In the history of the
world, no doubt, it has been common enough, alas, but fortunately today
there can be but few who know it, or would recognize it even when heard. The bones shot back into my body the same instant, but red-hot and
burning; the brief instant of irresolution passed; I was torn between
the desire to break down the door and enter, and to run--run for my life
from a thing I dared not face. Out of the horrid tumult, then, I adopted neither course. Without
reflection, certainly without analysis of what was best to do for my
sister, myself or Mabel, I took up my action where it had been
interrupted. I turned from the awful door and moved slowly towards the
head of the stairs. But that dreadful little sound came with me. I believe my own teeth
chattered. It seemed all over the house--in the empty halls that opened
into the long passages towards the music-room, and even in the grounds
outside the building. From the lawns and barren garden, from the ugly
terraces themselves, it rose into the night, and behind it came a
curious driving sound, incomplete, unfinished, as of wailing for
deliverance, the wailing of desperate souls in anguish, the dull and dry
beseeching of hopeless spirits in prison. That I could have taken the little sound from the bedroom where I
actually heard it, and spread it thus over the entire house and grounds,
is evidence, perhaps, of the state my nerves were in. The wailing assuredly was in my mind alone. But the longer I hesitated,
the more difficult became my task, and, gathering up my dressing gown,
lest I should trip in the darkness, I passed slowly down the staircase
into the hail below. I carried neither candle nor matches; every switch
in room and corridor was known to me. The covering of darkness was
indeed rather comforting than otherwise, for if it prevented seeing, it
also prevented being seen. The heavy pistol, knocking against my thigh
as I moved, made me feel I was carrying a child's toy, foolishly. I
experienced in every nerve that primitive vast dread which is the Thrill
of darkness. Merely the child in me was comforted by that pistol. The night was not entirely black; the iron bars across the glass front
door were visible, and, equally, I discerned the big, stiff wooden
chairs in the hall, the gaping fireplace, the upright pillars supporting
the staircase, the round table in the center with its books and
flower-vases, and the basket that held visitors' cards. There, too, was
the stick and umbrella stand and the shelf with railway guides,
directory, and telegraph forms. Clocks ticked everywhere with sounds
like quiet footfalls. Light fell here and there in patches from the
floor above. I stood a moment in the hall, letting my eyes grow more
accustomed to the gloom, while deciding on a plan of search. I made out
the ivy trailing outside over one of the big windows ... and then the
tall clock by the front door made a grating noise deep down inside its
body--it was the Presentation clock, large and hideous, given by the
congregation of his church--and, dreading the booming strike it seemed
to threaten, I made a quick decision. If others beside myself were about
in the night, the sound of that striking might cover their approach. So I tiptoed to the right, where the passage led towards the dining
room. In the other direction were the morning- and drawing rooms, both
little used, and various other rooms beyond that had been his, generally
now kept locked. I thought of my sister, waiting upstairs with that
frightened woman for my return. I went quickly, yet stealthily. And, to my surprise, the door of the dining room was open. It had been
opened. I paused on the threshold, staring about me. I think I fully
expected to see a figure blocked in the shadows against the heavy
sideboard, or looming on the other side beneath his portrait. But the
room was empty; I felt it empty. Through the wide bow-windows that gave
on to the verandah came an uncertain glimmer that even shone reflected
in the polished surface of the dinner-table, and again I perceived the
stiff outline of chairs, waiting tenantless all round it, two larger
ones with high carved backs at either end. The monkey trees on the upper
terrace, too, were visible outside against the sky, and the solemn
crests of the wellingtonias on the terraces below. The enormous clock on
the mantelpiece ticked very slowly, as though its machinery were running
down, and I made out the pale round patch that was its face. Resisting
my first inclination to turn the lights up--my hand had gone so far as
to finger the friendly knob--I crossed the room so carefully that no
single board creaked, nor a single chair, as I rested a hand upon its
back, moved on the parquet flooring. I turned neither to the right nor
left, nor did I once look back. I went towards the long corridor filled with priceless _objets d'art_,
that led through various antechambers into the spacious music-room, and
only at the mouth of this corridor did I next halt a moment in
uncertainty. For this long corridor, lit faintly by high windows on the
left from the verandah, was very narrow, owing to the mass of shelves
and fancy tables it contained. It was not that I feared to knock over
precious things as I went, but, that, because of its ungenerous width,
there would be no room to pass another person--if I met one. And the
certainty had suddenly come upon me that somewhere in this corridor
another person at this actual moment stood. Here, somehow, amid all this
dead atmosphere of furniture and impersonal emptiness, lay the hint of a
living human presence; and with such conviction did it come upon me,
that my hand instinctively gripped the pistol in my pocket before I
could even think. Either some one had passed along this corridor just
before me, or some one lay waiting at its farther end--withdrawn or
flattened into one of the little recesses, to let me pass. It was the
person who had opened the door. And the blood ran from my heart as I
realized it. It was not courage that sent me on, but rather a strong impulsion from
behind that made it impossible to retreat: the feeling that a throng
pressed at my back, drawing nearer and nearer; that I was already half
surrounded, swept, dragged, coaxed into a vast prison-house where there
was wailing and gnashing of teeth, where their worm dieth not and their
fire is not quenched. I can neither explain nor justify the storm of
irrational emotion that swept me as I stood in that moment, staring down
the length of the silent corridor towards the music-room at the far end,
I can only repeat that no personal bravery sent me down it, but that the
negative emotion of fear was swamped in this vast sea of pity and
commiseration for others that surged upon me. My senses, at least, were no whit confused; if anything, my brain
registered impressions with keener accuracy than usual.