Page:The Mask.pdf/5

THE TATLER

laughing remark, and ate his solitary dinner in a silence that grew grimmer and more grim as the hours wore on and Maisie did not return. Stretched at full length in a huge chair before the fire, the mask above his bent head staring out into the gloom of the big room, only lighted by the flaming heaped coals in the wide grate, the man brooded, chin on hand, seeing in the red heart of the fire endless pictures of the two, Maisie and Miles, each of which added fuel to the fire that was slowly rising in his jealous heart. Pictures, too, of the past, that had been so entirely happy and blessed till last night—now such untold ages ago—till their quarrel, the quarrel over that mask. Everything seemed to have gone wrong since he bought the wretched thing! How Maisie had hated it at first; now she didn’t seem to mind it—had hung it there above the mantelpiece with her own pretty hands. Now he seemed to have started a dislike for it—funny how the firelight leaping up then seemed to give the thing a horrible look of life! Almost as if it smiled, and the eye-slits looked down at him oddly, obliquely; whoever it was taken from, he must have been a horrible old devil, with a taste for blood…. Trelawney jumped suddenly, startled at his own thought, unconsciously uttered aloud. Getting up from his seat, he stood staring at the head, hung on a level with his own, to the left of the tall mirror that occupied the centre of the space above the mantelpiece.

“Now what put that into my head, I wonder?” he muttered, as his troubled grey eyes wandered over the sinister, fine-drawn face etched clearly in the leaping firelight. “I suppose it’s that murder business. What did the old man say—‘turn your eyes away,’ or something of the sort? ‘I’ve done what you wanted’—extraordinary idea! … I suppose it was a mask worn by some priest for sacrifices—perhaps human—who knows? Anyway, you old brute, I suppose one of those psychic asses would get a fine yarn out of your ‘thirst for blood’ still fulfilling itself….”

The words died away, and Trelawney’s gaze was fixed on the curious, dreadful hollows where eyes should be—his jaw was dropped, a little slack, and his eyes were dull and fixed. Holes in a mask, blank hollows where human eyes had once looked out—on what horrors, what unspeakable orgies of blood and evil! Who could say? Holes, blank and black and eyeless—yet were they eyeless in truth? In the leaping flicker of the firelight, how could one be sure that eyes no longer