She said it
was a dreadful face, with something unnatural about it, as if it had
been a dwarf, and before she had time to have a good look, it popped
back like lightning, and aunt all but fainted away.' 'A red-headed _boy_?' said Darnell. 'I thought----What an extraordinary
story this is. I've never heard of anything so queer. Who was the boy?' 'You will know in good time,' said Mrs. Darnell. 'It _is_ very strange,
isn't it?' 'Strange!' Darnell ruminated for a while. 'I know what I think, Mary,' he said at length. 'I don't believe a word
of it. I believe your aunt is going mad, or has gone mad, and that she
has delusions. The whole thing sounds to me like the invention of a
lunatic.' 'You are quite wrong. Every word is true, and if you will let me go on,
you will understand how it all happened.' 'Very good, go ahead.' 'Let me see, where was I? Oh, I know, aunt saw the boy grinning in the
hedge. Yes, well, she was dreadfully frightened for a minute or two;
there was something so queer about the face, but then she plucked up a
spirit and said to herself, "After all, better a boy with red hair than
a big man with a gun," and she made up her mind to watch Uncle Robert
closely, as she could see by his look he knew all about it; he seemed as
if he were thinking hard and puzzling over something, as if he didn't
know what to do next, and his mouth kept opening and shutting, like a
fish's. So she kept her face straight, and didn't say a word, and when
he said something to her about the fine sunset, she took no notice. "Don't you hear what I say, Marian?" he said, speaking quite crossly,
and bellowing as if it were to somebody in the next field. So aunt said
she was very sorry, but her cold made her so deaf, she couldn't hear
much. She noticed uncle looked quite pleased, and relieved too, and she
knew he thought she hadn't heard the whistling. Suddenly uncle pretended
to see a beautiful spray of honeysuckle high up in the hedge, and he
said he must get it for aunt, only she must go on ahead, as it made him
nervous to be watched. She said she would, but she just stepped aside
behind a bush where there was a sort of cover in the hedge, and found
she could see him quite well, though she scratched her face terribly
with poking it into a rose bush. And in a minute or two out came the boy
from behind the hedge, and she saw uncle and him talking, and she knew
it was the same boy, as it wasn't dark enough to hide his flaming red
head. And uncle put out his hand as if to catch him, but he just darted
into the bushes and vanished. Aunt never said a word at the time, but
that night when they got home she charged uncle with what she'd seen and
asked him what it all meant. He was quite taken aback at first, and
stammered and stuttered and said a spy wasn't his notion of a good wife,
but at last he made her swear secrecy, and told her that he was a very
high Freemason, and that the boy was an emissary of the order who
brought him messages of the greatest importance. But aunt didn't believe
a word of it, as an uncle of hers was a mason, and he never behaved like
that. It was then she began to be afraid that it was really Anarchists,
or something of the kind, and every time the bell rang she thought that
uncle had been found out, and the police had come for him.' 'What nonsense! As if a man with house property would be an Anarchist.' 'Well, she could see there must be some horrible secret, and she didn't
know what else to think. And then she began to have the things through
the post.' 'Things through the post! What do you mean by that?' 'All sorts of things; bits of broken bottle-glass, packed carefully as
if it were jewellery; parcels that unrolled and unrolled worse than
Chinese boxes, and then had "cat" in large letters when you came to the
middle; old artificial teeth, a cake of red paint, and at last
cockroaches.' 'Cockroaches by post! Stuff and nonsense; your aunt's mad.' 'Edward, she showed me the box; it was made to hold cigarettes, and
there were three dead cockroaches inside. And when she found a box of
exactly the same kind, half-full of cigarettes, in uncle's great-coat
pocket, then her head began to turn again.' Darnell groaned, and stirred uneasily in his chair, feeling that the
tale of Aunt Marian's domestic troubles was putting on the semblance of
an evil dream. 'Anything else?' he asked. 'My dear, I haven't repeated half the things poor aunt told me this
afternoon. There was the night she thought she saw a ghost in the
shrubbery. She was anxious about some chickens that were just due to
hatch out, so she went out after dark with some egg and bread-crumbs, in
case they might be out. And just before her she saw a figure gliding by
the rhododendrons. It looked like a short, slim man dressed as they
used to be hundreds of years ago; she saw the sword by his side, and
the feather in his cap. She thought she should have died, she said, and
though it was gone in a minute, and she tried to make out it was all her
fancy, she fainted when she got into the house. Uncle was at home that
night, and when she came to and told him he ran out, and stayed out for
half-an-hour or more, and then came in and said he could find nothing;
and the next minute aunt heard that low whistle just outside the window,
and uncle ran out again.' 'My dear Mary, do let us come to the point. What on earth does it all
lead to?' 'Haven't you guessed? Why, of course it was that girl all the time.' 'Girl? I thought you said it was a boy with a red head?' 'Don't you see? She's an actress, and she dressed up. She won't leave
uncle alone. It wasn't enough that he was with her nearly every evening
in the week, but she must be after him on Sundays too. Aunt found a
letter the horrid thing had written, and so it has all come out. Enid
Vivian she calls herself, though I don't suppose she has any right to
one name or the other. And the question is, what is to be done?' 'Let us talk of that again. I'll have a pipe, and then we'll go to bed.' They were almost asleep when Mary said suddenly--

'Doesn't it seem queer, Edward? Last night you were telling me such
beautiful things, and to-night I have been talking about that
disgraceful old man and his goings on.' 'I don't know,' answered Darnell, dreamily. 'On the walls of that great
church upon the hill I saw all kinds of strange grinning monsters,
carved in stone.' The misdemeanours of Mr. Robert Nixon brought in their train
consequences strange beyond imagination. It was not that they continued
to develop on the somewhat fantastic lines of these first adventures
which Mrs. Darnell had related; indeed, when 'Aunt Marian' came over to
Shepherd's Bush, one Sunday afternoon, Darnell wondered how he had had
the heart to laugh at the misfortunes of a broken-hearted woman. He had never seen his wife's aunt before, and he was strangely surprised
when Alice showed her into the garden where they were sitting on the
warm and misty Sunday in September.