Manuel fumbled in the darkness until he found the box, then handed it to Defoe. The latter waved it toward the Voice behind him.
“My guest first, Manuel,” he corrected.
The Cuban stood motionless. “I see no one else,” he insisted.
The Voice interrupted:
“Tell him I don’t care to smoke, Mr. Defoe.”
“I can see no one, _senor_,” the Cuban repeated.
“But didn’t you just _hear_ him?” Defoe cried, leaning forward nervously.
“No, _senor_, I hear no one speak but you.”
Defoe stared up at his valet, then half rose from his chair.
“Sit down, Defoe!” commanded the Voice sharply.
Defoe sank back once more.
“There!” he exclaimed to his valet. “Now tell me you didn’t hear any one order me to sit down just then!”
The Cuban shook his head. “No, _senor_, I hear no one talk but you since I come in.”
His master swore helplessly. “Are you trying to make a fool of me, Manuel? Do you dare stand there and tell me no one spoke to me?”
“I don’t know, _senor_. I only know I hear no one speak--”
Again the Voice intruded:
“It may be that Manuel thinks you are trying to make a fool of him,” it suggested.
“Do you?” Defoe asked the Cuban.
“Do I what, _senor_?” the valet asked, placidly.
“Do you think I’m trying to make a fool of you?”
“I do not say so, do I, _senor_?” the servant replied, deprecatingly.
“No, but you heard--or _did_ you hear?--this visitor say it!”
The Cuban, almost tearfully, denied it, becoming verbose in his protestation.
Defoe flapped his arms on the wings of his easy chair and bade his valet hush.
“Get out of here, you brown-skinned dumbbell! One of us has gone crazy tonight!”
The Cuban moved off, keeping a suspicious eye upon his master. His retreating footstep presently was heard dying away in the hall outside.
“Well, what do you think of that damned little Cuban?” Defoe asked the Voice. “I wonder what made him lie so brazenly?”
There was no response. Defoe repeated his second question.
Still silence answered him.
“Have you gone, my friend?” Defoe asked, turning part way in his chair to test the other’s watchfulness. This time no automatic punched his head and no command wilted him into the depths of his chair again.
Still doubtful of his good luck, Defoe called out once more:
“I say, stranger, have you gone?”
The only sound that greeted his ears was the faint creaking of a window in the adjoining dining-room. Defoe rose and darted to the connecting door, snapping on the electric light at the entrance to the dining-room.
The room was vacant of any soul but himself.
All he could see was the slight movement of the lace curtain at the dining-room window--and when he examined the window he found it latched.
_III._
The next day Defoe went to his doctor. He wished to take stock of himself; perhaps he had been applying himself too closely to his business.
“You are badly run down, Allen,” the physician said, almost before he had sat down with his patient. “You look mentally distressed.”
“I am,” admitted Defoe. “Working too hard, I guess.”
The doctor eyed him keenly.
“Anything else troubling you?” he asked.
Defoe insisted there really was nothing at all beside his work that was affecting him. So the doctor gave the usual diagnosis: Too much nerve tension, not enough sleep, not the proper kinds of food. He ended by advising more rest and quiet.
“And avoid excitement, too,” he warned. “That old heart palpitation might crop up again, you know.”
It was all very well for the doctor to advise more rest and more sleep, but how was a man to sleep beneath a Damocles sword of mystery, of weird forebodings?
It was three weeks before Defoe felt that he was succeeding in obeying the doctor’s instructions, partly, at least. Then--.
It happened late one night. Defoe lay in bed, his back to the lighted electric lamp on the table: he had fallen asleep, reading. Suddenly he stirred at a touch on his shoulder.
“That you, Manuel?” he asked, drowsily. “All right, put out the li--”
“No, it is not Manuel--and don’t bother to turn around, Defoe!” this last sharply, as Defoe made a movement to arise in bed.
“You again!” Defoe exclaimed. “What--how did you get in?”
“That’s my problem, not yours,” said the Voice. “I merely dropped in again to inquire if you had thought any more of doing what I suggested.”
Defoe checked an insane desire to leap out of bed and make a break for the door--anything, to escape this tormentor at his back! But he remembered the automatic....
He got himself under a semblance of control before he answered:
“Your suggestions were ridiculous. Why should I have anything to confess about the Bland trial, or why should I commit suicide over it?” He even essayed a laugh meant to be derisive.
But the intruder chose to ignore Defoe’s evasions. His next remark was as startling as it was illuminating:
“Did you know,” said the Voice, “that of the other eleven jurors who convicted Bland, only seven are living--still?”
“No; I haven’t kept track of the other eleven men,” replied Defoe, annoyed subconsciously by the detachment that the Voice gave to the word “still.”
“Well, I have,” said the Voice. “Two of the surviving seven are in insane asylums; two of the four dead committed sui--.”
Defoe could brook it no longer. He wrenched around in bed to grapple with his antagonist, forgetful, in his madness, of the automatic. But before he could free himself from the bedclothes the lamp was snapped out, and Defoe was left ignominiously tumbled in the darkness on the floor.
A chuckle from the vicinity of the bedroom door told him of his guest’s departure....
When morning came, after the nerve-racking night, Defoe found it hard to realize that his two experiences with the Voice really had taken place. None the less, he knew they were preying on his vitality, on his brain-functions.
Repeatedly the thought came to him that it was all a dream like his recollection of the murder trial out of which he had awakened the night of the Voice’s first visit. But always against the theory of the dream he placed his remembrance of the feel of the automatic revolver; and, too, the fact that he had talked with Manuel and with the Voice at the same time argued against the dream explanation.
Left, then, was conscience--that is, if the visits of the Voice were simply hallucinations of a distracted mind. But why should conscience wait for twelve years to haunt and harass him?
The more he pondered it all, the greater became the dread of another visit from the Voice. The greater grew his fear, too, of losing his reason, as he sought to analyze the situation from every conceivable standpoint. With every new bit of theorizing, Defoe felt himself giving way more and more to melancholia such as he knew is frequently but the prelude to insanity. Was it possible, he wondered, for a man’s conscience to drive him to imbecility?
Defoe finally accepted the inevitable.
“Manuel,” he ordered, the second morning after the bedroom encounter with the Voice, “pack my things. We’re going away.”
“Away, _senor_? Where?”
Defoe’s brain groped vainly for an instant, then seized upon the only chance.
“The sea--a sea voyage. My nerves....”
Manuel busied himself among Defoe’s clothes. “Do you need many things, _senor_? Do you go far away--Europe, perhaps?”
“No, no. Just down the coast--Old Point Comfort, I guess. Yes, that’s it. A week or so of rest. Just my steamer trunk and a suitcase will do.”
The day of the trip down the coast was as perfect as he could have wanted for his own satisfaction. All during the forenoon the Old Dominion steamer skirted the Jersey shore line, and Defoe sat out on deck basking in the sun and already feeling better for the salt-laden air that he breathed in deeply. In the afternoon he napped most of the time and when nightfall chilled the deck promenaders he descended with the rest to the dining-saloon.
It was while sitting in the smoking-saloon, after dinner, that Defoe first had the impression that he was being watched. A poker game was going on, lackadaisically, in one corner of the saloon; scattered in chairs and cushioned seats along the windows were perhaps a dozen or fifteen men. But, for the life of him, Defoe could not pick out any one in the room who might be watching him, now he gave his fleeting impression indulgence long enough to look about him.
Finishing a cigar, Defoe decided on a deck stroll before retiring. It was too cold and damp, with a fog beginning to gather, to permit of sitting on deck, so he paced to and fro briskly up near the fore deck beneath the pilot’s tower. The nervousness of the few moments in the smoking-saloon, when he imagined himself being watched, transmuted itself into a shiver as the foggy dampness penetrated to his marrow. He lit a fresh cigar and puffed at it jerkily as if to generate bodily warmth. Presently the shiver developed into a veritable shudder such as precedes chills or certain forms of ague.
Defoe, thoroughly miserable and alarmed now at the fear of sickness on board ship, chafed his cheeks with his hands and, on his way to the entrance to the stateroom, he flailed his arms about himself to stem the onrush of the chill. Once inside the passageway of the staterooms, however, he felt warmer, and by the time he reached his stateroom door the chill had subsided almost completely.