In a very few
days the family had all settled down, and every one, with the
exception of the Captain, had had a bath, but no matter how many and
how bitter were his wife's complaints, try how he would, he could
not, he positively _could_ not, bring himself to wash in the
bathroom--_alone_. It was all right so long as the door was open, but
his wife resolutely refused to allow him to keep it open, and the
moment it was shut his abject terror returned--a terror produced by
nothing that he could in any way analyse or define. At last, ashamed
of his cowardice, he screwed up courage, and, with a look of
determined desperation in his eyes and mouth--an expression which
sent his wife into fits of laughter--set out one night from his
bedroom, candle in hand, and entered the bathroom. Shutting and
locking the door, he lighted another candle, and, after placing them
both on the mantelshelf, turned on the bath water, and began to
undress. "I may as well have a peep in the cupboard," he said, "just to satisfy
myself no one is hiding there--for every one in the house knows how I
hate this beastly bathroom--with the intention of playing me a
practical joke. Supposing one of the maids--Polly, for example, I'm
sure she'd be quite capable--took it into her pretty head to"--but
here the Captain was obliged to stop; he really was not equal to
facing, even in his mind's eye, the situation such a supposition
involved, and at the bare idea of such a thing his countenance assumed
a deeper hue, and--I am loth to admit--an amused grin. The grin,
however, died out as he cautiously opened the door and peered
furtively in; no one--nothing was there! With a breath of relief he
closed the door again, placed a chair against it, and, sitting down,
proceeded to pull off his clothes. Coat, vest, under-garments, he
placed them all tenderly in an untidy heap on the floor, and then,
with a last lingering, affectionate look at them, walked sedately
towards the bath. But this sedateness was only momentary. The first
few steps he walked, but, a noise in the grate startling him, he
suddenly assumed an air of the greatest gaiety, and, bowing with mock
gallantry to his trousers, he now waltzed coquettishly to the bath. It
was grim, horribly grim, and horribly hot too, for, when he felt the
temperature with one of his squat, podgy toes, it made him swear quite
involuntarily. Turning on the cold water, and slapping his thighs
playfully, he felt again. Too hot yet, far too hot even for him! He
loved heat. More cold! and he was hoisting one chubby leg to feel
again, when, a repetition of the noise in the grate making him swing
round, he lost his balance, and descended on the floor with a hard, a
very hard, bump. For some seconds he lay still, too sulky and
aggrieved even to get up, but, the draught from under the ill-fitting
door tickling his bare flesh in the most immodest fashion, he roused
himself from this lethargy, and was about to raise himself from the
floor, when the lights went out--went out without a moment's warning,
and he found himself engulfed in the most funereal darkness. To say he
was startled is to put it very mildly--he was absolutely
terror-stricken--far too terror-stricken to think of moving now, and
least of all of getting up and groping for the matches. Indeed, when
he came to think of it, he had not seen any matches in the room, and
he had not brought any with him, his wife had flurried him so much. The moment the candles were extinguished the grimness sensibly
increased, and he could feel all around him, thickly amalgamated with
the ether, a superphysical presence, at once hostile and horrible. Then, to bring his terror to a climax, there issued from the bath a
loud rubbing and splashing, as if some one, some very heavy person,
was vigorously washing. The water rose and fell, squished and bubbled
as it does when one is lying at full length in it, raising and
lowering oneself, kicking and plunging first on one side and then on
the other. Whilst, to add to the realism, Captain Smythe distinctly
heard gasping and puffing; and the soft, greasy sound of a well-soaped
flannel. He could indeed follow every movement of the occupant of the
bath as graphically as if he had seen him--from the brisk scrubbing of
body and legs to the finicky process of cleaning the ears and toes. It was whilst the bather was occupied thus that the cupboard door
began to open very quietly and stealthily, and Captain de Smythe heard
the chair he had so carefully placed against it being gradually
propelled across the floor. Then something, he would have given anything to tell what, came out
and began to steal towards him. He tried to crawl out of its way, but
could not; his limbs no longer acted conjointly with his brain, and
when he opened his mouth to shout at it, his voice withered away in
his throat. It came up to him, and directly it touched his naked skin
he knew it was a woman--a woman with a much-beflounced silk skirt and
silk petticoats--a woman whose person was perfumed with violets (a
scent for which the Captain had a particular weakness), and without
doubt, loaded with jewellery. Her behaviour did not betray any
symptoms of embarrassment when she encountered the Captain lying on
the floor, but, planting one icy-cold high-heeled shoe on his chest
and the other on his cheek, she stepped on him as if he had been an
orthodox cushion or footstool, purposely placed there for her
convenience. A hollow exclamation, which died away in a gasp, issued
from the bath, as the woman, with a swift movement of her arms, threw
something over it. What followed, the Captain could only surmise, but
from the muttered imprecations and splashes in the water, it seemed to
him that nothing short of murder was taking place. After a while the
noises in the bath grew feebler and feebler, and when they finally
ceased, the woman, with a sigh of relief, shook the water from her
arms, and, stepping off the Captain, moved towards the fireplace. The
spell which had, up to the present, enthralled the unfortunate
Captain, was now broken, and, thinking that his ghostly visitor had
betaken herself right away, he sat up. He had hardly done so before
the darkness was rudely dissipated, and, to his horror, he saw
looking at him, from a distance of only a few feet, a white, luminous
face, presumably that of a woman. But what a woman! What a
devil!--what a match for the most lurid of any of Satan's male
retainers. Yet she was not without beauty--beauty of the richest
sensual order; beauty that, had it been flesh and blood, would have
sent men mad. Her hair, jet black, wavy, and parted in the centre, was
looped over her shell-like ears, which were set unusually low and far
back on her head; her nose was of that rare and matchless shape termed
Grecian; and her mouth--in form, a triumph of all things heavenly, in
expression, a triumph of all things hellish.