyes. "I am sorry to have said it if it has alarmed mademoiselle," was Richard's answer. "It need not trouble her; let her keep off the plateau at night; it never comes in the day." That Richard believed in it himself appeared all too evident, and she remarked it to Mrs. Thornycroft as she left the room. That good lady poured a glass of wine out for her with her own hand, and begged her, in accents so imploring as to take a tone of wildness, never again to go on the plateau after dusk had fallen. No need of the injunction; mademoiselle had scuttered onwards ever since with her head down, if obliged to go abroad at night in attendance on Miss Thornycroft.
To hear her tell this in a low earnest whisper, her brown hands clasped, her scared eyes strained on the opposite plateau, whose edge stood out defined and clear against the line of sea beyond and the sky above, was the strangest of all to Lady Ellis.
"If there is one thing that I have feared in life it is a revenant," confessed mademoiselle. "Were I to see one, knowing it was one, I think I should die. There was a revenant in the convent where they put me when I was a little child; a white-faced nun who had died unshriven; and we used to hear her in the upper corridors on a windy night. Ah, me! I was sick with fear when I listened; I was but a poor little weak thing then, and the dread of revenants has always rested with me."