Ursula Brangwyn continued in the same drowsy, dazed condition throughout the evening, and could not be persuaded to eat. Brangwyn sent Murchison off to bed early.
‘Get some sleep while you can,’ he said, ‘we may have trouble before morning.’
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Ever heard of telepathy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, Fouldes and Astley may try to come through to Ursula telepathically, and there will be the devil to pay if they do. That is when I shall want you to lend me a hand.’
Murchison acquiesced, though it seemed odd to him that Brangwyn could not hold his sister down single-handed.
To go to bed was one thing, but to go to sleep after all the happenings of the day proved to be quite another matter, and Murchison lay awake and smoked cigarette after cigarette.
The business in which he had become involved was a decidedly odd one, and it was only his complete trust in his employer which made him willing to lend himself to it. Brangwyn had struck the right note when he had asked Murchison if he trusted him. To Murchison he represented the ideal of perfect manhood, developed and balanced in all its parts. He could imagine no higher aim than to be like Brangwyn. Just as he had worshipped him as a boy, so he respected him as a man. He congratulated himself on his extraordinary luck in having such a man as Brangwyn to work under. This business with Miss Brangwyn was a queer one. He did not pretend to understand it.
He saw that it was something a good deal more than the shock of a broken engagement, as he had at first supposed. He had a shrewd suspicion that Brangwyn had not put quite all the cards on the table. Especially with regard to the part for which he himself was cast in the transaction, but that was hardly to be expected. Several points in the narrative had struck him as odd. It is not usually considered a desirable thing for an employee to get into sympathetic rapport with his employer's womenfolk, and he wondered that that aspect of the thing had not struck Brangwyn, who was quite as much a man of the world as a student of strange sciences. He wondered whether he was designed for the role of sucked orange while Miss Brangwyn swelled up like a bull frog in her turn, and judged that his five pounds a week would be dearly earned if he were. He also wondered what would happen when the time came to sever the rapport, which he judged as being used as a temporary scaffolding during the rebuilding of Ursula Brangwyn. He felt that he would be wise to look out for himself, and not get too deeply involved in the business.
Finally he came to the end of his cigarettes, and reluctantly turned out the light and settled down to sleep.
It seemed to him that he had hardly turned over when he was aroused by the ringing of the telephone bell in the next room. He leaped out of bed and answered it.
‘I'd be glad if you'd come down and lend me a hand,’ came Brangwyn's voice at the other end. ‘The expected has happened.’
The poverty-stricken Murchison did not own a dressing - gown, so he pulled on his old trench-coat over his shoulders, and, because his brogues would make an unholy clatter in the silence of the night, went down bare-footed. To his horror, the first person he encountered at the foot of the stairs was Miss Brangwyn, as wide awake as she had previously been drowsy.
She was in a dressing-gown of deep rose-pink silk, the same colour as her eiderdown, he remembered, and her hair hung in two long plaits down her back. Murchison had never seen a girl with long hair before in these cropped days, and it startled him. It made her seem so much more feminine. Brangwyn was fully dressed, and had apparently not been to bed.
‘We're going to have a bit of supper,’ said Brangwyn, ‘and we thought you might like to join us.’
‘Yes, rather,’ said Murchison, wondering what was afoot, and waiting for his cue. He saw a saucepan of milk warming on an electric hot-plate in the hearth, and bread broken up in a basin beside it. Evidently Miss Brangwyn was going to be fed.
‘Keep an eye on the milk, will you, Murchison?’ said Brangwyn, and disappeared into the dining-room.
The embarrassed Murchison, knowing that it was more than the milk that he was expected to keep an eye on, wrapped the trench-coat round him and strapped the belt securely. He saw Miss Brangwyn watching him.
‘I'm frightfully sorry you've been let in for all this,’ she said, and Murchison heaved a sigh of relief to find that she was in her right mind.
‘Don't you worry about that,’ he answered. ‘I'm only too glad to do anything I can.’
At that moment the milk came to the boil, and he hastily snatched it off the hot-plate. Slowly and clumsily he poured the milk on to the bread, his huge hands seeming far too big for anything they got hold of.
‘Won't you let me tuck you up on the sofa again?’ he said to the girl. ‘You'll get cold, wandering about the room like that.’
Meekly she lay down on the big chesterfield in front of the fire, and he put the rug over her. She was evidently not going to play him up, as she had been doing with her brother.
He was just reaching out his hand towards the bowl of bread and milk, to give it to her, when he felt a sudden cold draught of air stirring in the room, as though a door had opened somewhere, and at the same time there came upon his soul a sense of panic fear, as if in the presence of intense but intangible evil. He felt the short hairs on his neck beginning to rise.
‘My God, what's that,’ he exclaimed involuntarily.
He saw that Ursula Brangwyn was sitting upright on the sofa, looking about her with terrified eyes.
He recognized intuitively that the evil was of the same kind, only infinitely stronger, as the unpleasant personal magnetism that had radiated from Fouldes as he stood in the door of the railway carriage looking at Ursula. He remembered Brangwyn's words about a telepathic attack which was to be expected, and reckoned that this was it.
He reached out his hand to the girl.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We meet this standing up.’
She rose instantly from the couch and together they faced in the direction from which the force appeared to be emanating. The influence seemed to be coming in waves, with pulsations within the wave, dying down for a moment between them, and then coming up again with renewed vigour. Unconsciously Murchison had gripped the girl by her shoulders and turned her to face the force that was coming at them, and they stood thus, staring in the direction from which the invisible influence radiated, stiffening to each successive wave of force, like swimmers clinging to a half-tide rock. It was so tangible that it was difficult to believe that there was nothing physical about it.
Gradually the influence weakened, became uncertain, and then faded altogether; they relaxed their tenseness, and Ursula dropped down on the sofa. Murchison sat down beside her feet, and, without realizing what he did, took her hand in his, and they sat thus staring at each other without speaking.
‘You felt it, too?’ said the girl at length.
‘I should think I did! Good Lord, whatever was it?’
‘I think that it was Hugo Astley; telepathing, you know. It was much, much too strong for Frank.’
Whatever it was, it was damed unpleasant. Well, anyway, let's shove it behind us. The less you think about that sort of thing, the better. Eat your bread and milk and forget about it.’
‘I couldn't eat anything. I couldn't really.’
‘Now, come on you must just try. You'll be all right when you get started.’
He placed the small tray on her knees, and held it there, steadying it with his hand, and Ursula meekly began to eat her bread and milk. When Brangwyn returned he found them thus. The girl, with the loosened plaits of her dark hair straying over the soft folds of the rose-pink silk that fell across her breast. The man, with his thick fair hair standing up in every direction, his dirty old trench-coat girt about him over his pyjamas, and his bare, sinewy feet planted on the parquet. Ursula, he thought, looked slightly self-conscious, but Murchison was serenely fatherly, and reminded him of a St. Bernard with a kitten. He rose at his employer's entrance, but sat down again beside the girl's feet, and Brangwyn, who was watching closely, noticed that Ursula made no motion to draw them aside.
Brangwyn had a tray in his hands, and he and Murchison settled down to sandwiches and sherry, while Ursula finished her bread and milk. They chatted quietly of anything and everything but the recent disturbances, and Brangwyn observed that Ursula looked much more normal and Murchison seemed almost jolly, which was something decidedly new in his usually rather glum employee. Things were beginning to move, he concluded.
He was just thinking of suggesting a general return to their respective beds when he saw Murchison suddenly cock his ears, as it were, and stare into space over Ursula's head. The girl gazed at him, startled, for a moment, and then she, too, turned her head and looked in the same direction. Then Brangwyn also caught it, and felt the waves of evil influence come rolling in, banked and double-banked.
He was experienced in dealing with such things, and the waves divided and swept past him like the tide round a pier. But there was nothing he could do for the other two. This was not the time to give instructions that might be half-understood, and therefore muddled. It was best to leave Murchison to his unaided wits. The girl he could do nothing for. She had passed out of his reach on the tides of the force as if water had whirled her away. Her face had taken on the unnatural calmness of the face of the dead, all the moulding that gives character even to an unlined face being smoothed out; it was almost the face of an imbecile - utterly mindless. What possible chance was there that he - Murchison - or anyone - could reach her and touch her in that condition?
She rose slowly from the couch, Murchison staring helplessly at her. Brangwyn saw at once that the strong rapport that had been between them earlier in the evening had broken and that Ursula had gone from Murchison just as much as she had gone from him.
Murchison turned and looked at him helplessly, as if asking for instructions. But that was not what he wanted. He wanted Murchison to act from intuition. For there was only one thing to do with the girl, and if it were not done spontaneously, it was worth very little.
But Murchison, alas, would not do things on his own initiative in his employer's presence, thus forcing Brangwyn to take the lead. Brangwyn, feeling rather like Alice playing croquet with flamingoes for mallets, which turned and looked at her whenever she tried to hit a ball with them, started his secretary off with a push and hoped that Nature would do the rest.
‘Go after her,’ he said, ‘and see she does not bump into anything and hurt herself. She is sleep-walking.’
Obediently Murchison rose and set off after Ursula; but the girl's smooth, gliding walk was covering the ground faster than he had realized, and before he could reach her she had walked straight into one of the pillars supporting the gallery, the crack of her head on the sharp-edged wood resounding through the room. She recoiled dazed, her hand pressed to her bruised face and an expression of bewildered pain in her eyes, and Murchison, without realizing what he did, caught her in his arms, cursing himself for the inaptitude that had allowed this mishap to occur. She looked up into his face with the startled expression of a child waking from sleep on unfamiliar surroundings.
‘It's all right. It's all right,’ said Murchison, stroking her shoulder, oblivious of the silent watcher on the hearthrug. The girl gazed up at him dreamily out of her dilated eyes, her attention apparently distracted from what had previously held it with a hypnotic fascination; but gradually the other influence re-asserted itself, and she began to turn sideways in his arms and look over her shoulder; her hand clutched the folds of his trench coat in a convulsive grasp as she peered behind her, and she clung to him as if she had suddenly found herself on the edge of a precipice.
Murchison found himself staring in the same direction, but there was nothing to be seen. Ursula Brangwyn was looking into another dimension. The grandfather clock in the corner ticked and ticked as they stood thus, motionless, the silk and swansdown dressing-gown against the grimy khaki of the trench coat. Brangwyn began to wonder if the man also were succumbing to the influence of the hypnotic force that was being used so effectually on the girl.
Slowly Ursula began to disengage herself from his arms, and the spell was broken.
‘No, you don't!’ said Murchison, tightening his grip upon her. She began to struggle in a half-hearted fashion, and naturally made no impression on the big and powerful man, who held her gently enough, but without the slightest intention of letting her go. She looked up into his face with a surprised expression, as if inquiring what he were about.
‘You're not going,’ he said, smiling down at her.
She shuddered, and pressed closer to him, looking apprehensively over her shoulder. Then, all of a sudden, she shrieked and jumped as if red-hot iron had touched her, and began to struggle like a mad thing. Murchison hung on to her relentlessly, crushing her into immobility against him till she could do no more than quiver. Brangwyn watched them, never stirring, and saw a curious change come over the man's face, the change he had seen come as zero hour approached, and he got ready to take his men over the top. Murchison's eyes grew bleak and blue and wide in the inhuman glare of the berserker, and Brangwyn's imagination pictured a winged helmet on the shaggy fair hair. He wondered what was happening at the other end of the telepathic wire, and reckoned that something was coming over that had not been reckoned on. Murchison was in a towering rage, that was obvious; the blind, blazing eyes were seeing something pictured in the imagination, and a stream of rending, tearing hate, as destructive as dynamite, was being poured out on to it. If Fouldes and Astley were en rapport at the other end of the telepathic wire, they were getting it in the neck. Brangwyn wondered how his sister was faring in the midst of this furious strafe. Murchison, oblivious of everything save the vision before his mind's eye, appeared to be squashing her absolutely flat.
Then suddenly, a change came over the atmosphere of the room. The strange, evil power that had been pouring in as steadily as waves beating into a bay, broke and starred like a smashed mirror, running in every direction like spilled quicksilver, and in another moment the room was empty.
‘Phew!’ said Brangwyn, relaxing with a sigh of relief. He saw Murchison let go of Ursula and stare at her as if he had never seen her before. Ursula was panting, evidently having had all the breath squeezed out of her. They both looked perfectly normal, and very surprised and self-conscious, and with one accord they turned and gazed at him apprehensively. He, for his part, would have liked to have embraced and blessed the pair of them. The operation was going according to plan.
Ursula, recovering her self-possession first, as females usually do, turned and led the way back to the fireside, Murchison following.
‘Well,’ said Brangwyn, breaking the embarrassing silence, ‘so that's that.’
‘Yes,’ replied Murchison, dropping into a chair as if exhausted. ‘That is very much that.’
Ursula Brangwyn stared at him without speaking, a strange expression on her face, as if she had suddenly perceived all manner of unsuspected potentialities.