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  On and on they went, the open exhaust roaring at: Veronica's ankles and the inequalities of the road jarring the very soul out of her. Presently the darkness began to thin, the loom of objects showed up at greater and greater distance, and Lucas switched off the headlight, driving through a ghostly twilight that had something strangely unwholesome about it.

  The risen sun found them upon the top of a hill with a mist-blanketed valley lying below them. For the first time since they had started upon their wild ride, Lucas broke silence.

  “That's Beckering,” he said, as they slid down through thick woods towards the bottom.

  They passed through a straggling village, not yet astir, and crossed a broad but shallow river by a hump-backed bridge ; then, turning off down a rutted side road, they followed the windings of the river bank for close upon a mile. Thick, neglected woods closed in upon them, and the uncared-for bank broke down into the water in bays and headlands that endangered the road. Little traffic could have passed along it, for it soon degenerated into a mere cart track, and the tires refused to grip the slimy weeds of its surface.

  Suddenly it broadened out, however, and a pair of brick pillars holding up rusty iron gates appeared upon their left ; gates, pillars, everything, in fact, upon this sinister river bank, was covered with the same green slime. The gates were secured by an enormous padlock, but Lucas solved the problem of entry by riding straight in at a spot where the single strand of wire that flanked the gates had been lowered to the ground by the rotting of a post. It looked as if someone had set out to build a mansion, and had either run short of money or changed his mind.

  They went up a broad drive completely clothed in a green velvet of close-growing moss, and Veronica was at last permitted to stretch her cramped limbs while Lucas smote upon a door whereon the ubiquitous green slime strove to conceal the defects of peeling paint.

  The bell-pull was too firmly rusted home to permit of its ringing, and Lucas, after an assault upon the knocker that echoed like a bombardment through the silent house, leaving Veronica in the company of the motor cycle, went pushing through an overgrown shrubbery in search of the back door, bent, as he said, upon disinterring the caretaker. Disinter seemed the only word to apply to the process, no ordinary human awakening would have sufficed.

  At the end of close upon half an hour Veronica, exhausted, frightened, and filled with a nameless horror by her dank and mouldering surroundings, heard sounds of movement approaching through the silent house ; a great rattling of bolts followed, and the opening door revealed Lucas's sharpcut and somewhat drawn features, with a haglike face peering over his shoulder.

  The leathern racing helmet he wore, backed by the marble pilasters of the porch, made Lucas look exactly like an Egyptian priest, and the huddled figure at his side seemed some strange familiar he had invoked for his magical work.

  A dingy crimson dressing-gown had been hastily dragged on over an unbelievably dirty pink flannelette nightgown, and around all a gorgeous patchwork quilt was swathed, for the good dame had been aroused from her slumbers by the simple expedient of putting half a brick through her bedroom window. What explanations Lucas had shouted into her deaf ears will never be known, but apparently the little wad of Treasury notes clutched in her gnarled old hand was a satisfactory reason for anything that might be required of her.

  She peered at Veronica through hanging elf-locks of grey hair and, addressing her as “dearie,” started a long rigmarole, apparently of apology for the state of the house and garden, but so toothless was she, that not one word could be made out.

  Lucas solved the problem of this address of welcome by pushing her aside, and taking the now almost fainting girl by the arm, he led her into the house.

  “Come along,” he said, “There is one decent room in this mausoleum, anyway. We will have a fire put in it and the place will soon look more cheerful.”

  He led the shrinking girl down a long passage to what had apparently been a billiard room, though the table was gone. Rugs covered the polished floor, low bookcases stood round the walls from the tops of which enormous fish goggled at the intruders in their varnished dignity. Guns stood in a rack at: one end, and a litter of fishing tackle filled all four corners.

  Lucas dropped Veronica into one of the great leather armchairs and went to open the shutters, letting in a flood of early morning sunshine, and when the hag, who, for all her years, moved with a mouselike quickness, returned with a bundle of brushwood and kindled a fire upon the great open hearth, the place looked far from unprepossessing. An oval mahogany table inlaid according to Victorian taste stood in the window, and Lucas and the hag between them carried it over to the fire. In a marvellously short space of time bacon and eggs and tea appeared upon it, and the two travellers who since their entry into this dismal house had hardly addressed each other, set to work upon their welcome meal.

  Nothing but the commonplaces of the table passed between them till Lucas lit his after-breakfast pipe.

  “Listen to me, Veronica,” he said. “That is, if you can keep your eyes open, and you had better keep them open until I have told you what I have to say, because it is very important. We are in a very tight hole, both of us, at the present moment. The trouble may blow over. On the other hand, it may not, and then we shall have to look out for squalls. I shall know pretty soon. All you have got to do is to stop here and keep absolutely quiet. You can't talk to this old dame, whatever her name is, because you can't make her hear, and you mustn't try to talk to anyone else. Don't communicate with your friends, either, especially the Ashlotts, this is most important, because your only chance of safety is for no one to know of your existence. Understand this, Veronica, we are in grave danger, very grave danger, both of us.”

  Veronica had only to look at his strained face to know that he spoke the truth, or at least what he believed to be the truth, but she did not feel alarmed. Horror she might feel of the house and the whole situation, but she felt no anxiety for her personal safety. Her companion, however, seemed to take a different view of the matter.

  Lucas, glancing at his watch every other minute, allowed himself half an hour's rest, and then he announced that he must set forth upon his return journey. He heaved himself out of his chair and stood looking at Veronica as if he expected some move upon her part. She, however, stared vaguely back at him as usual, not knowing what was expected of her by this unaccountable being.

  “Aren't you coming to see me off ?” he said.

  She rose obediently, and followed him, doglike as usual, across the tiled hall to the front door. In the porch he paused, and looked steadfastly at the girl beside him. Then he suddenly caught her and drew her to him.

  “Veronica,” he said, “you've got no one to look to but me, and I've got no one but you ; we have got to stick together. Say you'll stand by me, Veronica ?”

  Veronica's soft little heart was easily touched. She only saw the man's face, strained, tired and anxious, close to hers ; everything that had gone before was forgotten, it was a different Lucas, changed and softened, who stood before her now. Almost involuntarily she smiled back at him. It was the first time Lucas had ever seen her smile, and so completely did it change her face that he hardly knew her for the same girl ; his arms tightened about her, and before he knew what he was doing, he had kissed her on her lips.

  Who can say what magic passes from lip to lip ? The man's face changed even more than the girl's had done. Many thoughts chased each other though his mind, if his changing eyes were any clue to them. Then, reluctantly, he released her and turned away. Half in the saddle of his cycle, and half out of it, he paused, and looked at Veronica again ; then suddenly he leant towards her.

  “I shall come back again,” he said. “I shall come back again, dear, whether or no. Wait for me, Veronica.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SOUNDS IN THE HALL OF THE BIG HOUSE IN the Bloomsbury square showed that the members of the council were assembling for their meeting. The butler, who was also a lay
brother, was admitting them, and one by one they passed down the long tiled passage to the room built out at the: back, which was designed for a billiard room but was now the lodge of an occult fraternity.

  In the office the secretary of that society was gathering together the papers that concerned the business about to be transacted. A close observer might have noticed that the lines of the man's dark face had deepened, adding some ten years to his apparent age, and that his eyes appeared to be deep sunk in his head and heavy-lidded ; save for that, and some dust-covered motoring clothes, rolled hastily into a bundle and thrown into the corner there was nothing to show that he had travelled over two hundred miles during the night.

  His papers made ready, he paused, and unlocking a cupboard that stood upon the safe, he poured himself out the best part of half a tumblerful of whisky and swallowed down the raw spirit without water. By the time he had walked down the passage that led to the billiard room the lines also had gone from his face.

  The members of the council had already assembled, and the secretary's entrance was the signal for them to take their places about the table and proceed to the transaction of business. The minutes of the preceding meeting were read and signed, and the matters on the agenda proceeded as usual ; then came the time when the chairman said : “Any other business ?” and looked from face to face of the men surrounding the table. Each responded with a shake of the head, and the man at the foot of the table was permitting his lungs to expand in a sigh of relief when the chairman broke the silence.

  “There is a matter, brethren, which I should like to lay before you, and upon which I should value your advice.

  “Last night a ritual was being worked in this Lodge, the ritual of the Seventh Degree. I was in the Chair. Suddenly I perceived a figure materialize upon the floor of the lodge, several of the other brethren perceived it also. By means of a Word of Power I was able to banish it, and we proceeded with the ritual, but it is a very serious thing that any cowan should have been able to pass through the seal set upon the room.”

  Grave faces received this announcement. Anyone acquainted with occult work will know how serious the matter was ; for those to whom the subject is unfamiliar it is enough to say that for thousands of years the occult fraternities have guarded their secrets, not only physically, but mentally also by means of the mystic seals they set upon their meeting places, and here was a fraternity, one of the oldest and most powerful in the western hemisphere, faced by the fact that a stranger had succeeded in penetrating into the working of one of their highest degrees.

  The old man with the long white beard upon the chairman's left spoke first.

  “Are you sure that it was a cowan ? I have known it happen that a member of the Fraternity, taken over to the Other Side by sudden death, had attended lodge from sheer habit, forgetting that he was no longer in the body.”

  To an outsider, this might have sounded like the maunderings of insanity, but to these men, as accustomed to functioning out of the body as in it, and to associate with dead and living upon equal terms, there appeared nothing strange, either in the statement that the dead had returned, or that the distant had suddenly materialized ; they were used to sitting in council with men who had been dead for hundreds of years or who were separated from them by the breadth of a continent. The only thing that puzzled them was, how the seal upon their meeting place had been broken by one who was not entitled to enter, and the chairman replied in all seriousness, “It could not have been a member of the Fraternity, because it was a woman.”

  Lucas waited with suspended breath to learn whether the intruder had been sufficiently clearly materialized to be recognizable ; he dared not ask any questions ; the pupils of his eyes had contracted to pinpoints and his face was set like a mask.

  The discussion turned this way and that for some minutes, and the concensus of opinion seemed to be that some outsider with considerable occult knowledge had succeeded in breaking the seal and effecting an entrance. Such a thing had not happened since the sixteenth century, when the Paris lodge had been similarly invaded, and to this occurrence they turned for a precedent that should guide them in their course of action.

  The Fraternity had in its keeping the secret of the use of the Punitive Dark Rays of disintegration, and these it was permitted to employ upon the occasions, happily rare, when its secrets were in danger of being revealed to the uninitiated. Not that the brethren were blood-thirsty men, but the secret knowledge entrusted to them was of such power that its dissemination among those unfit for such a supreme trust was a very serious matter indeed, too serious to be trifled with ; and when occult knowledge got into unworthy hands, those who were responsible for its safe custody were required to prevent effectually any use or spread of such knowledge ; if a man chose to spy upon their secrets, then he must take the consequences, for the knowledge was not theirs to communicate at will, neither had they the right to pardon a transgression. Some of the brethren, having regard to the fact that the transgressor was believed to be a woman, though the chairman was not absolutely certain upon this point, hesitated to cast their votes in favour of action ; and though no one actually refused to sanction the use of the Dark Ray upon this occasion, two abstained from voting, so the remaining five carried the decision.

  Let it be realized, in judging the action of these men, that they had a grave trust to fulfil in safeguarding the knowledge placed in their keeping, and that no one values human life more cheaply than the occultist, for he holds the belief in eternal life as a fact of his own personal experience, not as a theory, based, at best, upon the evidence of sacred writings. Some one had learnt their secrets, and that person, must, at all costs, be effectually silenced, only thus could their trust be held to have been fulfilled.

  Just such an occurrence as this Lucas had foreseen when he determined to use an intermediary to obtain the knowledge he desired. He could have done what he employed Veronica to do, but: he made use of her for the purpose of avoiding this precise risk. He himself was perfectly safe ; the brethren had no means of associating the intruder with himself ; she, and she alone would be struck by the Dark Ray, and he would pass scatheless ; he had only to send round once more to the secretarial agencies of London in order to replace her with a sensitive equally or almost as good, and yet he sat staring at the chairman like a hypnotized man, his soul frozen with horror. Absorbed in their discussion, no one looked at the secretary, or his face must surely have betrayed him. Lucas, who had thought himself beyond good or evil, immune from emotion, had been humanized, and his humanity betrayed him. A man upon the Left Hand Path finds his strength in separateness ; Lucas had formed a tie, he had deviated from his perfect loyalty to evil, the spark of good that was in him had been fanned to a flame, and it was proving his undoing.

  The brethren were discussing ways and means, who were to be responsible for the task in hand, and the time and place at which they should meet for the united meditation that should let loose the Dark Ray, and they did not realize that anything untoward was afoot until the scrape of a thrust-back chair drew their attention to the foot of the table.

  Lucas was upon his feet ; his face was the peculiar grey-white a dark skin goes when it becomes absolutely bloodless ; for a long minute the men round the table stared at him, arrested by the expression of his face. It seemed as if he would never find his voice, and then, with difficulty, the words came.

  “There is something I wish to say to you,” he said.

  The chairman signed to him to go on. For some time past the secretary had been an object of suspicion, and it did not come as any surprise to the men present that Lucas was involved in the affair under consideration. They waited for him to pull himself together. Presently he spoke again.

  “This matter is not quite as you think it is.”

  Another long pause followed as Lucas sought for the words that would not come. The men round the table waited immobile in the halflight of the shaded lamp, their gaze directed towards him, no one offering to help
him out.

  With a renewed effort he continued.

  “The person you saw in the lodge was not directly concerned in the matter. She was entirely passive. A trance medium in fact. She is not responsible for anything that has happened.”

  “Then,” said the chairman, “If she is not responsible, who is ?”

  “I am,” said Lucas. “I was operating her.”

  “In what way ?”

  “Under hypnosis.”

  “Has she any recollection of what has happened ?”

  “No, none ; I swear she hasn't. She was nothing but a tool. She had no more to do with it than a pen with what it signs. If you want to strafe anybody, you can strafe me. I am the person responsible.”

  It was a strange scene in that darkened Blooms-bury room. The circle of men round the table, their faces dimly illumined by the reflected-light from the shaded lamp ; behind them, a shadowy altar with the Everlasting Fire glowing dimly upon it ; and before them, erect, tense, solitary, the man who was about to die.

  For there could be no doubt as to what the verdict would be. A long time ago the Chiefs had known that Lucas was unsuitable to be a member of the Fraternity ; for some time past it had been suspected almost to certainty that he was intriguing against them, and now they had caught him red-handed. He, a member of the outer temple, had obtained possession of the secrets of the inner temple up to the seventh degree; they were not only angry at the theft, but thoroughly alarmed that such a theft had been possible, and their alarm made them ruthless.