The moon, he knew, was at the full, but its golden rotundity was heavily veiled to-night, so that it had the forlorn, the sorrowful appearance of a lamp, once brilliant, whose flame has gradually diminished and is about to expire.
Garth could hear nothing, but he waited breathlessly, still straining his ears. This, he mused, was the place where many soldiers had died in battle, the setting for ghostly legends, the spot where the servants had fancied a terrifying and bodiless re-animation, the death-bed of Alden's valet.
Now that he had time to weigh it, Mrs. Alden's manner puzzled him. She had said it had been in the house, that now they could come in, and that out here they were not men. Had the loneliness imposed upon her intelligence such a repulsive credulity?
He had to admit that imagination in such a medium could precipitate shameful and deceptive fancies.
Then, without realizing at first why, Garth knew he had been unjust. He found his eyes striving to penetrate the night to the left. Surely it was not the old illusion of moving trees and branches that had set the fog in lazy motion over there. He stepped cautiously behind a pine tree. The chill increased. A charnal atmosphere had crept into the woods. As he shivered he realized that this sepulchral place had filled with plausible inhabitants—shapes as restless and unsubstantial as if sprung solely from a morbid somnambulism.
CHAPTER IX
THE PHANTOM ARMY
Shadows advanced through the shadowy fog, and Garth could define them as no more than shadows. In one place the mist thinned momentarily, and he glimpsed, apparently floating forward, the trunk of a man's figure. Pallid tatters, such as might survive in a mortuary, flapped about bare shoulders, and from a little distance beyond came a sickly gleam—the doubtful response uncertain moonlight might draw from a bayonet or a musket barrel.
The fog closed in. There were no more shadows. Garth, eager to follow, forced himself to wait. He told himself that the march of phantoms possessed a meaning which would give direction to his task. The unveiling of its impulse, he was confident, would unveil the mystery at the house. Against so many only caution was useful at present.