The Power of Darkness | Page 6

darkness was that of the corpse in front of him. He thought of his dead friend. When the cigarette was smoked out he thought of him more and more, till it seemed that what lay on the bier was not wax. His hand reached forward and drew back more than once. But at last he made it touch the bier and through the blackness travel up along a lean, rigid arm to the wax face that lay there so still. The touch was not reassuring. Just so, and not otherwise, had his dead friend's face felt, to the last touch of his lips. Cold, firm, waxen. People always said the dead were 'waxen'. How true that was! He had never thought of it before. He thought of it now.
He sat still--so still that every muscle ached; because if you wish to hear the sounds that infest silence you must be very still indeed. He thought of Edward, and of the string he had meant to tie to one of the figures.
'That wouldn't be needed,' he told himself. And his ears ached with listening, listening for the sound that, it seemed, must break at last from that crowded silence.
He never knew how long he sat there. To move, to go up, to batter at the door and clamour to be let out--that one could have done if one had had a lantern or even a full matchbox. But in the dark, not knowing the turnings, to feel one's way among these things that were so like life and yet were not alive--to touch, perhaps, these faces that were not dead and yet felt like death! His heart beat heavily in his throat at the thought.
No; he must sit still till morning. He had been hypnotized into this state, he told himself, by Edward, no doubt; it was not natural to him.
Then, suddenly, the silence was shattered. In the dark something moved, and, after those sounds that the silence teemed with, the noise seemed to him thunder-loud. Yet it was only a very, very little sound, just the rustling of drapery, as though something had turned in its sleep. And there was a sigh--not far off.
Vincent's muscles and tendons tightened like fine-drawn wire. He listened. There was nothing more. Only the silence, the thick silence.
The sound had seemed to come from a part of the vault where long ago, when there was light, he had seen a grave being dug for the body of a young girl martyr.
'I will get up and go out,' said Vincent. 'I have three matches. I am off my head. I shall really be nervous presently if I don't look out.'
He got up and struck a match, refused his eyes the sight of the corpse whose waxen face he had felt in the blackness, and made his way through the crowd of figures. By the match's flicker they seemed to make way for him, to turn their heads to look after him. The match lasted till he got to a turn of the rock-hewn passage. His next match showed him the burial scene. The little, thin body of the martyr, palm in hand, lying on the rock-floor in patient waiting, the grave-digger, the mourners. Some standing, some kneeling, one crouched on the ground.
This was where that sound had come from, that rustle, that sigh. He had thought he was going away from it. Instead he had come straight to the spot where, if anywhere, his nerves might be expected to play him false.
'Bah!' he said, and he said it aloud. 'The silly things are only wax. Who's afraid?'
His voice sounded loud in the silence that lives with the wax people.
'They're only wax,' he said again, and touched with his foot contemptuously the crouching figure in the mantle.
And, as he touched it, it raised its head and looked vacantly at him, and its eyes were bright and alive. He staggered back against another figure and dropped the match. In the new darkness he heard the crouching figure move towards him. Then the darkness fitted in round him very closely.
* * *
'What was it exactly that sent poor Vincent mad--you've never told me?' Rose asked the question. She and Edward were looking out over the pines and tamarisks across the blue Mediterranean. They were very happy, because it was their honeymoon.
He told her about the Mus��e Gr��vin and the wager, but he did not state the terms of it.
'But why did he think you would be afraid?'
He told her why.
'And then what happened?'
'Why, I suppose he thought there was no time like the present-- for his five pounds, you know--and he hid among the waxworks. And I missed my train, and, I thought, there was no time like the present. In fact, dear, I thought if I waited I