CHAPTER LXX.

IN WHICH AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR IS SEEN.  IN THE CEDAR-PARLOUR OF THE TILED HOUSE, AND THE STORY OF MR. BEAUCLERC AND THE ‘FLOWER DE LUCE’ BEGINS TO BE UNFOLDED.

It was an awful night, indeed, on which all this occurred, and that apparition had shown itself up at the Mills.  And truly it would seem the devil had business on his hands, for in the cedar-parlour of the Tiled House another unexpected manifestation occurred just about the same hour.

What gentleman is there of broken fortunes, undefined rights, and in search of evidence, without a legal adviser of some sort?  Mr. Mervyn, of course, had his, and paid for the luxury according to custom.  And every now and then off went a despatch from the Tiled House to the oracular London attorney; sometimes it was a budget of evidence, and sometimes only a string of queries.  To-night, to the awful diapason of the storm—­he was penning one of these—­the fruit of a tedious study of many papers and letters, tied up in bundles by his desk, all of them redolent of ominous or fearful associations.

I don’t know why it is the hours fly with such a strange celerity in the monotony and solitude of such nightwork.  But Mervyn was surprised, as many a one similarly occupied has been, on looking at his watch, to find that it was now long past midnight; so he threw himself back in his chair with a sigh, and thought how vainly his life was speeding away, and heard, with a sort of wonder, how mad was the roar of the storm without, while he had quietly penned his long rescript undisturbed.

The wild bursts of supernatural fury and agony which swell and mingle in a hurricane, I dare say, led his imagination a strange aerial journey through the dark.  Now it was the baying of hell hounds, and the long shriek of the spirit that flies before them.  Anon it was the bellowing thunder of an ocean, and the myriad voices of shipwreck.  And the old house quivering from base to cornice under the strain; and then there would come a pause, like a gasp, and the tempest once more rolled up, and the same mad hubbub shook and clamoured at the windows.

So he let his Pegasus spread his pinions on the blast, and mingled with the wild rout that peopled the darkness; or, in plainer words, he abandoned his fancy to the haunted associations of the hour, the storm, and the house, with a not unpleasant horror.  In one of these momentary lulls of the wind, there came a sharp, distinct knocking on the window-pane.  He remembered with a thrill the old story of the supernatural hand which had troubled that house, and began its pranks at this very window.

Ay, ay, ’twas the impatient rapping of a knuckle on the glass quite indisputably.

It is all very well weaving the sort of dream or poem with which Mervyn was half amusing and half awing himself, but the sensation is quite different when a questionable sound or sight comes uninvited to take the matter out of the province of our fancy and the control of our will.  Mervyn found himself on his legs, and listening in a less comfortable sort of horror, with his gaze fixed in the direction of that small sharp knocking.  But the storm was up again, and drowning every other sound in its fury.