第76章

The darkness forced his mind back upon itself, and set his memory at work, reviving with a painfully vivid distinctness the momentary impression it had received from his first sight of the corpse.Before long the face seemed to be hovering out in the middle of the darkness, confronting him through the window, with the paleness whiter--with the dreadful dull line of light between the imperfectly-closed eyelids broader than he had seen it--with the parted lips slowly dropping further and further away from each other--with the features growing larger and moving closer, till they seemed to fill the window, and to silence the rain, and to shut out the night.

The sound of a voice shouting below stairs woke him suddenly from the dream of his own distempered fancy.He recognized it as the voice of the landlord.

"Shut up at twelve, Ben," he heard it say."I'm off to bed."He wiped away the damp that had gathered on his forehead, reasoned with himself for a little while, and resolved to shake his mind free of the ghastly counterfeit which still clung to it by forcing himself to confront, if it was only for a moment, the solemn reality.Without allowing himself an instant to hesitate, he parted the curtains at the foot of the bed, and looked through.

There was the sad, peaceful, white face, with the awful mystery of stillness on it, laid back upon the pillow.No stir, no change there! He only looked at it for a moment before he closed the curtains again, but that moment steadied him, calmed him, restored him--mind and body--to himself.He returned to his old occupation of walking up and down the room, persevering in it this time till the clock struck again.

Twelve.

As the sound of the clock-bell died away, it was succeeded by the confused noise downstairs of the drinkers in the taproom leaving the house.The next sound, after an interval of silence, was caused by the barring of the door and the closing of the shutters at the back of the inn.Then the silence followed again, and was disturbed no more.

He was alone now--absolutely, hopelessly alone with the dead man till the next morning.

The wick of the candle wanted trimming again.He took up the snuffers, but paused suddenly on the very point of using them, and looked attentively at the candle--then back, over his shoulder, at the curtained bed--then again at the candle.It had been lighted for the first time to show him the way upstairs, and three parts of it, at least, were already consumed.In another hour it would be burned out.In another hour, unless he called at once to the man who had shut up the inn for a fresh candle, he would be left in the dark.

Strongly as his mind had been affected since he had entered the room, his unreasonable dread of encountering ridicule and of exposing his courage to suspicion had not altogether lost its influence over him even yet.

He lingered irresolutely by the table, waiting till he could prevail on himself to open the door, and call from the landing, to the man who had shut up the inn.In his present hesitating frame of mind, it was a kind of relief to gain a few moments only by engaging in the trifling occupation of snuffing the candle.

His hand trembled a little, and the snuffers were heavy and awkward to use.When he closed them on the wick, he closed them a hair-breadth too low.In an instant the candle was out, and the room was plunged in pitch darkness.

The one impression which the absence of light immediately produced on his mind was distrust of the curtained bed--distrust which shaped itself into no distinct idea, but which was powerful enough, in its very vagueness, to bind him down to his chair, to make his heart beat fast, and to set him listening intently.No sound stirred in the room, but the familiar sound of the rain against the window, louder and sharper now than he had heard it yet.

Still the vague distrust, the inexpressible dread possessed him, and kept him in his chair.He had put his carpet-bag on the table when he first entered the room, and he now took the key from his pocket, reached out his hand softly, opened the bag, and groped in it for his traveling writing-case, in which he knew that there was a small store of matches.When he had got one of the matches he waited before he struck it on the coarse wooden table, and listened intently again without knowing why.Still there was no sound in the room but the steady, ceaseless rattling sound of the rain.

He lighted the candle again without another moment of delay, and, on the instant of its burning up, the first object in the room that his eyes sought for was the curtained bed.

Just before the light had been put out he had looked in that direction, and had seen no change, no disarrangement of any sort in the folds of the closely-drawn curtains.

When he looked at the bed now, he saw hanging over the side of it a long white hand.

It lay perfectly motionless midway on the side of the bed, where the curtain at the head and the curtain at the foot met.Nothing more was visible.The clinging curtains hid everything but the long white hand.

He stood looking at it, unable to stir, unable to call out--feeling nothing, knowing nothing--every faculty he possessed gathered up and lost in the one seeing faculty.How long that first panic held him he never could tell afterward.It might have been only for a moment--it might have been for many minutes together.How he got to the bed--whether he ran to it headlong, or whether he approached it slowly; how he wrought himself up to unclose the curtains and look in, he never has remembered, and never will remember to his dying day.It is enough that he did go to the bed, and that he did look inside the curtains.

The man had moved.One of his arms was outside the clothes; his face was turned a little on the pillow; his eyelids were wide open.Changed as to position and as to one of the features, the face was otherwise fearfully and wonderfully unaltered.The dead paleness and the dead quiet were on it still.