Her mother was also anxiously watching her.
There was no answer. The girl sat like a statue. Mrs. Vandermeulen glanced at me in wild alarm, silently imploring my intervention. Old Vandermeulen and his son were hotly arguing the desirability or otherwise of informing Captain Higgins of their plans, and took no notice of us.
I got up from my seat and went round the table to the girl. I lifted up her lifelessly heavy arm with my fingers on her pulse. It was normal.
“Miss Vandermeulen!” I said, rather sharply. “Are you not well?”
She turned her head slowly round to me, like a sleep-walker faintly aware of some sound that does not, however, wake her, and stared me full in the face with eyes in which there was not the slightest glimmer of recognition.
“Pauline!” almost screamed her mother, “don’t you know your own name?”
An expression of curious intelligence dawned in her face--her aspect changed in some subtle manner, as though another, quite different, personality was emerging in her--she laughed in low, confident tones utterly unlike her ordinary laugh.
“My name is Lucia!” she said, as though stating a well-known fact.
Lucia! To say that we were startled is to understate our astonishment--we were dumbfounded. The first word of the cryptic message! We gazed at her for a moment as at a complete stranger from the clouds--and indeed she looked it, as she smiled at us with bright malicious eyes. The diffident Pauline we knew had completely disappeared.
“She is possessed!” screamed her mother. “Oh, God--restore her! restore her!”
The girl stood up suddenly from her chair, passed her hand over her eyes, shook herself as though shaking off sleep. She turned away from us deliberately.
“Oh, John!” she said, and there was an odd little foreign accent in her tone, “I have dreamed--such a strange dream! I dreamed--I know not!--that I was not Lucia!” She laughed softly in her new low tones, “--That strange people were asking me my name. Then I woke--oh, John!” she sidled up in a wheedling manner to what, so far as we could see, was vacant space. “I am Lucia, am I not?--And you love me? You love me?” Her shoulders moved sinuously as though she were putting herself under the caresses of a person invisible to us. “You love me--and I love you, although you have only that one terrible eye!” She still spoke with that curious foreign accent which lent a certain piquancy to her speech. “You love me, you John Dawson, you Englishman, you love me for ever, say?” She reminded me of Carmen sidling up to Don José. “You not deceive me--or----!” She looked up as into a tall man’s face with a sudden expression of feline vindictiveness, her white teeth showing in an ugly little rictus of the mouth, and slid her hand down stealthily toward her stocking. “But no!” She smiled; her hand came up again as though to rest upon a man’s shoulder. “You love me--and I love you--and,” her voice dropped, “when we have killed the others we go away with the treasure--you promise me, John Dawson?”