The Beetle, Richard Marsh [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

as no one else seemed to have any sense, and the man seemed as good as dead, I thought I would try my hand. Directly I knelt down beside him, what do you think he said?”

“Thank you.”

“Nonsense.⁠—He said, in such a queer, hollow, croaking voice, ‘Paul Lessingham.’ I was dreadfully startled. To hear a perfect stranger, a man in his condition, utter that name in such a fashion⁠—to me, of all people in the world!⁠—took me aback. The policeman who was holding his head remarked, ‘That’s the first time he’s opened his mouth. I thought he was dead.’ He opened his mouth a second time. A convulsive movement went all over him, and he exclaimed, with the strangest earnestness, and so loudly that you might have heard him at the other end of the street, ‘Be warned, Paul Lessingham, be warned!’ It was very silly of me, perhaps, but I cannot tell you how his words, and his manner⁠—the two together⁠—affected me.⁠—Well, the long and the short of it was, that I had him taken into the house, and washed, and put to bed⁠—and I had the doctor sent for. The doctor could make nothing of it at all. He reported that the man seemed to be suffering from some sort of cataleptic seizure⁠—I could see that he thought it likely to turn out almost as interesting a case as I did.”

“Did you acquaint your father with the addition to his household?”

She looked at me, quizzically.

“You see, when one has such a father as mine one cannot tell him everything, at once. There are occasions on which one requires time.”

I felt that this would be wholesome hearing for old Lindon.

“Last night, after papa and I had exchanged our little courtesies⁠—which, it is to be hoped, were to papa’s satisfaction, since they were not to be mine⁠—I went to see the patient. I was told that he had neither eaten nor drunk, moved nor spoken. But, so soon as I approached his bed, he showed signs of agitation. He half raised himself upon his pillow, and he called out, as if he had been addressing some large assembly⁠—I can’t describe to you the dreadful something which was in his voice, and on his face⁠—‘Paul Lessingham!⁠—Beware!⁠—The Beetle!’ ”

When she said that, I was startled.

“Are you sure those were the words he used?”

“Quite sure. Do you think I could mistake them⁠—especially after what has happened since? I hear them singing in my ears⁠—they haunt me all the time.”

She put her hands up to her face, as if to veil something from her eyes. I was becoming more and more convinced that there was something about the Apostle’s connection with his Oriental friend which needed probing to the bottom.

“What sort of a man is he to look at, this patient of yours?”

I had my doubts as to the gentleman’s identity⁠—which her words dissolved; only, however, to increase my mystification in another direction.

“He seems to be between thirty and forty. He has light hair, and straggling sandy whiskers. He is so thin as to be nothing but skin and bone⁠—the doctor says it’s a case of starvation.”

“You say he has light hair, and sandy whiskers. Are you sure the whiskers are real?”

She opened her eyes.

“Of course they’re real. Why shouldn’t they be real?”

“Does he strike you as being a⁠—foreigner?”

“Certainly not. He looks like an Englishman, and he speaks like one, and not, I should say, of the lowest class. It is true that there is a very curious, a weird, quality in his voice, what I have heard of it, but it is not un-English. If it is catalepsy he is suffering from, then it is a kind of catalepsy I never heard of. Have you ever seen a clairvoyant?” I nodded. “He seems to me to be in a state of clairvoyance. Of course the doctor laughed when I told him so, but we know what doctors are, and I still believe that he is in some condition of the kind. When he said that last night he struck me as being under what those sort of people call ‘influence,’ and that whoever had him under influence was forcing him to speak against his will, for the words came from his lips as if they had been wrung from him in agony.”

Knowing what I did know, that struck me as being rather a remarkable conclusion for her to have reached, by the exercise of her own unaided powers of intuition⁠—but I did not choose to let her know I thought so.

“My dear Marjorie!⁠—you who pride yourself on having your imagination so strictly under control!⁠—on suffering it to take no errant flights!”

“Is not the fact that I do so pride myself proof that I am not likely to make assertions wildly⁠—proof, at any rate, to you? Listen to me. When I left that unfortunate creature’s room⁠—I had had a nurse sent for, I left him in her charge⁠—and reached my own bedroom, I was possessed by a profound conviction that some appalling, intangible, but very real danger, was at that moment threatening Paul.”

“Remember⁠—you had had an exciting evening; and a discussion with your father. Your patient’s words came as a climax.”

“That is what I told myself⁠—or, rather, that was what I tried to tell myself; because, in some extraordinary fashion, I had lost the command of my powers of reflection.”

“Precisely.”

“It was not precisely⁠—or, at least, it was not precisely in the sense you mean. You may laugh at me, Sydney, but I had an altogether indescribable feeling, a feeling which amounted to knowledge, that I was in the presence of the supernatural.”

“Nonsense!”

“It was not nonsense⁠—I wish it had been nonsense. As I have said, I was conscious, completely conscious, that some frightful peril was assailing Paul. I did not know what it was, but I did know that it was something altogether awful, of which merely to think was to shudder. I wanted to go to his assistance, I tried to, more than once; but I