“Ah, that’s the women I mean.”
“But where is the connection?”
“Ah, you’re new to these parts, you are. That Dr. Kassimere he keeps a siren down in Hollow Grange. They see her—these here strangers (same as the shipwrecked sailors parson told about)—and it’s all up with ’em.”
Dillon stifled a laugh, in which anger would have mingled with contempt. To think that in the twentieth century a man of science was like to meet with the fate of Dr. Dee in the days of Elizabeth! Truly there were dark spots in England. But could he credit the statement of this benighted elder that a modern clergyman had actually drawn an analogy between Phryné Devant and the sirens? It was unbelievable.
“What was the unhappy fate,” he asked, masking his intolerance, “of the young man staying at the Vicarage?”
“The same as them afore him,” came the startling reply; “for he warn’t the first, and maybe”—with a shrewd glance of the rheumy old eyes—“he won’t be the last. Them sirens has the powers of darkness. I know, ’cause I’ve seen one—her at the Grange; and though I’m an old man, nigh on seventy-five, I’ll never forget her face, I won’t, and the way she smiled at me!”
“But,” persisted Dillon, patiently, “what became of this particular young man, the one who was staying at the Vicarage?”
The ancient sage leant forward in his chair and tapped the speaker upon the knee with the stem of his clay pipe.
“Ask them as knows,” he said, with impressive solemnity. “Nobody else can tell you!”