Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes | Page 8

Old, yet eternally young they were, as rivers and
mountains count their years by thousands, yet remain ever youthful;
and the first effect of all those pairs of eyes lifted to meet my own was
to send a whirlwind of unknown thrills about my heart and make me
catch my breath with mingled terror and delight. A fear of death, and at
the same time a sensation of touching something vast and eternal that
could never die, surged through me.
A deep hush followed my entrance as all turned to look at me. They
stood, men and women, grouped about a table, and something about
them--not their size alone--conveyed the impression of being gigantic,
giving me strangely novel realisations of freedom, power, and immense
existence more or less than human.
I can only record my thoughts and impressions as they came to me and
as I dimly now remember them. I had expected to see old Tom Bassett
crouching half asleep over a peat fire, a dim lamp on the table beside
him, and instead this assembly of tall and splendid men and women
stood there to greet me, and stood in silence. It was little wonder that at
first the ready question died upon my lips, and I almost forgot the
words of my own language.
"I thought this was Tom Bassett's cottage!" I managed to ask at length,
and looked straight at the man nearest me across the table. He had wild
hair falling about his shoulders and a face of clear beauty. His eyes, too,
like all the rest, seemed shrouded by something veil-like that reminded
me of the shadowy man of whom I had first inquired the way. They
were shaded--and for some reason I was glad they were.

At the sound of my voice, unreal and thin, there was a general
movement throughout the room, as though everyone changed places,
passing each other like those shapes of fluid sort I had seen outside in
the mist. But no answer came. It seemed to me that the mist even
penetrated into the room about me and spread inwardly over my
thoughts.
"Is this the way to the Manor House?" I asked again, louder, fighting
my inward confusion and weakness. "Can no one tell me?"
Then apparently everyone began to answer at once, or rather, not to
answer directly, but to speak to each other in such a way that I could
easily overhear. The voices of the men were deep, and of the women
wonderfully musical, with a slow rhythm like that of the sea, or of the
wind through the pine-trees outside. But the unsatisfactory nature of
what they said only helped to increase my sense of confusion and
dismay.
"Yes," said one; "Tom Bassett was here for a while with the sheep, but
his home was not here."
"He asks the way to a house when he does not even know the way to
his own mind!" another voice said, sounding overhead it seemed.
"And could he recognise the signs if we told him?" came in the singing
tones of a woman's voice close behind me.
And then, with a noise more like running water, or wind in the wings of
birds, than anything else I could liken it to, came several voices
together:
"And what sort of way does he seek? The splendid way, or merely the
easy?"
"Or the short way of fools!"
"But he must have some credentials, or he never could have got as far
as this," came from another.

A laugh ran round the room at this, though what there was to laugh at I
could not imagine. It sounded like wind rushing about the hills. I got
the impression too that the roof was somehow open to the sky, for their
laughter had such a spacious quality in it, and the air was so cool and
fresh, and moving about in currents and waves.
"It was I who showed him the way," cried a voice belonging to
someone who was looking straight into my face over the table. "It was
the safest way for him once he had got so far----"
I looked up and met his eye, and the sentence remained unfinished. It
was the hurrying, shadowy man of the hillside. He had the same
shifting outline as the others now, and the same veiled and shaded eyes,
and as I looked the sense of terror stirred and grew in me. I had come in
to ask for help, but now I was only anxious to be free of them all and
out again in the rain and darkness on the moor. Thoughts of escape
filled my brain, and I searched quickly for the door through which I had
entered. But nowhere could I discover it again. The walls