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  THE INQUEST WAS REPORTED AT LENGTH IN THE local papers, but it is needless to chronicle it in these pages ; the reader is already aware of the causes that led to the hurried departure of Lucas, and there is no occasion to weary him with the half truths that were told to those who concerned themselves with the fate of the sheath of dense matter that he had been forced to abandon in his haste ; the doctor certified that death was due to heart failure brought on by over-exertion ; that was all he could say. The most rigorous cross-examination of Veronica, the most careful analysis of the viscera, had failed to reveal any reason why the man should die, he had simply ceased to live, and that was all there was to it. All the same, there was left upon the minds of all who contacted the case the same curious impression, they all felt that there was much that had not been revealed, and yet no man could frame a question that should lay bare that which they sought.

  They all knew that the young girl who had been the dead man's companion knew more than she chose to tell ; they also knew that the hard-faced man who elected to come down from London and who said he was the dead man's employer, was not taking the court into his confidence ; and when it transpired that he had in his possession a recently-made will, in which everything was left to the aforesaid young girl, the mystery deepened, and yet no one could strike upon the link that connected them with the tragedy. It was a riddle to which they could find no solution, so they gave it up, and a verdict was returned of death from natural causes, in conformity with the medical evidence, yet all the countryside knew that something that was not natural had happened among them.

  After the close of the inquest, however, an interview took place at which they would have given much to be present, though what they would have made of that which transpired would be difficult to say. The hard-faced man came to see Veronica. She was sitting upon the terrace as the sun went down, when she heard footsteps upon the gravel, and looking up, saw him beside her.

  He seated himself upon the stone balustrade that bounded the terrace, leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees, hands clasped, and looked straight into Veronica's eyes, his face close to hers.

  “Now, Miss Mainwaring, I want the truth. What was the nature of your association with Lucas ?”

  “I was his secretary,” replied Veronica.

  The man's eyes changed as Lucas's had changed on the day when he made his selection from among the women whom the London employment bureau had sent to him ; he looked straight through Veronica, not at her, the eyes out of focus and glazed.

  “You are a psychic, and accustomed to leave your body ; tell me, can you go out at will, or has someone got to hypnotize you and push you out ?”

  “I don't understand what you mean,” said Veronica, looking as blank as she knew how, and Veronica's round, childish face could look very blank indeed when she did not choose to understand, as they had found out at the inquest.

  “It doesn't matter whether you understand or not. The images rise in your mind, and I can read them. As a matter of fact, you know what I mean perfectly well. Come, Miss Mainwaring, won't you take me into your confidence ? I come as a friend, not an enemy ; we are quite aware that you were not responsible for the use that was made of your faculties.”

  Veronica still elected to look blank, and the man said sharply : “It is no use pretending that you know nothing, because Lucas confessed the whole business. Moreover, it was I who saw you materialize that night in the Lodge, and as soon as you entered the witness-box I recognized you.”

  At this statement, Veronica produced a handkerchief and took refuge in tears. The stern-faced man tugged angrily at his moustache ; a woman scores heavily on these occasions.

  “It is apparently no use trying to reason with you,” he said, “But remember this, however much or however little you know, you are not to talk about it. You have seen what happened to one traitor, take care it doesn't happen to another.”

  Veronica raised her face from her handkerchief and looked straight at him ; during the last few days a new spirit had begun to dawn in her, and it was with that spirit she spoke.

  “You take too much upon yourself,” she said. “You have no right to take the law into your own hands. That was not an execution, it was a murder, and you will have to answer for it. If you had given him time, he would have straightened himself out, but you did not give him time, and now he is dead.”

  “That is precisely my own opinion,” said a voice behind them, and they both turned in surprise to find that an old man with a long white beard had crossed the lawn unperceived during their conversation.

  “I was responsible for that boy. It was I who put into his hands the knife with which he cut himself, and you should have left him to me to deal with. I could always manage him, he was fond of me in his way, and she and I——” indicating Veronica, with a wave of his corded old hand, “Could have pulled him through between us. Now you have set going causes that we cannot easily calculate. But what is the attitude of this young lady towards the matter ?”

  “Mulish,” said the hard-faced man, tugging his moustache more furiously than ever. “I wash my hands of the whole affair.”

  “It is a pity that you did not do so sooner,” replied the newcomer coldly, and the hard-faced man turned on his heel and strode off down the path, still tugging his moustache.

  “Now, my child,” said the old man, turning to Veronica. “Let us talk this matter over and see what we can make of it. We know practically everything, so you need not feel that you are giving us information Mr. Lucas would not wish us to have ; all that we do not know is the nature of your own position in the affair. Did you know what you were doing, or were you a passive tool in his hands ?”

  “I will tell you nothing,” replied Veronica. “I don't see why I should answer your questions ; you killed Mr. Lucas, and you can kill me too, if you want to, but I will tell you nothing about him.”

  The old man sighed. “I cannot urge you further, in the face of the debt you owe him,” he said.

  Veronica looked up quickly, in astonishment.

  “What debt? what do you mean ?”

  “Then he has not told you? He did not take you into his confidence ?”

  “He told me practically nothing. I am in the dark, save for what I have guessed.”

  “Then why are you so loyal to him if you are not his partner? You must be his victim, his tool, used more unscrupulously than any man in my experience has ever used a living creature.”

  Veronica looked out into the last of the sunset. “You wouldn't understand if I told you,” she said at length. “I am not sure if I understand myself, but there was some tie between us ; I didn't know its nature, but I was conscious of it. Besides, there is no one to stand by him if I do not, and if no one stands by him, then he will be lost altogether. He was a bad man, but he was not a wholly bad man ; I think there was something good in him, and 1 think he would have got better if they had given him a chance.”

  The old man held out his hand. “Go on believing in him,” he said. “If there is anything that can save him, it is your faith that will do it.” Veronica noticed that he too looked upon Lucas as a living entity, and was about toframe a question, but checked herself lest she should be betraying information the significance of which she could not gauge.

  He had retreated a few paces down the path when he returned again. “He was a much worse man than a child like you can realize,” he said. “You will want all the faith of which you are capable if you are to regenerate him, and I am going to tell you something in order to reinforce your faith, though I am afraid that it will pain you very much. Do you know that Lucas died in your place.”

  Veronica stared at him wide-eyed.

  “It was known to the Fraternity of which I am a member that our secrets had been penetrated by some person, and we decided to strike that person, as we are able to do, even though he be unknown to us ; and Lucas, knowing this, stood up and said, ‘ That person is nothing but a tool, it is I who am responsible,’ so
the brethren left you alone and struck at him, and I think that they erred grieviously in so doing, for they should have known that a man who made that confession had set his face towards the light, and they should have given him time to tread his path.

  “My dear, I am afraid you have seen the darker side of the Secret Wisdom ; you have seen it used for evil, and you have seen it used in judgment without the the saving grace of mercy ; but I would ask you to remember this, though perhaps you know it already from your own inner consciousness, for I think you are not wholly asleep to such things, that the power which lies behind the brethren is beneficent, though men may take its name in vain and use it in error ; for it is only men of the greatest calibre who can carry that force and not be bent and twisted, or even burst asunder by it ; therefore do not judge a man harshly who fails in occult work. Do not be misled by our errors, our lack of vision, or the fear that makes men cruel ; we serve a reality, my child, though we may not always perceive it clearly.”

  Veronica rose and held out her hand to him. “I am a stranger to you, and have no claim upon you,” she said, “but I feel that I can trust you ; will you help me? I have no one I can turn to, and there are all sorts of business matters that I do not understand, and I do not know where to go for advice.”

  The old man took her hand. “I accept the responsibility that is laid upon me, and I pray that I may discharge it better than I did my responsibility towards the elder child of my spirit, whom we have lost.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE OLD MAN STOPPED WITH VERONICA THREE days and straightened out her affairs. Not that they were in any great tangle, for Lucas had evidently expected his death and made full preparation for it. The death of General Sawberry some five days before himself had placed him, and consequently Veronica, in possession of a considerable estate, of which the house in the river valley formed an outlying portion. Many affairs had to be settled before Veronica could enter upon the possession of her fortune, and the old man was very anxious for her to leave the gloomy and unhealthy house that had been the scene of the tragedy and make her home with himself and his sister pending the settlement of her affairs. But she refused. She had a feeling that Lucas was not far from her in this place, but that if she left it and went among the busy haunts of men he would lose track of her, and sinister though he had been in life, and ill-omened though the house might be, yet she could not bring herself to leave it. She longed for nothing so much as to be finished with the coil of affairs that had surrounded her since his death, and be free to enter into the silence where alone he might be able to approach her.

  Therefore she bade the old man farewell, promising to call upon him if need should arise, and settled down to her solitude with the old caretaker as her sole attendant. No one came near her. The doctor, suspicious of the whole affair, was only too thankful to be clear of it ; and the vicar, believing Veronica to be a black sheep, had no mind to prejudice himself in the eyes of his white and woolly flock by trying to save her.

  So the days went past. Veronica kept close to the routine that they had followed during the few short hours that she and Lucas had spent there together. In the morning she walked about the grounds and sat upon the log by the river, and in the evening she walked upon the terrace. Between whiles, she sat, sometimes in the room that had been a Milliard room and which served them as a living-room, and sometimes in the room in which Lucas had died. She believed that in the places which were familiar to him Lucas would wander, and that sooner or later they would meet ; but as day followed day and she got no hint of his presence, a chill fear crept into her heart. Was he indeed dead ? Dead in the sense in which most people use that word ? She knew quite well that he had discarded his physical body, that a man with an olive skin and erect carriage would no longer walk towards her with that light springing step that was so characteristic of him ; but she firmly believed that Lucas as a personality continued to exist—that the organized system of thoughts and feelings that made up his character was still held together by a centralized consciousness, was still actuated by desires and controlled by a purposive will, and it was this organized consciousness that had been her companion, not the five foot nine of flesh and bone that now mouldered in the churchyard.

  The summer had changed into autumn, and coming down one day after a night of rain, Veronica found a chill wind blowing. It was too cold to walk in the garden unprotected, so she took from its peg the old trench coat in which Lucas had wrapped her when he brought her down from London, and clad in this garment, she went out into the woods.

  Clothes are strange things, they seem to absorb something of the personality of their wearers. Veronica found herself enveloped in the mental atmosphere that Lucas always emanated, as if the man himself had stood before her, talking in his characteristic fashion.

  The vagueness of retrospect was gone and he had become a living reality again, and it suddenly seemed to her that he wished her presence by his grave. She had never gone there, for it had never seemed to her that it was her friend that lay buried there, moreover she dreaded the curious eyes of the village. But now, just as she was, hatless, and wrapped in the old trench coat, she set out upon her errand.

  By a detour, she reached the church through the woods and entered the burial ground unperceived. Two men were engaged in digging a grave, a small grave for a child, and beyond lay three other little mounds. Veronica thought it strange that so many children should have died in so small a village, for the four little recent graves represented a heavy infant mortality for that small population.

  Veronica kept some bushes between herself and the grave-diggers, but as she passed, a snatch of conversation reached her ears.

  “——an’ it was fower days to the inquest, an’ then they adjourned for a week to hear what the doctors in Lunnon had to say, and then Mester Sampson had to coffin him, but Joe Wellan, wot helped, told me that he was as fresh as the day he died, not a mark on him——”

  As Veronica passed round the church in search of Lucas's grave, a hand touched her elbow, and she turned to confront a pleasant-faced, fresh-coloured young man who addressed her, hat in hand.

  “I—I beg your pardon, but—Miss Main-waring, is it not ?”

  Veronica bowed.

  “Then, if you will allow me—this is the way,” and he led her through the shrubs to a remote corner of the graveyard, for the instincts of the village men had told them that Lucas was not of their kind, and even in death they had removed him as far as possible from the place where they and their children should lie.

  Veronica stood looking down at the mound of rough, newly-turned earth ; there lay all that was left of Lucas as the world knew him, and she felt a cold tide of fear rising in her heart lest the world should be right after all ; there was no evidence to the contrary, no shadowy hand from beyond the grave had touched her, as she had half expected, no intuition had stolen into her consciousness, and now, confronted by this mound of clay among the yew-trees, death, as the world knew death, seemed incontrovertible ; her faith slipped from her ; what strange phantom of belief had Lucas pursued, dragging her in his train ? He had died from heart failure following on over-exertion, so the coroner's jury had decided ; and before he died he had suffered from delusions, and she, drawn under the sway of his personality, had shared in them. But now he was dead, and here his body was buried, and his soul, according to all orthodox tenets, had gone to hell. This was the end.

  Veronica roused from her reverie. The wind blew coldly through the dreary evergreens, she drew the heavy coat she wore closer about her and pulled her feet out of the sodden ground into which they had sunk. A dozen yards away the man who had shown her the grave was still waiting, bare-headed, watching her, and as she turned away from the grave he approached her with the awkward sympathy of an Englishman, rendered still more awkward by the ambiguity of her position ; but whatever her relations with Lucas might have been (and the village was quite certain upon this point), he was touched by the sight of the lonely girl co
ming down to the still lonelier grave.

  “I—I'm afraid it is rather rotten for you up at the Grange,” he began diffidently, “especially after the shock you have had. It's a beastly place at the best: of times. I am awfully sorry about the whole business. You must have had a rotten bad time.”

  Veronica looked up at him steadily for a moment without replying;. He was a big-boned, fresh-complexioned young fellow, just such a one as she had often played tennis with in the gardens on the Surrey hills ; he belonged to the old days before her world had fallen about her ears, days that she had thought to be gone for ever, and for the sake of those days, Veronica smiled.

  In repose, Veronica was a pretty doll ; in animation she was a pretty child, but her smile was the smile of the Monna Lisa, and in that she was the eternal woman, world-old but unageing, revealing the hint of life's essential forces lying latent and unfired, only awaiting the touch that should arouse them ; and no man who saw that smile could withhold his hand from the attempt to bestow that touch and see the fire blaze up at his command.

  At length Veronica spoke. “It is very kind of you,” she said, “but I have not been lonely. After all the trouble was over I was glad to be quiet.”

  “But it is a rotten place for a girl up at that God-forsaken Grange. How long are you going to stop there ?”

  “I don't know,” said Veronica. An hour ago she would have answered that she was going to stop there for the rest of her life, but now a strange detachment had taken place. Lucas was dead, it was all over ; there was no point in remaining.

  “Are you going back to the Grange now ? I can show you a short cut through the woods if you like, it will save you going through the village,” and he led Veronica down a path that passed through a gap in the low stone wall that surrounded the churchyard. “My name is Alec Butler,” he continued. “My pater is doctor here.”

  “I remember him,” said Veronica. “He came when Mr. Lucas died.”