Demon Lover

by Fortune , Dion

  Like all who deal with the hidden side of things, Lucas knew from experience the influence of the macrocosm which is our universe, upon the microcosm which is man, and he would not, if it could be avoided, embark upon an enterprise of such importance as the present if the stars were unpropitious.

  “True, a man can master his stars,” he would say, “but why should I swim against the current when, if I but wait a little while, the tide will be with me ?” So he noted the set of the heavenly tides and so ordered his course that they might aid and not oppose.

  What he found to-night was quite satisfactory. Neptune, the occult planet, was well aspected in his House of Fortune, reinforced by Mars, the fighter ; the only doubtful aspect was Venus, much afflicted, and in the House of Death.

  Lucas considered the chart carefully. “Ah, well,” he said finally, “one cannot have everything, and anyway, Venus is not a lady who has ever troubled me much.” With which he too went to bed.

  Veronica did not think that the Ashlotts would be stirring much before seven, but the hostel would be awake well before that time, for business girls have to rise early and be fed before they go to their work. She set her alarm for five o'clock, that would give her time to pack her scanty belongings into the two suit cases that constituted her luggage, and enable her to slip round to the hostel before anybody in this house was stirring. The superintendent had been uneasy at the time she had accepted the post, and would surely lend assistance, even if Veronica judiciously suppressed the incident of the collar and chain, which was likely to invalidate her whole story, prime horror though it was. The fact that Lucas had chased her downstairs and forcibly prevented her from leaving the house was quite sufficient.

  She fell into an uneasy doze, between sleeping and waking, but whenever unconsciousness stole over her she was snatched back by fear, and wide awake, every nerve tingling, every muscle taut, her whole soul stood upon the defensive.

  It seemed but a little while before grey stole into the sky, and as soon as it was light enough to see, she arose and packed. It was before six o'clock that she stole on tiptoe down the passage ; there was no Lucas on the settee this time, as she had almost expected to see him, and her progress was unbarred.

  She crept on and on with her heart in her mouth ; she knew the Ashlotts slept in the basement, but she was not sure where Lucas's room was. A pair of brown brogues outside a door on the lower landing informed her, and she went past hardly daring to breathe.

  The hall was filled with the stale odours of a shut-up house, but the great front door presented no difficulties, its bolts were never shot, a spring lock alone securing the house from intrusion, for Mrs. Ashlott's ‘ gentlemen ’ came and went at all hours of the twenty-four. It opened silently, but Veronica did not dare to risk the click of the lock should she shut it behind her. For a moment she paused on the broad step, was that strange chain going to tighten and strangle her ? Nothing happened, however, and in another moment she was speeding down the street—free !

  In five minutes she was round at the hostel; where the superintendent, clad in a wrapper but wide awake, viewed her with surprise mingled with disapproval.

  “What brings you here at this time in the morning ?” she demanded.

  Veronica was almost too breathless to reply, and the superintendent, seeing that trouble was afoot, drew her into the office out of the gaze of an inquisitive charwoman. There, she turned gimlet eyes upon the girl and awaited her explanation. The world is very ready with advice and warning to save the young and innocent from getting into difficulties, but once trouble has supervened it is a different matter, and the world begins to think how best it can avoid being involved.

  “There has been,” began Veronica awkwardly, “a little unpleasantness where I have been working. Mr. Lucas, the man I am working for…I think he forgot himself…we had a scuffle…I don't want to go back again. Can I stop here ? Is my cubicle still empty ?”

  “Your cubicle is not let yet,” said the superintendent somewhat ungraciously. “Yes, I suppose you can stop here if you want to, so long as there is no further trouble, but we don't want any unpleasantness here. I will send the porter round for your box. I thought at the time you were very ill-advised to take that post.”

  She paused, eyeing Veronica inquisitively ; all women have a nose for a romance, even of the sordid, kissed-typist kind that Veronica had implied in her half-confession. “What is Mr. Lucas like ? ” she inquired finally.

  “He is a very strange man,” began Veronica slowly, “the strangest I have ever met.” Memory called up a vision of Lucas before her eyes. Smooth olive skin, sharp-cut nose, thin lipped, firm of chin, with the uncanny greeny-brown eyes. What would he do when he found she had got away ? She paused, oblivious of the superintendent, arrested by the image that rose so vividly before her eyes. But horror of horrors—it was ceasing to be a memory-picture, it was becoming alive, actual, capable of action ! A thin brown hand was being stretched out towards her as it had been the night before, a voice (surely the superintendent must hear it ?) was saying : “There is a steel collar about your neck, you will not be able to breathe if you say any more. There is a steel chain attached to the collar, the end of it is in my hand, you will have to come back.” Jerk. Veronica took two stumbling steps towards the door. Another jerk at the chain, and she took two more.

  “Where are you going ?” demanded the superintendent, staring at her suspiciously.

  “I—I have changed my mind,” said Veronica, “I shall have to go back after all.”

  The superintendent snorted. “You need not come here again if you do,” she said; and shut the door in the girl's face.

  Veronica, on the doorstep, realized that her sole refuge was now closed to her, she was more in Lucas's hands than ever. She had lost her purse in the scuffle on the stairs, and it only contained a few shillings had she had it ; there was nothing for her to do, apart from the pressure of the steel chain, but to go back to the house in the square. So back she went.

  Mrs. Ashlott was cleaning the steps when she arrived, so she was spared the ordeal of ringing the bell.

  “Been for an early morning walk ? ” asked the good woman, a smile on her pleasant face. “I like to see young ladies who can get up early, so few can nowadays, not like when I was a girl. I will soon have your breakfast up, Miss, I expect you are hungry.”

  Veronica was too near tears to answer her ; she slipped past the bucket and crept upstairs. Lucas's shoes still stood upon the mat, likewise his shaving water. He was not one to earn Mrs. Ashlott's encomiums for early rising.

  Back in her room, Veronica flung herself on her bed and fell into a dead sleep, from which she was roused by the sounds of Mrs. Ashlott laying the table in the next room.

  Veronica ate her breakfast and reviewed the situation. She was absolutely penniless ; she had estranged the superintendent of the hostel by her inexplicable behaviour ; Lucas had her more completely in his hands than ever, had that been possible.

  That good man, singing lustily to the accompaniment of running bath-water, was feeling very well content with life ; and indeed he had no reason to be otherwise.

  Veronica, awaiting his pleasure at ten o'clock, was informed that she looked as if she had spent a night on the tiles, and had better go for a walk in Regent's Park and get freshened up.

  “On a lead, of course,” he added with a mischievous smile. “But if you are good, as I think you will be, you shall have a nice blue bow on your collar, and how would you like a bell ? Wouldn't you like a bell on your collar, Miss Mainwaring ?”

  Veronica beat a hasty retreat. One of the horrors of Lucas's personality was the pleasant way in which he did unspeakable things ; that, and his eyes—his eyes when the pupils contracted to pinpoints. Veronica had not had very much experience of life. For her, villains were villains and looked the part, and Lucas, though he was dark, which is one of the principal qualifications for villainship, did not look a villain. Neither did he behave like one, except at the me
lodramatic moment when he chased her downstairs, then indeed, he had acted according to the best Surrey-side tradition, but his subsequent nonchalance had almost annulled the impression. No, Lucas was not in the least malignant, but he just didn't care. Therein lies the key to much of the world's worst cruelty.

  CHAPTER SIX

  VERONICA RETURNED FROM HER WALK TO FIND a message from Lucas awaiting her ; she was to go and lie down and have a good sleep, as he would be needing her that evening and wanted her to be fresh. The second half of the message was quite sufficient to render the first half impossible. She went to her room, but not to sleep ; instead, she tossed backwards and forwards on her bed wondering what demands were about to be made upon her.

  Veronica was young in years, and young for her years. From the time she left school till the break-up of her home, she and her mother had lived in a little cottage in a Surrey village. The garden, the church, an occasional tea party with women who led lives as limited as their own, had not tended to broaden her outlook ; and until her mother's death had let cataclysm in upon their placid stagnation, the years had left Veronica as they had found her.

  Hers was naturally a sweet nature ; gentle, because she had never had need of anything but gentleness ; affectionate, because her mother and she, having no one but each other, had been compelled to make a little world for themselves. She had been trained in the Christian virtues, and had practised them as women in secluded backwaters can practise them, but she had had no training for life as it is lived beyond the confines of their quiet village. She had come into the world sweet and unspoiled as any daydreaming male could have wished, and the world had taken cruel advantage of her. She had not been able to hold her own in the give-and-take of the commercial college ; girls who had learnt the pressure of life and the struggle for existence from council school and rough home life readily ousted her from coveted seat in class and convenient locker in cloakroom ; and in the hostel she suffered inconvenience at the hands of her neighbours without the strident protest that is necessary to ensure a hearing.

  Now, in Lucas's hands she was equally helpless. She did not know what to do or where to turn ; she did not even know whether this was life as it was usually lived out in the workaday world, and that protest on her part would be laughed to scorn as ultra-refinement, as had so often happened before. She had gone for help to the superintendent of the hostel, and, to her surprise, found that she herself seemed in some mysterious way to be held responsible for Lucas's behaviour, as if her own character had undergone deterioration from the treatment which she had not been strong enough to resist, and from which she desired nothing so much as to escape. The superintendent had, by some alchemy of the mind, been made the recipient of the obedience and confidence that the mother had previously received ; and, though ready enough to accept the obedience which had made Veronica an amenable exception among her undisciplined room-mates, she was not prepared to repay the confidence of another woman's child. Why should she ? She, too, had to live, and one has troubles enough of one's own without taking on other people's.

  After her rebuff by the superintendent, Veronica's resources were exhausted. It did not occur to her to appeal to her class mates, for she had never made friends among them, and had gained herself a reputation for ‘ standoffishness/ yet, had she done so, they would have rallied round her like little fighting-cats for defence against their common enemy, the employer, and especially the male employer who had tried to take advantage of a girl's helplessness ; the rough and ready homes would have stood open to her, and male relations to the third and fourth generation would have been invoked for her assistance, only too pleased for a chance of attack from so good a vantage point. But Veronica did not know this. She had never been taught to weigh the words distorted by an accent, and Brummagem jewellery could still hide from her perception the qualities of pluck and generosity. Most defenceless of all creatures, a lady torn from her environment, she faced the world alone. Helplessly conscious of her pennilessness, not knowing where to turn for help or to whom to go for advice, with no one to enquire what became of her or whither she went—Lucas could not have had a better tool for his purpose. Plucky, but purposeless, quick-brained, but inexperienced, the end was a foregone conclusion; Veronica, theoretically the ideal young English girl, would go under.

  So she fretted upstairs in her blue and white bedroom—the room that had looked so pleasant after the hostel cubicle, and that now seemed like a den where animals were kept before they are slaughtered. She had not seen much of life, and still less of men, but her quick intuitions enabled her to read Lucas pretty accurately. His care for her was the care of the butcher for the beast he is fattening ; his kindliness meant nothing, Lucas had no feelings ; she would have thrown herself on the mercy of the nearest policeman, but a strange inhibition had been planted in her own inner nature. Lucas horrified her, but at the same time fascinated her. She knew nothing of the psychology of suggestion, or the subtle reactions that sex makes under hypnosis ; these things are not put in the text-books ; all she knew was that Lucas's power over her had an element of fascination about it that she could not explain even to herself.

  As the time drew near for her to face Lucas, she changed her tumbled jumper and skirt for a little grey frock, a frock that had not seen the light of day since the last tea party under the tree in that Surrey garden. Wavy brown hair was brushed and bound with a ribbon, and though her eyes were heavy because she had cried, she was a very different girl to the thin and haggard creature who had first come to the house.

  At nine o'clock Lucas sent Ashlott up to fetch her, and with her heart beating uncomfortably in her throat, she followed him down the thickly-carpeted stairs to the room, half office, half study, where Lucas spent his days. There she found him, smoking an after-dinner pipe, which he waved cheerfully at her on her entry. He was very wide awake and well pleased with life ; Veronica had already observed that he always seemed to wake up towards evening, but to-night he seemed extra wide awake. Silently she took the seat he assigned to her in an enormous arm-chair which completely engulfed her small person, and looked up at Lucas as he stoòd before her, nursing his pipe and studying her quizzically.

  “Have you been a good child and had your sleep ?” he demanded.

  Veronica, in a very small voice, replied that she had.

  “That's right. I have told Ashlott that we are not to be disturbed, but we may as well lock the door. No, you needn't look at me like that, I am not going to murder you, but if anyone wakes you up suddenly when you are in a trance it gives you a nasty shock.”

  He walked across the room and turned the key, then knocked the ashes out of his pipe and put it away. Veronica, motionless, as if bound to her chair, watched every movement he made with that eerie fascination he always had for her. His quick, silent step, his alert yet graceful carriage, were unlike those of any man she had ever seen before. Lucas was so very much alive that he made every other being seem devitalized, flat, and stale. The green eyes with their strange gleams, the slender student's hands with their long brown fingers, the crow-black hair that he rubbed up on end when he was puzzled, the neat, thin-lipped mouth that always seemed to be enjoying some quiet joke at her expense in which the eyes never joined—all these gave the girl an intense and vivid sense of the man's personality. Lucas, if it had not been for his eyes, would have given the impression of being a pleasant enough fellow, but there was something wrong with the eyes ; it was not the brooding, in-looking gaze that characterizes the eyes of men trained in occult meditation, it was a kind of detachment, as if he did not belong to the order of beings that makes up our pleasant human world ; from another planet, or another evolution Lucas had come, and he had no ties with us or our kind ; our little affairs were nothing to him. Whence he had come, thither he would return, bearing with him such loot as he could gather from our race, and he had no intention of making Persephone's mistake and eating the pomegranate seeds, such as had bound her to her dark lover. Therefore, it was that V
eronica, watching him, knew that she was dealing with something that was not quite human, and that appeals for human mercy would have no meaning for him.

  Lucas fidgeted about the room, apparently waiting for the sunset, Veronica's eyes following him. Then as the last light died, he came over to Veronica. He dropped on one knee in front of her, bringing his keen dark face on a level with hers.

  “Look straight into my eyes, Miss Mainwaring,” he said.

  Veronica, horrified but fascinated, looked as bidden, and saw that the pupils were pulsating with a strange inner light, as if Lucas's skull contained, not brains, but a blazing fire that shone out through the lens of the eyeballs. Once she had met those eyes, she was powerless to withdraw her own. The blaze grew brighter and brighter, the man's face disappeared, and she was gazing straight into the furnace of which his form was but the screen. She seemed to be passing through the flames into that which lay beyond. Then, suddenly, the ground went from under her feet, and she plunged downwards into illimitable blue-blackness ; out between the planets she seemed to fall into stellar space. Then the curve of her course turned upwards as a diver returns to the surface, the blue grew lighter, it was the pale sapphire that precedes the sunrise. Back she came through rosy dawn clouds, and woke up in her chair.