CHAPTER XVII

THE CIRCLE BREAKS

WHEN I told Pamela that her uncle had put an end for good and all to the rich man's persecution, she was pleased indeed.

"It was horrid, because it made me feel so horrid," she said. "It was good of uncle to take the trouble."

Truly, she had learned to expect little of Woodfell.

But the affair seemed to have brought about a change in his attitude to her, awakening his sense of responsibility.

A few days later she said, "Uncle is growing quite nice to me—he is hardly grumpy at all."

A week later she came to dine with me, very joyful.

"Uncle is going to make me an allowance—twenty pounds a year—think of that!" she cried.

"I think it's quite time that he did," I said. "But I congratulate you all the same."

"It begins on the 30th June," she said.

"The time has also come for you to buy summer frocks. There is no use putting off one's winter wear, though one may modify it, before the middle of June. To-morrow we will go shopping."

She protested; she wished to wait till her quarter's allowance came in. But I would not hear of it; and shopping we went. It was very pleasant; and when the frocks were finished, light and flimsy frocks, Pamela was more than ever a delight to the eye.

A week before the full moon I saw the rich man again; he came in the evening to visit Woodfell. His face had lost its haggardness, and was filling out; it would soon be plump again. But he had lost much of the assured air which comes of great wealth. He walked more humbly. Woodfell had put fear into him; and it had chastened him. On three evenings I saw Helen Ranger come to No. 19.

I made a half-hearted effort to dissuade Pamela from watching the celebration of the rites with me; but I did not hold out long against her pleading. I had a half-thought that if, by the addition of the feminine element to the rites from which Woodfell expected so mnuch, they did get the ultimate revelation, Pamela ought to be present.

On the night of the full moon, half an hour after Woodfell had locked her in her room, I helped her over the partition wall and through the window of my front room. I saw no need to watch the arrival of the celebrants; and we went into the dining-room that we might talk at our ease, with no fear of their hearing her voice as they came past the house and along the path to the door of No. 19.

At half-past eleven we went upstairs to the back room. I sat on a chair by the window and took Pamela on my knee; she put her arm round my neck; and talking softly, we waited for the moon to reach the Zenith.

At last the door into the garden of No. 19 opened; the celebrants came out. They were all in the garden when a woman's laugh low and excited, rose to our ears. It was the laugh of Helen Ranger.

"The priestess of Ashtaroth," I whispered.

I saw that Helen Ranger, like the others wore a robe and the horned headdress. The roaring of the bull-roarer broke throbbing on the still air; and they filed down the garden to the lawn.

The ritual had hardly begun when I observed a change in it. The first, formal part was no longer performed in the earlier mechanical fashion; there was a new earnestness, a solemnity in it. Woodfell's voice was louder, clearer, and graver in the opening invocation; the responses were louder and more earnest; there was a new, keener expectancy in the voices of the celebrants.

Pamela observed it too, for presently she whispered, "They're much more earnest to-night."

In due order came the celebration of the rite of each of the seven gods of the Abyss and the sacrifices to each. I had expected that by now, the third time of watching them, I should be more used to them and less affected. It was not so; my tingling nerves grew tenser and tenser, as the fierce note in the voices of the celebrants grew fiercer; and every time the full volume of their full-throated responses surged up to us, I felt Pamela quiver in every limb and heard her short, gasping sigh.

The seventh rite of the gods of the Abyss was performed; then came the rite of the goddess. The priestess of Ashtaroth stood before the altar; and her clear, bell-like voice rose, adjuring, in a strange tongue. She had thrown off her robe, and was wearing a short tunic. Now and again, when she moved in some symbolic gesture, a shaft of moonlight, falling through the tops of the sycamores, struck her bare limbs. The priests of the gods roared their responses in a furious enthusiasm. At the end of the rite she danced a slow, symbolic dance, chanting.

There was an extraordinary, solemn, compelling tone in her voice as she chanted. It seemed to string up my nerves to the last tenseness; and Pamela clung to me, hardly breathing. Never had Ashtaroth such a priestess.

The chant ceased; and it seemed to leave all the world quivering. The bleat of the sacrificed lamb broke the silence; and the veiling clouds of incense rolled over the lawn.

Out of the clouds rose a clear, piercing cry, "Ashtaroth! Ashtaroth! Ashtaroth!"

The world hung poised on the dying note; and then came the outburst of the final, frenzied adjuration, each man yelling to his god. I rose from my chair and, with Pamela gripped to me, leaned out of the window with straining eyes. In the midst of the tumultuous uproar a sudden bright light shone out as if the fire on the altar had blazed up; and it thinned the veil.

There came a shrill scream of terror, a man's scream; terrified outcries echoed it; four howling, jostling figures, with a fifth on their heels, raced down the garden, and bolted into the house.

The bright light died down swiftly, as if the fire had been snuffed out; and there was only a gray cloud of incense eddying slowly in the moonlight.

I gasped; and Woodfell's voice rose loud and hoarse in furious, incoherent imprecations, then grew clear, crying, "The swine—the cowardly swine! They've spoilt it! They've spoilt it! May they rot on earth and shrivel in hell!"

Three figures came staggering out of the cloud and stopped at the end of the path.

"It moved! I saw it move! And its eyes were open, black eyes! What a shame to run away," cried Helen Ranger in a quick, excited voice.

"Confound the cowardly fools!" growled Marks. "We were on the verge—the very verge—at last."

His deep voice quavered as though he had been badly shaken.

"Yes; we were on the verge of something new, something big," said Woodfell in a quieter but still savage voice. "It might have convinced even you, Marks."

"It's the most—the most disturbing thing I have ever seen," said Marks. "I was not looking for that—none of us were. It wasn't a mere trick of the mind. No one of us suggested it to the rest."

"You'll probably persuade yourself by to-morrow that it might have been a trick of the mind," said Woodfell savagely.

"But it couldn 't have been. I saw it," broke in Helen Ranger.

"Well, where we have been we can go again," said Woodfell, leading the way down to the garden. "I believe myself that we took the last step and saw the ultimate veil beginning to lift; and then those swine—those cowardly swine! Another month's waiting. Well, never mind, I've found out that I was right; we did need the feminine element. To think that I've been all this time guessing it. The woman is the key of the ultimate lock."

They passed into the house.

I eased my grip on Pamela.

"What a pity it was spoiled!" she cried. "That time it was going to happen; and we should have known."

"What?" said I.

"Wonderful things. All there is to know. I felt it," she said softly.