Free Dorothy Eden by Eerie Nights in London

she could hear the soft footsteps, the stealthy swish of a silk dress at the door.
    “Red roses were her favourite flowers,” Arabia continued dreamily. She almost always wore them. I put some in her hands at the end…”
    “There’s someone at the door!” Cressida cried nervously.
    Arabia started up. “I didn’t hear anything. Go and see who it is.”
    Cressida went quickly, but she knew almost at once that there would be no one there. Nor was there, except round the curve of the stairs, Dawson blundering up on his too-large feet carrying a basket of vegetables. He gave his sideways look at her.
    “I’ve brought the shopping up,” he said humbly.
    Arabia called impatiently, “Put it in the kitchen, boy. I can’t stop to talk to you tonight. I have a guest.”
    Dawson obediently disappeared into the kitchen, and then clattered off downstairs.
    Arabia sighed. “That was a mistake I made,” she confessed, “letting that dreary little woman and her son come here. I like amusing people. But she caught me at a time when I was feeling soft-hearted. She has this bad throat, and she’s a widow. The boy’s brilliant, they say. Well he may be, with those looks. One has to have some compensations. Come and sit down again, dear. What were we saying before Dawson interrupted us?”
    “About the red roses,” Cressida said. Suddenly she couldn’t sit down again. She wandered about, taut and restless.
    “Yes,” Arabia murmured. “People to amuse me, or people to love me. That is what I expect out of life.”
    “Arabia, where is Lucy’s grave?”
    The question fell into a suddenly still room.
    Then Arabia said in a harsh voice with which she had spoken to Dawson, “Why do you ask that?”
    “Because I’d like to go and see it.” Cressida regretted her question. She had not expected it to distress Arabia so much. Did the old lady, with her make-believe of the room waiting for an occupant, shut out of her mind the fact that there was a grave?
    Arabia suddenly began to pace up and down the room, wringing her hands. With her long brocade dress, slightly tarnished and a little grubby, and the rakish tiara, she looked like a slightly tipsy Lady Macbeth. But Lady Macbeth suggested guilt—it could not be guilt that made Arabia wring her hands and turned her face gaunt and ugly.
    “You shouldn’t have asked that question,” she said at last, harshly. “It distresses me too much. You see, I could not bear to think of Lucy buried. So sweet and young. In the cold earth. Oh, no! So I had her cremated, and her ashes”—Arabia gave a harsh deep sob—“flung on the four winds. Her room upstairs, fresh with flowers—”
    “Is really her grave,” Cressida whispered.
    Arabia flung around. “Do not use that word, child! I cannot endure it. Oh, dear, why have we got so melancholy. Ahmed! Come here! Amuse me!” With a swift movement, she seized the sleeping parrot and flung it on to the cage of the stuffed one.
    Ahmed immediately responded by squawking loudly and attacking the thin bars of the cage. Arabia, laughing now, urged him on.
    “Go on! Get him! Wring his scruffy neck! Toss him on the floor! Get your claws into him!”
    The pandemonium went on for several minutes. Ahmed biting at the cage bars with his vicious beak, giving his deafening squawks, and Arabia flapping her hands and shrieking with laughter. Then all at once Ahmed clambered on to the top of the cage, and subsided into his ruffled feathers. Arabia sighed deeply and straightened her tiara which had threatened to come completely adrift.
    “That was amusing,” she said to Cressida, with her brilliant illuminating smile. “I adore noise. It reminds one that one is alive. It’s wonderful to be alive, isn’t it?”
    “I—I think I must go now,” Cressida said.
    “Oh, must you, my dear? I suppose you’re tired after your long day. Thank you for an enchanting evening.” She took Cressida’s hand in her own and began stroking it lightly. “You must