Page:The Mask.pdf/8

THE TATLER Trelawney’s eyes, rapidly regaining their old brightness and sanity, widened as he looked from Miles to her and back again. The soldier nodded frankly, and kicked a fragment of the mask away.

“Then it’s not true—it didn’t happen?” Flushing a dull scarlet, Mules nodded, and Maisie gripped her husband’s hand.

“There’s no use lying, Jack, old man, For a crazy hour or two—while this beastly horror was hanging there, only—something seemed to take us both by the throat. I swear that though I’ve always been awfully fond of May as a brother, I never had the remotest feeling for her any other way—nor she for me, I’ll take my solemn oath…. But somehow, as I say, for a few hours something happened to us both, but it’s gone now for ever, and everything’s clear again. You do believe me, old man?”

Trelawney’s old frankly affectionate glance met his as he held out his hand.

“You don’t need to ask, my dear old chap…. Now things are coming back to me again. I remember now, faintly, some of the awful things I seemed to see when I was looking at the mask: I seemed to go off into a sort of dream of sacrifices and magic, and the Lord knows what sort of horrors….”

Maisie suddenly broke in.

“I believe you were right all along, Jack. It must have been a thing somehow used to having blood sacrifices before it, and tried to get them again. I believe old Schroeder’s murdering his wife was just done under the same influence. It all seems like some impossible dream”

Trelawney shuddered as he put his arms round his wife and buried his head in her soft shoulder.

“Good God! To think I nearly fed the vile thing with a double sacrifice to-night; how I missed you I don’t know”

“You slipped a little on the polished floor,” supplied Miles, “and that just saved us all, for your shot went wide and crashed full into the mask. It fell on the hearthrug, and you made for me, and we rolled about fighting each other; you were still mad, but the minute the mask smashed May and I got sane at once, and the one thing she was screaming about the whole time was for me not to hurt you! Well, that scrap of ours finally flattened the thing to smithereens, so all’s well. And we’re all three out of the most awful danger we’re ever likely to meet this side of Hell, where I believe that devilish mask was made.”

“How did you know it was the mask?” Trelawney asked.

“Because once in India I came across something the same sort of thing—and I had a funny feeling about the thing directly I saw it,” said Miles, for once shedding his English dislike of admitting any belief in the supernatural. “And what made me bang certain was that the second the thing