The Abandoned Room | Page 3

a spectral glow was diffused. She heard one of the windows
opened with a grating noise. The court was a sounding board. It carried
to her even the shuffling of the old man's feet as he must have
approached the bed. The glow of his candle vanished. She heard a
rustling as if he had stretched himself on the bed, a sound like a
long-drawn sigh.
She tried to tell herself there was no danger--that these peculiar actions
sprang from the old man's fancy--but the house, her surroundings, her
loneliness, contradicted her. To her over-acute senses the thought of
Blackburn in that room, so often consecrated to the formula of death,
suggested a special and unaccountable menace. Under such a strain the
supernatural assumed vague and singular shapes.
She slept for only a little while. Then she lay awake, listening with a
growing expectancy for some message to slip across the court. The
moon had ceased struggling. The wind cried. The baying of a dog
echoed mournfully from a great distance. It was like a remote alarm
bell which vibrates too perfectly, whose resonance is too prolonged.
She sat upright. She sprang from the bed and, her heart beating
insufferably, felt her way to the window. From the wing opposite the
message had come--a soft, shrouded sound, another long-drawn sigh.
She tried to call across the court. At first no response came from her
tight throat. When it did at last, her voice was unfamiliar in her own
ears, the voice of one who has to know a thing but shrinks from asking.
"Uncle!"
The wind mocked her.
"It is nothing," she told herself, "nothing."
But her vigil had been too long, her loneliness too complete. Her earlier
impression of the presence of death in the decaying house tightened its
hold. She had to assure herself that Silas Blackburn slept untroubled.
The thing she had heard was peculiar, and he hadn't answered across

the court. The dark, empty corridors at first were an impassable barrier,
but while she put on her slippers and her dressing-gown she
strengthened her courage. There was a bell rope in the upper hall. She
might get Jenkins.
When she stood in the main hall she hesitated. It would probably be a
long time, provided he heard at all, before Jenkins could answer her.
Her candle outlined the entrance to the musty corridor. Just a few
running steps down there, a quick rap at the door, and, perhaps, in an
instant her uncle's voice, and the blessed power to return to her room
and sleep!
While her fear grew she called on her pride to let her accomplish that
brief, abhorrent journey.
Then for the first time a different doubt came to her. As she waited
alone in this disturbing nocturnal intimacy of an old house, she shrank
from no thought of human intrusion, and she wondered if her uncle had
been afraid of that, too, of the sort of thing that might lurk in the
ancient wing with its recollections of birth and suffering and death. But
he had gone there as an escape. Surely he had been afraid of men. It
shamed her that, in spite of that, her fear defined itself ever more
clearly as something indefinable. With a passionate determination to
strangle such thoughts she held her breath. She tried to close her mind.
She entered the corridor. She ran its length. She knocked at the locked
door of the old bedroom. She shrank as the echoes rattled from the
dingy walls where her candle cast strange reflections. There was no
other answer. A sense of an intolerable companionship made her want
to cry out for brilliant light, for help. She screamed.
"Uncle Silas! Uncle Silas!"
Through the silence that crushed her voice she became aware finally of
the accomplishment of its mission by death in this house. And she fled
into the main hall. She jerked at the bell rope. The contact steadied her,
stimulated her to reason. One slender hope remained. The oppressive
bedroom might have driven Silas Blackburn through the private hall
and down the enclosed staircase. Perhaps he slept on the lounge in the

library.
She stumbled down, hoping to meet Jenkins. She crossed the hall and
the dining room and entered the library. She bent over the lounge. It
was empty. Her candle was reflected in the face of the clock on the
mantel. Its hands pointed to half-past two.
She pulled at the bell cord by the fireplace. Why didn't the butler come?
Alone she couldn't climb the enclosed staircase to try the other door. It
seemed impossible to her that she should wait another instant alone--
The butler, as old and as gray as Silas Blackburn, faltered in. He started
back when he saw her.
"My God,