Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/229

 elbow, something splashed, softly, yet he heard it. He turned quickly and his breath went short.

It was a crimson spot of warm human blood.

As he looked, another drop fell next to it. He looked up, in a sudden panic, and saw that it was coming from the ceiling—a thin, dark trickle that turned red when it came into the compass of the candle light.

What was it up there; bleeding, dying, dripping through this old ceiling in the black night? There was another splash of a drop of blood and another.

Suddenly, with a wet sobbing splash, one of the drops struck the candle wick full, extinguishing it instantly, leaving the room and Val in a black, velvet darkness. For an instant or two,—or was it an eternity or two?—he sat there, immovable, his face pale.

There was a sudden, leaping flash of sheet lightning, illuminating the room to the last, farthest corner for a brief instant. At the window toward which Val was looking, he saw something that made his blood run cold.

Framed in the window, a figure from the old world, was the upper part of a man. Although the time of seeing the apparition was only an instant, Val could remember every detail, so plainly did he see it. The figure was dressed in the frock coat affected by the old Virginia planters and gentlemen, and his face was shaded by a large soft hat. His face was pasty, old, with a white goatee and mustache, and the eyes were unutterably mournful and aged, dark windows that looked upon the world in sorrowful aloofness. Every line on the figure’s face was plain to Val in the fraction of a second in which he glimpsed it, standing there at the window.