The
owner of the land had pulled this down, and erected for himself a house
on the same site out of these materials, keeping, in a very ecstasy of
wickedness, the altar, and on this he dined and played dice afterwards. But as he grew old some black melancholy seized him, and he would have
lights burning there all night, for he had deadly fear of the darkness. On one winter evening there sprang up such a gale as was never before
known, which broke in the windows of the room where he had supped, and
extinguished the lamps. Yells of terror brought in his servants, who
found him lying on the floor with the blood streaming from his throat. As they entered some huge black shadow seemed to move away from him,
crawled across the floor and up the wall and out of the broken window. “There he lay a-dying,” said the last of my informants, “and him
that had been a great burly man was withered to a bag o’ skin, for
the critter had drained all the blood from him. His last breath was
a scream, and he hollered out the same words as parson read off the
screen.”

“_Negotium perambulans in tenebris_,” I suggested eagerly. “Thereabouts. Latin anyhow.”

“And after that?” I asked. “Nobody would go near the place, and the old house rotted and fell in
ruins till three years ago, when along comes Mr. Dooliss from Penzance,
and built the half of it up again. But he don’t care much about such
critters, nor about Latin neither. He takes his bottle of whisky a
day and gets drunk’s a lord in the evening. Eh, I’m gwine home to my
dinner.”

Whatever the authenticity of the legend, I had certainly heard the
truth about Mr. Dooliss from Penzance, who from that day became
an object of keen curiosity on my part, the more so because the
quarry-house adjoined my uncle’s garden. The Thing that walked in
the dark failed to stir my imagination, and already I was so used to
sleeping alone in my shelter that the night had no terrors for me. But
it would be intensely exciting to wake at some timeless hour and hear
Mr. Dooliss yelling, and conjecture that the Thing had got him. But by degrees the whole story faded from my mind, overscored by
the more vivid interests of the day, and, for the last two years of
my out-door life in the vicarage garden, I seldom thought about Mr.
Dooliss and the possible fate that might await him for his temerity in
living in the place where that Thing of darkness had done business. Occasionally I saw him over the garden fence, a great yellow lump of
a man, with slow and staggering gait, but never did I set eyes on him
outside his gate, either in the village street or down on the beach. He interfered with none, and no one interfered with him. If he wanted
to run the risk of being the prey of the legendary nocturnal monster,
or quietly drink himself to death, it was his affair. My uncle, so I
gathered, had made several attempts to see him when first he came to
live at Polearn, but Mr. Dooliss appeared to have no use for parsons,
but said he was not at home and never returned the call. *       *       *       *       *

After three years of sun, wind, and rain, I had completely outgrown
my early symptoms and had become a tough, strapping youngster of
thirteen. I was sent to Eton and Cambridge, and in due course ate my
dinners and became a barrister. In twenty years from that time I was
earning a yearly income of five figures, and had already laid by in
sound securities a sum that brought me dividends which would, for
one of my simple tastes and frugal habits, supply me with all the
material comforts I needed on this side of the grave. The great prizes
of my profession were already within my reach, but I had no ambition
beckoning me on, nor did I want a wife and children, being, I must
suppose, a natural celibate. In fact there was only one ambition which
through these busy years had held the lure of blue and far-off hills to
me, and that was to get back to Polearn, and live once more isolated
from the world with the sea and the gorse-clad hills for play-fellows,
and the secrets that lurked there for exploration. The spell of it had
been woven about my heart, and I can truly say that there had hardly
passed a day in all those years in which the thought of it and the
desire for it had been wholly absent from my mind. Though I had been in
frequent communication with my uncle there during his lifetime, and,
after his death, with his widow who still lived there, I had never
been back to it since I embarked on my profession, for I knew that if
I went there, it would be a wrench beyond my power to tear myself away
again. But I had made up my mind that when once I had provided for my
own independence, I would go back there not to leave it again. And yet
I did leave it again, and now nothing in the world would induce me to
turn down the lane from the road that leads from Penzance to the Land’s
End, and see the sides of the combe rise steep above the roofs of the
village and hear the gulls chiding as they fish in the bay. One of the
things invisible, of the dark powers, leaped into light, and I saw it
with my eyes. The house where I had spent those three years of boyhood had been left
for life to my aunt, and when I made known to her my intention of
coming back to Polearn, she suggested that, till I found a suitable
house or found her proposal unsuitable, I should come to live with her. “The house is too big for a lone old woman,” she wrote, “and I have
often thought of quitting and taking a little cottage sufficient for me
and my requirements. But come and share it, my dear, and if you find
me troublesome, you or I can go. You may want solitude--most people in
Polearn do--and will leave me. Or else I will leave you: one of the
main reasons of my stopping here all these years was a feeling that I
must not let the old house starve. Houses starve, you know, if they
are not lived in. They die a lingering death; the spirit in them grows
weaker and weaker, and at last fades out of them. Isn’t this nonsense
to your London notions?...”

Naturally I accepted with warmth this tentative arrangement, and on an
evening in June found myself at the head of the lane leading down to
Polearn, and once more I descended into the steep valley between the
hills. Time had stood still apparently for the combe, the dilapidated
signpost (or its successor) pointed a rickety finger down the lane,
and a few hundred yards farther on was the white box for the exchange
of letters. Point after remembered point met my eye, and what I saw
was not shrunk, as is often the case with the revisited scenes of
childhood, into a smaller scale. There stood the post-office, and there
the church and close beside it the vicarage, and beyond, the tall
shrubberies which separated the house for which I was bound from the
road, and beyond that again the grey roofs of the quarry-house damp and
shining with the moist evening wind from the sea. All was exactly as I
remembered it, and, above all, that sense of seclusion and isolation.