For days after this the conversation turned on the technical questions of war, with which Vinton’s opportunities as a war correspondent had made him familiar.
Then one night Vinton had come down from Boston on a late afternoon train. He had been lunching at one of the clubs with friends who had listed him to speak at two or three houses in aid of emergency funds. It was tea-time and suddenly he rose, with his cup and saucer in hand, and went over to one of the dining-room windows. “Hello,” he said. “We’re going to get a northeaster, I’ll be bound.”
“The sheep-shearer’s due,” said Ware from his desk.
And it was that very night, when the great easterly gale was enveloping the whole New England coast and was sending showers of sparks down the big fire-place before which they sat, in a low-ceiled room which had been the kitchen in colonial days, that Vinton told the story as he had heard it from the Marquis of Mallorie’s daughter.
“It seems,” he began, “that the Mallories are of an immensely ancient family in the southwest of England; the title is one of the oldest in the realm, and one of the poorest. Away back in the time of the Tudor they became Protestant under protest, and have remained so under protest; only their chapel, like the worshipping places of the early Christians, was taken down into the bosom of the earth and there it rested, exhaling strange virtues over all the land above, and, as many thought, harboring much of good that the newer order of things had cast out. And so the Mallories are High-Church and when the Puseyites began their revolt they were only approaching what the Mallories had been for centuries. And about these delightful people there is none of the fanaticism of the convert.
“When war broke out there were two beautiful daughters living, most of their time, down there at Mallorie Abbey, and a son who went over with the expeditionary force as soon as war was declared. This young man was killed in action, under the most heroic circumstances. He was, apparently, the type of young soldier who might have been one of Arthur’s men, and I believe the clerical incumbent there used to quote the lines of the Puritan Milton: ‘Arthur stirring wars under the earth that hides him,’ or ‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen,’ as having a kind of ironic application to the whole Mallorie domain. When I came back from France I was pretty well used up, and Carteret Lyon asked me down to his place, which stands within four or five miles of Mallorie, in the south. They are, of course, in mourning and fearfully sad, but I met the eldest daughter at tea one afternoon, and, being the most natural people on earth, and as I could tell her some things she wished to hear about France, we became almost friends at once. After that they made me welcome at Mallorie whenever I dropped in at tea-time, and one day Lady Maurya took me over the abbey, telling me as we went through the dim old place with its stained and mullioned windows a lot of its curious, almost supernatural, history. Suddenly she broke off from the narrative, on which it had seemed to me that her mind had been only lightly fixed, and, sinking down on a window-seat in the low, long hall we had been passing through, she looked up at me and said: ‘Ah, this is nothing to something that has really happened here within the year.’
“I asked her if she could tell me, and she answered that she wished to, but that it was all so very extraordinary that she feared I would be unable to believe it, and she felt that she could not hear it doubted.
“I said to her that I was the most believing man since the Dark Ages, and so she told me.
“It was the anniversary of her brother’s death, and a quarter to three in the morning had just struck from the clock on a kind of tower that rises over the chapel and which has a circular stairway running down into the middle of a small lady-chapel where her brother’s body (which had finally been found after the engagement in which he had been killed) had been buried. She and the other members of her family were keeping vigil beside the tomb by turns while masses were being said, during the twelve hours that were passing, and she was just mounting the stairs to go to her room for a little rest, being nearly exhausted with fatigue and emotion, when suddenly the tower and stairway, which had been in inky darkness before, became as light as day. She knew in an instant what it was, and, looking up, straight over her head she saw a Zeppelin hovering exactly above where she stood and so low that it seemed to her that she could see the crew and their preparations for the hideous work afoot. Then she looked down and a single shaft of the search-light fell directly on the heads of those who were gathered on their knees about the tomb. They were praying, with their heads bent and their eyes closed, for not one of them seemed to be aware of it, and the priests, whose chanting came up to her fearfully from the altar, were protected from it by the high reredos. There was something so dreadful and so uncanny about it all that she was petrified, for she knew that annihilation was hanging over her and all her family, without the shadow of a doubt, for the aim was at the tower—which was a landmark for miles around—and that it would fall before she could warn one of her people to safety, when, as in a flash from nowhere, flying at a most terrific rate of speed yet without a sound and straight at the Zeppelin, there appeared an aeroplane. It approached almost within hailing distance of the great thing without firing, and then, as the Zeppelin started a little, the aeroplane began swirling about it. She could not tell how long a battle went on between them without a single shot from either. It seemed as if the aeroplane was winding the monster in some intangible net, in which it turned and twisted and writhed, trying to get away into the free air; and then, again without a single shot, it fell to earth.