THE TERRACES OF NIGHT Page 2

  Throwing the despised snuff-box morosely on the fireside table, he poured himself out a whisky-and-soda. It was only six-thirty, although it was growing dark—lots of time for a drink and a snooze before he need change to take Isabel out to the Embassy, at nine. He did hope she’d have recovered her temper by then; he hated doing anything to upset her . . . but after all, he had only been ten minutes late! Nothing to what she often was herself. . . . Lying back in his deep leather chair, comfortably warmed by the insidious mixture of Johnny Walker and a good log-fire, the young man meditated, half asleep and half awake.

  The red glow of the firelight flickered on the comfortable little room, in the shining array of old pewter in the corner-cupboard, on the fluted edge of an old Venetian mirror, on Chelsea porcelain and Georgian silver and antique brass. It struck a light, bright as a tiny star, from the crystal box upon the round walnut table at his elbow, a light so bright that it arrested Mr Wilbrough’s drowsy attention, and he stared at it, half asleep. How it winked and sparkled, that tiny corner where the fire struck it! . . . Made one blink and dazzle to watch it. . . . Suppose that was what those fellers did to one when they hypnotised one? Made one stare at something that dazzled, till one got sleepy—why, he was getting sleepy, actually, which was damn funny, come to think of it! . . . Ee—yah, he certainly could do with a snooze. Rowing with Is’bel . . . exhaustin’ . . . exhaustin’ business. . . . Women were tryin’ things . . . haurgh! Honghrh— haurgh! . . . The impeccable Sims, appearing a few moments later to attend on his young lord and master, withdrew softly. Mr Peter Wilbrough was deeply and completely asleep.

  * * * * *

  Although Mr Wilbrough was again late for his appointment with his lady-love that evening, she greeted him with a smile instead of the afternoon’s frown—being, to tell the truth, rather ashamed of her recent peevishness. By way of being extra-specially nice, both to look at as well as to talk to, she had donned a new and wonderful frock of gleaming gold tissue that seemed to catch and reflect the lights in her casque of shining yellow hair—but for the first time in their acquaintance Peter did not comment on the extreme good looks of his fiancée. He looked white and tired and curiously strained. Concluding that their recent quarrel was the reason for his depressed air, the girl, secretly repentant, exerted herself to be charming, and even interjected a quick ‘Oh, it didn’t matter,’ when half-way through the dinner he suddenly as if, indeed he had only just realised it, apologised for his late arrival.

  ‘Don’t know how it happened, but I’m awfully sorry.’ Under the influence of champagne, sole Florentine, and the cheerful atmosphere of lights and music, Peter was regaining his old spirits if not quite his old looks—for he still looked oddly pale and tired. ‘The fact is, Belle darling, I was asleep!’

  Isabel laughed.

  ‘Sleepy, were you? It doesn’t seem to have rested you much, Peter—you look all-in!’

  ‘I know,’ admitted the young man. ‘I had a rotten nightmare—must have been broodin’ over your wrathiness, my angel. Dreamt like hell, and woke as weak as a kitten.’

  ‘Dreaming? What about?’ she queried.

  Peter wrinkled his brows, faintly puzzled. ‘I knew, exactly, but I can’t remember now,’ he admitted. ‘Only that I was glad enough to wake up! I believe there was a woman in it; not you, but a dark woman that scared me rather? She seemed to be runnin’ after me somehow?.’

  ‘Sounds like Sonia Varens,’ commented Isabel dryly.

  Mr Wilbrough promptly changed the subject, as the said Miss Varens—an old flame of his—was rather a sore point with Isabel.

  The talk drifting to a more absorbing topic—that of the imminent Great Day at St Margaret’s, Isabel promptly forgot her betrothed’s curious dream; but not so Mr Wilbrough. Under the cloak of eager talk and laughter, his mind kept recurring with an odd persistence to it, delving eagerly, excitedly, into his memory in an endeavour to remember, to reconstruct it—for, despite his admission to Isabel of his ‘scare’, that frightened feeling had been accompanied by an odd, breathless fascination that made him long to turn and look at the fear that was pursuing him—a fear feminine in form, he knew; tall and dark, but veiled; surrounded with a dark cloud of some sort through which great eyes gleamed, ever fixed on his.

  It had been a weird dream, but there, it was over and not worth talking about, especially since it seemed possible it might annoy Isabel again, which God forbid. Therefore Peter discreetly held his tongue, and the rest of the evening passed as usual, in dancing, chatter, light laughter and the usual badinage that passes for love-making among the casual generation of today.

  Peter’s car being for the moment off duty, the Dillingham’s sumptuous red limousine carried the two young people to their respective homes at last, Isabel insisting on first dropping Peter at his flat in St James’, declaring that in his white and weary condition, which had certainly returned towards the end of the evening, the quicker he got to bed the better. As the girl peered out from the car to see the young man who, despite her modern pose of nonchalance, she secretly adored, safely within the shelter of 12, Bury Street, she happened to glance up at his sitting-room window, a square of ruddy amber against the black front of the house.

  ‘Peter!’ A sharp voice arrested Mr Wilbrough as he inserted his latchkey into the door. ‘Peter—who’s that in your rooms at this time of the night?’

  The young man stared, turned and came back to the car. Standing back, he peered up at the lighted window, perplexed.

  ‘What—Sims has left the light on, that’s all!’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish to me!’ snapped the young lady, scrambling out of the car with a great display of silk-clad leg. ‘She’s moved away now, but I saw her shadow distinctly against the blind. Peter, you’ve got a woman up there!’

  Strong in the consciousness of virtue, Mr Wilbrough loudly protested. It was perfect rubbish. A woman up there! Rot and rubbish, complete and utter, unless the impeccable Sims had fallen from grace and concealed a woman of his own about his employer’s flat—in which case Sims could look for instant dismissal in the morning, admirable valet as he was. But Isabel was not to be appeased—that be hanged for a tale. She would come up and see for herself, if it was two o’clock in the morning. There had been a woman there—a tall woman with a hood or something about her head—maybe Sonia Varens, the little beast, had bribed her way into the flat, and was lying in wait for its occupant. . . . The said young lady being quite capable of doing such a thing, as he well knew, Mr Peter Wilbrough’s heart thumped in considerable apprehension as he followed his determined fiancée up the winding stairs.

  Great, therefore, was his relief, as great as Isabel’s angry bewilderment, to discover the flat absolutely empty; the fire burning quietly on the hearth, with the lamp ready lit upon the table beside it; all things neat and orderly as the admirable Sims invariably left them. In the bedroom nothing to be seen; a fresh pair of the apricot crêpe-de-Chine pyjamas Mr Wilbrough affected reposing demurely upon the mulberry-satin eiderdown; nobody in the bathroom; nobody in hiding behind the curtains. . . . There was no denying it, the ‘woman’ must have been a mere passing shadow, possibly thrown from a window opposite; an impression due to some trick of light; a figment of a jealous woman’s brain. . . . though this last possibility was wisely not voiced by the accused, whatever his own private opinion!

  Standing at the window watching the car draw away up the steep old-fashioned street, Peter Wilbrough heaved a sigh of relief.

  ‘Crazy, bless her heart; she’s perfectly crazy! Sees that confounded Sonia in every corner. . . .’ He sighed again, and turned towards the room with a yawn—turned, and started violently. For just beyond the circle of light cast by the shaded lamp, it seemed that a woman stood, a tall woman dressed in a pale yellow satin gown, her dark hair piled high about her lovely head in countless curls and ringlets; her long white fingers resting lightly on the Crystal Box!

  With a gasp of terrified astonishment, Mr Wilbrough passed hi
s hand across his eyes and stared again—and gasped again, but this time with relief, for there was nothing there! Only the dying firelight, and the quiet room, and his whisky-and-soda waiting beside the lamp; just as usual. . . . Hurriedly the young man poured himself out an unusually stiff nightcap and drank it off, more agitated than he cared to admit.

  ‘Lord! Talk of “thought-transference”,’ he muttered, as he set down the empty glass, ‘there’s a case for you! Poor little Belle starts yapping about some damn woman, and for a second I—actually with my own eyes—think I see here! Must be getting barmy in my old age. . . . But, hang it all, it was so amazingly real! I shan’t be in such a hurry to laugh at people talking about ghosts and so on, now I know how easy it is to think oneself into seein’ ’em?’

  * * * * *

  It was about a week later, to be exact, that Peter Wilbrough woke to the disquieting discovery that somehow, in some curious way, he seemed to be developing a most distressing trick of blundering; of saying and doing the wrong thing when in company with Lady Isabel Dillingham that was, to say the least of it, not conducive to harmonious relations between them.

  Previously notable for his charming manners with women—as, indeed, he should be, his training having been considerable and in various experienced hands!—he now seemed increasingly incapable of, as the Irishman said, ‘Opening his mouth without putting his foot into it.’ Some power beyond himself seemed to urge him to say and do the most unforgivably clumsy things. The same malign fate seemed now to be influencing him to be late for every appointment; to forget when the little lady had stipulated for Page and Shaw’s; size six in gloves when he knew perfectly well she only took fives; get tickets for Shakespeare when she wanted to see revue, and generally behave like a man either trying deliberately to pick a quarrel, or else becoming absent and thoughtless to a really alarming degree!

  Amazed and offended as the young lady naturally was, her amazement was nothing to the startled perturbation of the unfortunate victim, who, panic-stricken after a series of quite outrageous slights, foresaw his adored one ‘chucking’ him, and gloomily declared she would be entirely justified if she did . . . but for once he was mistaken.

  Isabel Dillingham was no fool; moreover, she loved her betrothed. Realising, as she soon and shrewdly did, that his increasingly frequent lapses from good manners did not arise from any desire to be rude, but from sheer inability to help himself, she bit her lip and forgave, overlooked, made excuses, both to herself and the outside world, till Society, always acid, shrugged incredulous shoulders and decided that ‘Really, darling Isabel seemed to have lost all proper pride. Couldn’t she see that Peter Wilbrough was fed up with the whole thing?’

  For, slowly, but with increasing frequency, ‘things’ were being said. Odd and unpleasant things, about Peter Wilbrough. Only whispered as yet, but as time went on the whispers grew. He was indulging in various and unpleasant habits—‘Look at the way he looks now, my dear, and how he dresses! And you know how smart he used to be. . . .’ He was to be met at all hours of the night, it was reported, wandering about London, wearing any old coat thrown over his evening clothes; wandering vaguely, with a hunted, haunted sort of look; started when spoken to, and admitted, if one asked him why this thus-ness, that he ‘was walking because he couldn’t sleep, because of the dreams!’

  He had taken to refusing invitations—or worse, accepting them and then standing in some corner staring blankly at the crowd, or else muttering vaguely to himself; or talking to some imaginary person at his side. . . . And worse still: ‘Isabel, darling, I know it’s going to hurt, but you ought to know: he keeps a woman in his flat, or at least one visits him there! She’s been seen—not only through the window —she’s been seen two or three times at dusk, walking beside him in the streets; and twice Freddy Langham, who lives opposite, has seen her dart into the doorway of No. 12 and vanish—so of course she must have a key. It can’t be anybody decent, or he wouldn’t only meet her at night; and it’s only at night that she appears—a tall woman in a sort of dark cloak-and-hood arrangement. . . .’

  Thus Society, first in private, finally in chorus, and Isabel smiled, and setting her dimpled white chin firm, shook her head again and yet again. She trusted Peter, although her trust was having daily to face many dire attacks from within as well as without. Five weeks now since this curious malaise had attacked Peter, and he was not only no better, but it seemed, even worse. When Lady Mary Stanley, the disseminator of the piece of news about Freddy Langham, had departed, full of comfortable consciousness of duty done and a slap at the prettiest girl in London obtained at one and the same time, Isabel sat lost in anxious thought, toasting her smart brown satin slippers at the fire in her own little sanctum at the top of the house in Grosvenor Square. What was the best thing to do now?

  She had long ago given up her idea that Sonia Varens had anything to do with Peter’s strange behaviour. Sonia was safely in Cannes and, report had it, now engaged to an Italian marquis, so that was that. No, this was something much odder, more disquieting than any ordinary affaire. . . . Once, in the beginning, her fiancé had blunderingly tried to discuss the situation with her in a vain endeavour to fathom it, and although that was some time ago now, and it was many days since poor hag-ridden Peter Wilbrough had emerged from the state of silent brooding that seemed his usual mood of late, Isabel had not forgotten one or two things he had said—unheeded at the time, but now emerging clear-cut, sinister, like black rocks peeping from the billows of a surging mysterious sea.

  ‘I’m always having these funny dreams now . . . can’t get away from them. . . . Had ’em every night since that time I told you about the first! I get up sometimes in the night and walk and walk, rather than let myself sleep, they worry me so. . . . No, nothing definite, but it’s always—a woman. A woman who scares me stiff—and fascinates me at the same time. I wish to heaven I could see her face clearly. . . . I see her eyes, and when she looks at me straight I feel like the old buffer in the Bible, wasn’t it, whose bones turned to water. . . . God, it’s awful, that feeling! A sort of feeling as if she was sucking all my whole self, my soul and every damn thing, out of me with her eyes?.

  ‘I often feel that the only thing that saves me from letting go is the thought of you. I hang on to you like mad—try to shut my eyes and picture you in that gold frock you wore that first night after She came; or in the green sweater I like, striding over the moors with Dan; or bathing in the cove near home. And then slowly, very slowly, I seem to sort of “come out of it”, as if I was rising to the surface and gasping—for air, after swimming a bit too long under water! I can’t make it out. I try to get away from her, but she pursues me—it’s awful! At first it was only at night she came—in dreams—but now . . . now she comes as soon as it gets dusk. I turn suddenly, and see her melt into the shadows . . . and she’s not there, and I tell myself I’m imagining things. . . .

  ‘I look at my book again, and I know she’s back at my elbow. I come in late, and just before I turn up the light I see the gleam of her yellow gown, the shine of her great eyes . . . looking at me, always looking, with a sort of odd secret smile, as if she was trying to say “Let go, don’t struggle any more . . . you know I’m bound to win in the long run!” And the worst of it all is, Belle, that I feel she’s right—sooner or later she’ll catch me when I’m too tired to fight, too tired even to think of you, and she’ll win. I shan’t be able to stand out any more. . . . It’s odd, isn’t it? A dream—it must be only a vivid sort of dream—something that isn’t real, and yet, it’s sapping my life away, bit by bit. . . . I can’t make out why she wants me, or what she wants me for, can you?’

  She knew! Sitting by the fire in the dusk of the chilly January day, she knew—that for some reason, Something from the Outer Spaces, some sinister, ruthless Thing that once wore feminine flesh, had come near and touched Peter Wilbrough, and that he was right: unless something could be done, sooner or later this Woman who had come to woo him, to possess and vanq
uish him utterly and completely, would win—and presumably retreat, triumphant, whence she came with her prey; the soul, the very inner man himself, of Peter Wilbrough. . . . The thought was utterly horrible, and stung to action, the girl sprang to her feet. It couldn’t be! It couldn’t! Yet all sorts of things were happening that a month ago she would have called utterly ridiculous and impossible!

  This Woman—she was a nothing, a shadowy, invisible dream, a Horror from the world of the Unseen—yet she was now so real, perhaps had grown so strong through poor distracted Peter’s thoughts, for ever concentrated, that others, even, had caught glimpses of her! Witness the unconscious testimony of Mary Stanley, Langham and the rest. Slinking by night at Peter’s heels, darting into the dark shadowy doorway of Number 12, flitting across that blind where Isabel herself had first seen her. . . . For by now the girl had long relinquished any idea that her rival was any flesh-and-blood woman who could be faced and fought. God, if there was only anything she could do! . . . After a moment’s indecision the girl ran out of the room, and in a few moments, huddled in a fur coat, was pushing home the self-starter of the smart little blue Buick that had been Peter’s first present to her after the announcing of their engagement.

  It was a cold, crisp night, and the streets clear; the sting of the rushing wind against her hot cheeks cooled them a trifle, and steadied her jangled nerves; the swift little car made short work of the distance, and it was barely seven-thirty when she drew up outside No. 12.