Anxiety over Miss Mertoun’s exposure to the midnight air prompted Alberta Pendleton, not for the first time, to urge taking her inside the Hall. But Miss Lebetwood shook her head in a determined manner, and with a gesture showed that she believed it was too far to carry her to the mansion.
“It’s very mild out here now,” she declared. “I know sleep-walking people. If she were to wake up while she’s being taken, it might have some long-lasting ill effect. Alberta, please don’t ask again. I want her to be in my arms when she opens her eyes. You good people don’t need to stay. I—and Sean—can wait here with her alone.”
But none of us would go. Then while we waited to see a greater sign of life than the restlessness of those long black lashes on the pallid cheek, down from the dark north came that ragged, hungry voice I had heard while alone earlier in the night, a cry that tore at our nerves and congealed our blood to ice-drops in our veins. A carnal, raving cry, thinning to a shriek that pierced the ear, swelling to a howl that loosened the knees.
Of that dire, abysmal wail of mad desire, an overtone must have found a counterpart in Cosgrove’s spirit. Out of the past of his kind, that had seen things more clearly in the dusk than in the plain light of day, that had loved cries of battle and death more than joyful cries, some strain may have wrung the man’s soul. Terribly to all of us, he raised his voice in answer to the inhuman call; I, at least, had no sense of body or of time and place while he burst into a black rain of words, a torrent of rancour, and defiance against the fiend of the pit, whose incarnate self he seemed to hear in the voice of the beast.
But a low call from Paula Lebetwood reduced him to a stunning silence. “I think she’s coming to.”
The unconscious girl’s fingers fluttered briefly; her lips stirred; her whole body stirred a little. She turned once, twice, restlessly, and sank, with a little sigh, comfortably and trustingly into the American girl’s embrace. The trace of a sneer had vanished from her face, and her breast moved with her breathing.
“She’s sleeping now,” said Alberta Pendleton, and stooped beside the pair on the grass.
Miss Lebetwood whispered, “Dearest, do you hear me? Do you know me? It’s Paula. . . . Dearest, do you hear me?” She stroked the pale forehead free of its last furrow.
“Yes,” came like a shadow of a word from the sleeping girl.
“Dearest, Paula wants you to come with her.” Still she spoke, soothing, caressing, in the effort to woo her to awaken peacefully. And the eyes of Millicent Mertoun opened, revealing themselves to be of a deep blackness that rivalled her errant hair, opened to see only the smile of love on the face of the American girl bending over her; and the English girl smiled too.