“It could not be an everyday occurrence in anyone’s point of view. But she has disappeared; we don’t know where…yet. Perhaps we never shall. The authorities are trying to discover her whereabouts. Has it occurred to you, Mrs. Verlaine, that if what some people suspect is the truth, your inquisitiveness could put you in danger?”
I was astonished. I had no idea I had betrayed my determination to discover the truth.
“Danger? What sort of danger?”
There was a pause. The change had taken place again. There was the Mrs. Lincroft whom I had known since my arrival at Lovat Stacy, a little vague, remote. “Who can say? But I should keep aloof if I were you.”
I thought: She is warning me. Does she mean that I must not become involved with a man who is suspected of being concerned in his wife’s disappearance? Or is she telling me that by interfering I am putting my life in danger?
“As for danger,” she went on with a little laugh, “I am being a bit too vehement, I expect. This matter will be cleared up sooner or later. Edith will come back.” She added with forced conviction: “I feel sure of it.” I was about to speak but she hurried on: “Sir William told me that he so much enjoyed the Schubert the other evening. Your playing sent him into a deep sleep which was just what he needed.”
She smiled at me gratefully. Anyone who could soothe Sir William was a friend of hers.
The disaster happened two days later. I went to the room next to Sir William’s. Mrs. Lincroft was there. She whispered to me: “He’s a little poorly today. He’s dozing in his chair. How dark it is. There’s been nothing but rain all day. I did think it showed signs of brightening a little, but now it’s as bad as ever.”
The music was laid out for me…the pieces Sir William had chosen. I glanced at the top sheet, which was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
“I think I’d better light the candles,” said Mrs. Lincroft.
I agreed and when she had done so I sat down at the piano and she tiptoed out of the room.
As I played I was thinking of Napier and feeling increasing indignation at the way in which he was accused before anything had been proved against him.
I finished the sonata and to my surprise the next piece was Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre, an unusual choice I thought. I began to play. I thought of Pietro who had always brought something indescribably spine-chilling into the playing of this piece. He said that when he played it, he saw the musician as a kind of pied piper who, instead of luring children into the mountain side, brought people out of their graves to dance round the piper…in the dance of death.
It had grown darker outside and the light from the candle was scarcely adequate, but I did not really need to read the music.
And then suddenly I was not alone. I thought at first that my playing had indeed conjured up a ghost for the figure in the doorway looked like a corpse.
“Go away…Go away…” cried Sir William. He was staring at me in a fixed, stony way. “Why…did you…come…back.”
I stood up, and as I did so he cried out in horror; and the next thing I knew he was lying on the floor.
Frantically I called to Mrs. Lincroft, who fortunately was not far off.
She stared at him in dismay.
“What…happened?”
“I was playing Danse Macabre,” I began…
I did not finish, for I thought she was going to faint.
Then she was her competent self again. “We must send for the doctor,” she said.
Sir William was very ill indeed. He had had another stroke and there were several doctors with him. It was thought that he might not recover.
I told them that I had been playing and suddenly I had looked up and seen him in the doorway. As he could scarcely walk it must have been a great effort for him to do so, and that effort, said the doctors, could have been the cause of his collapse.
In a day or two it was believed that he was not going to die after all and Mrs. Lincroft was greatly relieved.
She said to me: “This will mean that Napier will stay after all. I’m sure Sir William doesn’t remember what has happened to Edith. He’s a little hazy about everything and keeps fancying he’s back in the past.”
That July was a wet one; there was rain for several days and the skies were overcast.
Sybil Stacy came to my room to talk to me. I had to light the candles although it was only late afternoon. Sybil in deep mauve dress trimmed with black bows—and mauve bows in her hair—had chosen a color which I had never seen her wear before.
“Mourning,” she whispered.
I started up from my little table at which I had been preparing lessons.
She wagged a finger coyly at me. “For Edith,” she said.
“But how can you be sure?”
“I am sure. She would have come back if she wasn’t dead. Besides everything points to it. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know what to think, but I prefer to believe that she is alive and one day she will walk in.” I turned to the door as though I expected her. Sybil turned too and watched it expectantly.
Then she shook her head. “No, she can’t come back. She’s dead, poor child. I know it.”
“You can’t be sure,” I repeated.
“Strange things are happening in this house,” she went on. “Don’t you feel it?”
I shook my head.
“You aren’t telling the truth, Mrs. Verlaine. You do feel it. You’re sensitive. I know it. I shall put it in my picture when I paint it. Strange things are going on…and you know it.”
“I wish…oh how I wish Edith would come back!”
“She would if she could. She was always so meek and would do what people wanted. You know what’s happened, don’t you…to William?”
“He’s very ill, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, and all because he came to see who was playing.”
“He knew I was playing.”
“Oh no he did not, Mrs. Verlaine. That’s where you’re wrong. He thought it was someone else.”
“How could he? I play to him often.”
“He chooses the music for you, doesn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“I know. He chooses the pieces he likes to hear, pieces which remind him of pleasant things. And now because of what happened Napier will stay. I believe Napier would have had to go but for what had happened. So what is good for Napier is bad for Sir William. One man’s meat, so they say, is another’s poison. Oh how true! How true! Listen to the rain. It rained on St. Swithin’s Day. You know what that means, Mrs. Verlaine. Forty days and forty nights it will rain now…and all because it rained on St. Swithin’s Day.”
She snuffed out the candles. “I like the gloom,” she said. “It fits everything doesn’t it? Tell me what piece you were playing when Sir William came to the doorway.”
“Danse Macabre.”
She shivered. “The Dance of Death. Well, it was nearly, wasn’t it? For Sir William. It’s an eerie piece of music. Did you think it was strange that he should have chosen it?”
“Yes, I did.”
“You would have thought it more strange if you had known it was the last thing Isabella played that day. She sat at the piano all morning and she played it over and over again. And William said: ‘For God’s sake stop playing that mournful thing!’ And she stopped and she went out into the woods and shot herself. It’s never been played in this house since…until you sat at the piano and played it.”
“It was in the music he set for me to play for him.”