The Power of Darkness | Page 5

had legs. They were full-sized
figures, dressed completely in the costume of the period.

'Thorough the beggars are, even the parts that don't show-- artists, upon
my word,' said Vincent, and went back to his doorway, thinking of the
hidden carving behind the capitals of Gothic cathedrals.
But the idea of the soldier who might come behind him in the dark
stuck in his mind. Though still a few visitors strolled through the
gallery, the closing hour was near. He supposed it would be quite dark.
Then--and now he had allowed himself to be amused by the thought of
something that should creep up behind him in the dark--he might
possibly be nervous in that passage round which, if waxworks could
move, the soldier might have come.
'By Jove!' he said; 'one might easily frighten oneself by just fancying
things. Suppose there were a back way from Marat's bathroom, and
instead of the soldier Marat came out of his bath with his wet towels
stained with blood and dabbed them against your neck!'
When next the gallery was deserted he crept out. Not because he was
nervous, he told himself, but because one might be, and because the
passage was draughty, and he meant to sleep.
He went down the steps into the Catacombs, and here he spoke the
truth to himself.
'Hang it all,' he said, 'I was nervous. That fool Edward must have
infected me. Mesmeric influences or something.'
'Chuck it and go home,' said common sense.
'I'm hanged if I do,' said Vincent.
There were a good many people in the Catacombs at the moment. Live
people. He sucked confidence from their nearness, and went up and
down looking for a hiding place.
Through rock-hewn arches he saw a burial scene--a corpse on a bier
surrounded by mourners; a great pillar cut off half the still lying figure.
It was all still and unemotional as a Sunday-school oleograph. He

waited till no one was near, then slipped quickly through the mourning
group and hid behind the pillar. Surprising-- heartening, too, to find a
plain rush-chair there, doubtless set for the resting of tired officials. He
sat down in it, comforted his hand with the commonplace lines of its
rungs and back. A shrouded waxen figure just behind him to the left of
his pillar worried him a little, but the corpse left him unmoved as itself.
A far better place, this, than that draughty passage where the soldier
with legs kept intruding on the darkness that is always behind one.
Custodians went along the passages issuing orders. A stillness fell.
Then, suddenly, all the lights went out.
'That's all right,' said Vincent, and composed himself to sleep.
But he seemed to have forgotten what sleep was like. He firmly fixed
his thoughts on pleasant things--the sale of his picture, dances with
Rose, merry evenings with Edward and the others. But the thoughts
rushed by him like motes in sunbeams--he could not hold a single one
of them, and presently it seemed that he had thought of every pleasant
thing that had ever happened to him, and that now, if he thought at all,
he must think of the things one wants most to forget. And there would
be time in this long night to think much of many things. But now he
found that he could no longer think.
The draped effigy just behind him worried him again. He had been
trying, at the back of his mind, behind the other thoughts, to strangle
the thought of it. But it was there, very close to him. Suppose it put out
its hand, its wax hand, and touched him? But it was of wax. It could not
move. No, of course not. But suppose it did?
He laughed aloud, a short, dry laugh, that echoed through the vaults.
The cheering effect of laughter has been overestimated perhaps.
Anyhow, he did not laugh again.
The silence was intense, but it was a silence thick with rustlings and
breathings, and movements that his ear, strained to the uttermost, could
just not hear. Suppose, as Edward had said, when all the lights were out
these things did move. A corpse was a thing that had moved, given a

certain condition--life. What if there were a condition, given which
these things could move? What if such conditions were present now?
What if all of them--Napoleon, yellow-white from his death sleep; the
beasts from the amphitheatre, gore dribbling from their jaws; that
soldier with the legs--all were drawing near to him in this full silence?
Those death masks of Robespierre and Mirabeau--they might float
down through the darkness till they touched his face. That head of
Mme de Lamballe on the pike might be thrust at him from behind the
pillar. The silence throbbed with sounds