Sax Rohmer

“ I expect you were only dreaming. We often wake suddenly and mistake the end of an unpleasant dream for a reality. I shall not be a moment.”
LEAVING Lycius seated in the porch, Margaret returned. From the tiny, compact servants’ quarters—detached from the house—no sound reached her.
She walked quietly through the court where the fountain plashed, along the tiled passage and up the little oaken stairs. Without tremor or hesitation she passed into her writing-room. The moon silvered the ivy leaves about the open windows and spilled a pool of brightness upon a tiny patch of the polished floor. ”

“ What could have occasioned his fear it was beyond her power to conjecture; for living as he did in a pathetic shadow-world peopled by phantoms which perhaps had existence only in his own imagination, ghostly menaces held no meaning for him.
Margaret hurried across the court toward the doorway communicating with Lycius’ room—and with the chapel. When she had conducted Grainger Barton to the chapel, it had been necessary to employ candles; but now the moon poured its radiance fully through the stained-glass window at the head of the Cardinal’s Stair, lighting the way. ”

“ Anticipating the literary woman of Fleet Street, who is so different from her writings, Margaret Orme disconcerted him. Her beauty, and the very womanliness of her surroundings, with flowers, flowers everywhere, increased rather than diminished that portentous something—that pending revelation. She was what “The Flamen” would lead one to expect her to be—and this it was that startled him.
For the first time his glance caught the dull gleam of the odd ring she wore. .... ”

“ I was just going to call out, softly, to Joe Cheame, when from inside the chapel came the sound of some one laughing!
“It was Cheame. Mind, I’d never heard him laugh like that before; I’ve never heard any man laugh like it, and I never want to hear one laugh like it again. I was frozen, absolutely frozen, to the floor; and as I stood there I saw the curtain move, and I saw the red robe. I was on the point of gasping out something, when the curtain fell back, and the man in the red robe began very slowly to come down the stairs toward me. ”

“ You are not afraid to waken in the dark?”
“Madonna, Madonna!” He always called her so. “You know I care nothing for darkness—how can I?”
“Then Lycius, what is it?”
“It was some one—in the room, Madonna!”
“Surely Felice?”
“No, no! It was not Felice. It was some one else!”
“No one else would go to my writing-room, dear,” said Margaret, tenderly drawing the frightened child to her. “You have been thinking too much about all sorts of gloomy things, Lycius.”
“Madonna,” he whispered as she led him through the darkened court and out into the freshness of the garden, “there was some one ”

“ She turned the key, and Lycius, pale and tearful, sprang out and threw himself into her arms.
“Oh, what has happened?” he said. “Something dreadful happened last night, I know! Some one came and locked my door, and although I called to you until I could call no more, you did not come—no one came! Of course, if you did not come, no one else could possibly hear me, I know.”
She stroked the boy’s head lovingly, her heart overflowing with gladness because he was safe.
“Nothing dreadful has happened, dear,” she said reassuringly. “You can go back to bed again; it is much too early to get up ”

“ They’re dangerous.”
“I tell you Lewis will give me two hundred and fifty for it on sight! It’s worth thousands!”
The other remained downcast.
“Isn’t there plenty of stuff in the house,” he inquired, “without touching the chapel?”
Joseph Cheame, alias Grainger Barton, turned his fine dark eyes upon the foxy little man.
“Did you ever win a prize at Sunday school?” he asked mockingly. “Don’t be a fool!”
Yet, strangely, his glance was not so confident as usual, and his enthusiasm did not ring true when without pause he plunged into a mass of purely professional details. ”

“ Yet her conversation was not of unusual things. She spoke of plays and of books and of other matters of the everyday world, and spoke simply and charmingly. She could be no more than twenty-three years of age, he told himself ”

“ The oldest inhabitant—a sort of Hebrew prophet—met me with a country cart and drove me to the house.”
“Does he sleep in?”
“No men sleep in—only a woman who’s old and deaf—and a boy. The other servants have quarters right away from the house. I gathered this and one or two other points from the prophet who drove me to catch the London train. The place is packed with silver, and with stuff better worth handling than silver. There’s a genuine Correggio in the chapel.” ”