“Nothing, man; nothing,” said Herold, turning away and fumbling for his cigarette-case.
“You looked as if you had seen a ghost. It was I who saw the ghost.” He laughed. And the laugh, coming from the haggard face below the brow-reaching white bandage, was horrible.
“Your brain was playing you tricks,” said Herold. “You got to Southcliff. What happened?”
“I felt a fool,” said John. “Can't you see what a fool a man feels when he knows he has played the fool?”
Bit by bit he revealed himself. At the gate of the Channel House he reflected. He had not the courage to enter. Stella would be up and about. He resolved to wait until she went to bed. He wandered down to the beach. The rain began to fall, fine, almost imperceptible. The beacon-light in the west window threw a vanishing shaft into the darkness.
“We saw it once—don't you remember?—years ago when you gave her the name—Stellamaris. I sat like a fool and watched the window. How long I don't know. My God! Wallie, you don't know what it is to be shaken and racked by the want of a woman—”
“By love for a woman, you mean,” said Herold.
“It 's the same thing. At last I saw her. She stood defiant in the light. She had changed. I cried out toward her like an idiot,”—the rugged, grim half face visible beneath the bandage was grotesque, a parody of passion,—“and I stayed there, watching, after she had gone away. How long I don't know. It was impossible to ring at the door and see Oliver and Julia.”
He laughed again. “You must have some sense of humour, my dear man. Fancy Oliver and Julia! What could I have said to them? What could they have said to me? I sat staring up at her window. The rain was falling. Everything was still. It was night. You know how quiet everything is there. Then I seemed to hear footsteps and I turned, and a kind of shape—a woman's—disappeared. I know I was off my head, but I began to think. I had a funny experience once—I 've never told you. It was the day she came out of prison. I sat down in St. James's Park and fell half asleep,—that sort of dog sleep one has when one's tired,—and I thought I saw her going for Stella—Stella in her bed at the Channel House—going to strangle her. This came into my mind, and then something hit me,—a chunk of overhanging cliff loosened by the rain, I suppose,—and, as I 've told you, it knocked me out. But it's devilish odd that she should be mixed up in it.”
“As I said, your brain was playing you tricks,” said Herold, outwardly calm; but within himself he shuddered. The woman was like a foul spirit hovering unseen about those he loved.