Three years ago I was on my way out to the East, and as an extra day
in London was of some importance, I took the Friday evening mail train
to Brindisi instead of the usual Thursday morning Marseilles express.
Many people shrink from the long forty-eight-hour train journey
through Europe, and the subsequent rush across the Mediterranean on
the nineteen-knot _Isis_ or the _Osiris_; but there is really very
little discomfort on either the train or the mail-boat, and unless
there is actually nothing for me to do, I always like to save the extra
day and a half in London before I say good-bye to her for one of my
longer tramps. This time--it was early, I remember, in the shipping
season, probably about the beginning of September--there were few
passengers, and I had a compartment in the P. and O. Indian express to
myself all the way from Calais. All Sunday I watched the blue waves
dimpling the Adriatic, and the pale rosemary along the cuttings; the
plain white towns, with their flat roofs and their bold "duomos," and
the gray-green gnarled olive orchards of Apulia. The journey was just
like any other. We ate in the dining-car as often and as long as we
decently could. We slept after luncheon; we dawdled the afternoon away
with yellow-backed novels; sometimes we exchanged platitudes in the
smoking-room, and it was there that I met Alistair Colvin.
Colvin was a man of middle height, with a resolute, well-cut jaw; his
hair was turning gray; his mustache was sun-whitened, otherwise he was
clean-shaven--obviously a gentleman, and obviously also a preoccupied
man. He had no great wit. When spoken to, he made the usual remarks in
the right way, and I dare say he refrained from banalities only because
he spoke less than the rest of us; most of the time he buried himself
in the Wagonlit Company's Time-table, but seemed unable to concentrate
his attention on any one page of it. He found that I had been over the
Siberian railway, and for a quarter of an hour he discussed it with
me. Then he lost interest in it, and rose to go to his compartment.
But he came back again very soon, and seemed glad to pick up the
conversation again.
Of course this did not seem to me to be of any importance. Most
travelers by train become a trifle infirm of purpose after thirty-six
hours' rattling. But Colvin's restless way I noticed in somewhat marked
contrast with the man's personal importance and dignity; especially
ill suited was it to his finely made large hand with strong, broad,
regular nails and its few lines. As I looked at his hand I noticed a
long, deep, and recent scar of ragged shape. However, it is absurd to
pretend that I thought anything was unusual. I went off at five o'clock
on Sunday afternoon to sleep away the hour or two that had still to be
got through before we arrived at Brindisi.
Once there, we few passengers transhipped our hand baggage, verified
our berths--there were only a score of us in all--and then, after an
aimless ramble of half an hour in Brindisi, we returned to dinner at
the Hôtel International, not wholly surprised that the town had been
the death of Virgil. If I remember rightly, there is a gaily painted
hall at the International--I do not wish to advertise anything, but
there is no other place in Brindisi at which to await the coming of the
mails--and after dinner I was looking with awe at a trellis overgrown
with blue vines, when Colvin moved across the room to my table. He
picked up _Il Secolo_, but almost immediately gave up the pretense of
reading it. He turned squarely to me and said:
"Would you do me a favor?"
One doesn't do favors to stray acquaintances on Continental expresses
without knowing something more of them than I knew of Colvin. But I
smiled in a noncommittal way, and asked him what he wanted. I wasn't
wrong in part of my estimate of him; he said bluntly:
"Will you let me sleep in your cabin on the _Osiris_?" And he colored a
little as he said it.
Now, there is nothing more tiresome than having to put up with a
stable-companion at sea, and I asked him rather pointedly:
"Surely there is room for all of us?" I thought that perhaps he had
been partnered off with some mangy Levantine, and wanted to escape from
him at all hazards.
Colvin, still somewhat confused, said: "Yes; I am in a cabin by myself.
But you would do me the greatest favor if you would allow me to share
yours."
This was all very well, but, besides the fact that I always sleep
better when alone, there had been some recent thefts on board these
boats, and I hesitated, frank and honest and self-conscious as Colvin
was. Just then the mail-train came in with a clatter and a rush of
escaping steam, and I asked him to see me again about it on the boat
when we started. He answered me curtly--I suppose he saw the mistrust
in my manner--"I am a member of White's and the Beefsteak." I smiled
to myself as he said it, but I remembered in a moment that the man--if
he were really what he claimed to be, and I make no doubt that he
was--must have been sorely put to it before he urged the fact as a
guarantee of his respectability to a total stranger at a Brindisi hotel.
That evening, as we cleared the red and green harbor-lights of
Brindisi, Colvin explained. This is his story in his own words:
"When I was traveling in India some years ago, I made the acquaintance
of a youngish man in the Woods and Forests. We camped out together for
a week, and I found him a pleasant companion. John Broughton was a
light-hearted soul when off duty, but a steady and capable man in any
of the small emergencies that continually arise in that department. He
was liked and trusted by the natives, and his future was well assured
in Government service, when a fair-sized estate was unexpectedly left
to him, and he joyfully shook the dust of the Indian plains from his
feet and returned to England. For five years he drifted about London.
I saw him now and then. We dined together about every eighteen months,
and I could trace pretty exactly the gradual sickening of Broughton
with a merely idle life. He then set out on a couple of long voyages,
returned as restless as before, and at last told me that he had decided
to marry and settle down at his place, Thurnley Abbey, which had long
been empty. He spoke about looking after the property and standing
for his constituency in the usual way. He was quite happy and full of
information about his future.
"Among other things, I asked him about Thurnley Abbey. He confessed
that he hardly knew the place. The last tenant, a man called Clarke,
had lived in one wing for fifteen years and seen no one. He had been
a miser and a hermit. It was the rarest thing for a light to be seen
at the Abbey after dark. Only the barest necessities of life were
ordered, and the tenant himself received them at the side-door. His
one half-caste man-servant, after a month's stay in the house, had
abruptly left without warning, and had returned to the Southern States.
One thing Broughton complained bitterly about: Clarke had wilfully
spread the rumor among the villagers that the Abbey was haunted, and
had even condescended to play childish tricks with spirit-lamps and
salt in order to scare trespassers away at night. He had been detected
in the act of this tomfoolery, but the story spread, and no one, said
Broughton, would venture near the house except in broad daylight. The
hauntedness of Thurnley Abbey was now, he said with a grin, part of
the gospel of the countryside, but he and his young wife were going to
change all that. Would I propose myself any time I liked? I, of course,
said I would, and equally, of course, intended to do nothing of the
sort without a definite invitation.
"The house was put in thorough repair, though not a stick of the old
furniture and tapestry were removed. Floors and ceilings were relaid;
the roof was made watertight again, and the dust of half a century was
scoured out. He showed me some photographs of the place. It was called
an Abbey, though as a matter of fact it had been only the infirmary of
the long-vanished Abbey of Closter some five miles away. The larger
part of this building remained as it had been in pre-Reformation days,
but a wing had been added in Jacobean times, and that part of the
house had been kept in something like repair by Mr. Clarke. He had in
both the ground and the first floors set a heavy timber door, strongly
barred with iron, in the passage between the earlier and the Jacobean
parts of the house, and had entirely neglected the former. So there had
been a good deal of work to be done.
"Broughton, whom I saw in London two or three times about this time,
made a deal of fun over the positive refusal of the workmen to remain
after sundown. Even after the electric light had been put into every
room, nothing would induce them to remain, though, as Broughton
observed, electric light was death on ghosts. The legend of the Abbey's
ghosts had gone far and wide, and the men would take no risks. On the
whole, though nothing of any sort or kind had been conjured up even
by their heated imaginations during their five months' work upon the
Abbey, the belief in the ghosts was rather strengthened than otherwise
in Thurnley because of the men's confessed nervousness, and local
tradition declared itself in favor of the ghost of an immured nun.
"'Good old nun!' said Broughton.
"I asked him whether in general he believed in the possibility of
ghosts, and, rather to my surprise, he said that he couldn't say he
entirely disbelieved in them. A man in India had told him one morning
in camp that he believed that his mother was dead in England, as her
vision had come to his tent the night before. He had not been alarmed,
but had said nothing, and the figure vanished again. As a matter of
fact, the next possible dak-walla brought on a telegram announcing the
mother's death. 'There the thing was,' said Broughton.
"'My own idea,' said he, 'is that if a ghost ever does come in one's
way, one ought to speak to it.'
"I agreed. Little as I knew of the ghost world and its conventions,
I had already remembered that a spook was in honor bound to wait to
be spoken to. It didn't seem much to do, and I felt that the sound
of one's own voice would at any rate reassure oneself as to one's
wakefulness. But there are few ghosts outside Europe--few, that is,
that a white man can see--and I had never been troubled with any.
However, as I have said, I told Broughton that I agreed.
"So the wedding took place and I went to it in a tall hat which I
bought for the occasion, and the new Mrs. Broughton smiled very nicely
at me afterwards. As it had to happen, I took the Orient Express that
evening and was not in England again for nearly six months. Just before
I came back I got a letter from Broughton. He asked if I could see him
in London or come to Thurnley, as he thought I should be better able
to help him than any one else he knew. His wife sent a nice message to
me at the end, so I was reassured about at least one thing. I wrote
from Budapest that I would come and see him at Thurnley two days after
my arrival in London, and as I sauntered out of the Pannonia into the
Kerepesi Ut to post my letters, I wondered of what earthly service I
could be to Broughton. I had been out with him after tiger on foot,
and I could imagine few men better able at a pinch to manage their own
business. However, I had nothing to do, so after dealing with some
small accumulations of business during my absence, I packed a kit-bag
and departed to Euston.
"I was met by a trap at Thurnley Road station, and after a drive of
nearly seven miles we echoed through the sleepy streets of Thurnley
village, into which the main gates of the park thrust themselves,
splendid with pillars and spread-eagles and tom-cats rampant atop of
them. From the gates a quadruple avenue of beech-trees led inwards for
a quarter of a mile. Beneath them a neat strip of fine turf edged the
road and ran back until the poison of the dead beech-leaves had killed
it under the trees. There were many wheel-tracks on the road, and a
comfortable little pony trap jogged past me laden with a country parson
and his wife and daughter. Evidently there was some garden party going
on at the Abbey. The road dropped away to the right at the end of the
avenue, and I could see the Abbey across a wide pasturage and a broad
lawn thickly dotted with guests.
"The end of the building was plain. It must have been almost
mercilessly austere when it was first built, but time had crumbled the
edges and toned the stone down to an orange-lichened gray wherever it
showed behind its curtain of magnolia, jasmine, and ivy. Farther on
was the three-storied Jacobean house, plain and handsome. There had
not been the slightest attempt to adapt the one to the other, but the
kindly ivy had glossed over the touching-point. There was a tall flèche
in the middle of the building, surmounting a small bell tower. Behind
the house there rose the mountainous verdure of Spanish chestnuts all
the way up the hill.
"Broughton had seen me coming from afar, and walked across from his
other guests to welcome me before turning me over to the butler's care.
This man was sandy-haired and rather inclined to be talkative. He
could, however, answer hardly any questions about the house: he had, he
said, only been there three weeks. Mindful of what Broughton had told
me, I made no inquiries about ghosts, though the room into which I was
shown might have justified anything. It was a very large low room with
oak beams projecting from the white ceiling. Every inch of the walls,
including the doors, was covered with tapestry, and a remarkably fine
Italian fourpost bedstead, heavily draped, added to the darkness and
dignity of the place. All the furniture was old, well made, and dark.
Underfoot there was a plain green pile carpet, the only new thing about
the room except the electric light fittings and the jugs and basins.
Even the looking-glass on the dressing-table was an old pyramidal
Venetian glass set in heavy repoussé frame of tarnished silver.
"After a few minutes cleaning up, I went downstairs and out upon the
lawn, where I greeted my hostess. The people gathered there were of
the usual country type, all anxious to be pleased and roundly curious
as to the new master of the Abbey. Rather to my surprise, and quite to
my pleasure, I rediscovered Glenham, whom I had known well in old days
in Barotseland: he lived quite close, as, he remarked with a grin, I
ought to have known. 'But,' he added, 'I don't live in a place like
this.' He swept his hand to the long, low lines of the Abbey in obvious
admiration, and then, to my intense interest, muttered beneath his
breath, 'Thank God!' He saw that I had overheard him, and turning to me
said decidedly, 'Yes, thank God I said, and I meant I wouldn't live at
the Abbey for all Broughton's money.'
"'But surely,' I demurred, 'you know that old Clarke was discovered in
the very act of setting light to his bug-a-boos?'
"Glenham shrugged his shoulders. 'Yes, I know about that. But there is
something wrong with the place still. All I can say is that Broughton
is a different man since he has lived here. I don't believe that he
will remain much longer. But--you're staying here?--Well, you'll
hear all about it to-night. There's a big dinner, I understand.' The
conversation turned off to old reminiscences, and Glenham soon after
had to go.
"Before I went to dress that evening I had twenty minutes' talk with
Broughton in his library. There was no doubt that the man was altered,
gravely altered. He was nervous and fidgety, and I found him looking at
me only when my eye was off him. I naturally asked him what he wanted
of me. I told him I would do anything I could, but that I couldn't
conceive what he lacked that I could provide. He said with a lustreless
smile that there was, however, something, and that he would tell me the
following morning. It struck me that he was somehow ashamed of himself,
and perhaps ashamed of the part he was asking me to play. However, I
dismissed the subject from my mind and went up to dress in my palatial
room. As I shut the door a draught blew out the Queen of Sheba from the
wall, and I noticed that the tapestries were not fastened to the wall
at the bottom. I have always held very practical views about spooks,
and it has often seemed to me that the slow waving in firelight of
loose tapestry upon a wall would account for ninety-nine per cent of
the stories one hears, and certainly the dignified undulation of this
lady with her attendants and huntsmen--one of whom was untidily cutting
the throat of a fallow deer upon the very steps on which King Solomon,
a gray-faced Flemish nobleman with the order of the Golden Fleece,
awaited his fair visitor--gave color to my hypothesis.
"Nothing much happened at dinner. The people were very much like those
of the garden party. After the ladies had gone, I found myself talking
to the rural dean. He was a thin, earnest man, who at once turned the
conversation to old Clarke's buffooneries. But, he said, Mr. Broughton
had introduced such a new and cheerful spirit, not only into the Abbey,
but, he might say, into the whole neighborhood, that he had great
hopes that the ignorant superstitions of the past were from henceforth
destined to oblivion. Thereupon his other neighbor, a portly gentleman
of independent means and position, audibly remarked 'Amen,' which
damped the rural dean, and we talked of partridges past, partridges
present, and pheasants to come. At the other end of the table Broughton
sat with a couple of his friends, red-faced hunting men. Once I noticed
that they were discussing me, but I paid no attention to it at the
time. I remembered it a few hours later.
"By eleven all the guests were gone, and Broughton, his wife, and I
were alone together under the fine plaster ceiling of the Jacobean
drawing-room. Mrs. Broughton talked about one or two of the neighbors,
and then, with a smile, said that she knew I would excuse her, shook
hands with me, and went off to bed. I am not very good at analyzing
things, but I felt that she talked a little uncomfortably and with a
suspicion of effort, smiled rather conventionally, and was obviously
glad to go. These things seem trifling enough to repeat, but I had
throughout the faint feeling that everything was not square. Under the
circumstances, this was enough to set me wondering what on earth the
service could be that I was to render--wondering also whether the whole
business were not some ill-advised jest in order to make me come down
from London for a mere shooting party.
"Broughton said little after she had gone. But he was evidently
laboring to bring the conversation round to the so-called haunting
of the Abbey. As soon as I saw this, of course I asked him directly
about it. He then seemed at once to lose interest in the matter. There
was no doubt about it: Broughton was somehow a changed man, and to my
mind he had changed in no way for the better. Mrs. Broughton seemed no
sufficient cause. He was clearly very fond of her, and she of him. I
reminded him that he was going to tell me what I could do for him in
the morning, pleaded my journey, lighted a candle, and went upstairs
with him. At the end of the passage leading into the old house he
grinned weakly and said, 'Mind, if you see a ghost, do talk to it; you
said you would,' He stood irresolutely a moment and then turned away.
At the door of his dressing-room he paused a moment: 'I'm here,' he
called out, 'if you should want anything. Good-night,' and he shut his
door.
"I went along the passage to my room, undressed, switched on a lamp
beside my bed, read a few pages of the _Jungle Book_, and then, more
than ready for sleep, switched the light off and went fast asleep.
* * * * *
"Three hours later I woke up. There was not a breath of wind outside.
It was so silent that my ears found employment in listening for the
throbbing of the blood within them. There was not even a flicker of
light from the fireplace. As I lay there, an ash tinkled slightly
as it cooled, but there was hardly a gleam of the dullest red in the
grate. An owl cried among the silent Spanish chestnuts on the slope
outside. I idly reviewed the events of the day, hoping that I should
fall off to sleep again before I reached dinner. But at the end I
seemed as wakeful as ever. There was no help for it. I must read my
_Jungle Book_ again till I felt ready to go off, so I fumbled for
the pear at the end of the cord that hung down inside the bed, and I
switched on the bedside lamp. The sudden glory dazzled me for a moment.
I felt under my pillow for my book with half-shut eyes. Then, growing
used to the light, I happened to look down to the foot of my bed.
* * * * *
"I can never tell you really what happened then. Nothing I could ever
confess in the most abject words could even faintly picture to you
what I felt. I know that my heart stopped dead, and my throat shut
automatically. In one instinctive movement I crouched back up against
the head-boards of the bed, staring at the horror. The movement set my
heart going again, and the sweat dripped from every pore. I am not a
particularly religious man, but I had always believed that God would
never allow any supernatural appearance to present itself to man in
such a guise and in such circumstances that harm, either bodily or
mental, could result to him. I can only tell you that at that moment
both my life and my reason rocked unsteadily on their seats."
The other _Osiris_ passengers had gone to bed. Only he and I remained
leaning over the starboard railing, which rattled uneasily now and then
under the fierce vibration of the over-engined mail-boat. Far over,
there were the lights of a few fishing-smacks riding out the night, and
a great rush of white combing and seething water fell out and away from
us overside.
At last Colvin went on:
"Leaning over the foot of my bed, looking at me, was a figure swathed
in a rotten and tattered veiling. This shroud passed over the head, but
left both eyes and the right side of the face bare. It then followed
the line of the arm down to where the hand grasped the bed-end. The
face was not that entirely of a skull, though the eyes and the flesh of
the face were totally gone, There was a thin, dry skin drawn tightly
over the features, and there was some skin left on the hand. One wisp
of hair crossed the forehead. It was perfectly still. I looked at it,
and it looked at me, and my brains turned dry and hot in my head. I
had still got the pear of the electric lamp in my hand, and I played
idly with it; only I dared not turn the light out again. I shut my
eyes, only to open them in a hideous terror the same second. The thing
had not moved. My heart was thumping, and the sweat cooled me as it
evaporated. Another cinder tinkled in the grate, and a panel creaked in
the wall.
"My reason failed me. For twenty minutes, or twenty seconds, I was
able to think of nothing else but this awful figure, till there came,
hurtling through the empty channels of my senses, the remembrance that
Broughton and his friends had discussed me furtively at dinner. The dim
possibility of it being a hoax stole gratefully into my unhappy mind,
and once there, one's pluck came creeping back along a thousand tiny
veins. My first sensation was one of blind unreasoning thankfulness
that my brain was going to stand the trial. I am not a timid man,
but the best of us needs some human handle to steady him in time of
extremity, and in this faint but growing hope that after all it might
be only a brutal hoax, I found the fulcrum that I needed. At last I
moved.
"How I managed to do it, I cannot tell you, but with one spring
towards the foot of the bed I got within arm's length and struck out
one fearful blow with my fist at the thing. It crumbled under it, and
my hand was cut to the bone. With the sickening revulsion after my
terror, I dropped half-fainting across the end of the bed. So it was
merely a foul trick after all. No doubt the trick had been played many
a time before: no doubt Broughton and his friends had had some bet
among themselves as to what I should do when I discovered the gruesome
thing. From my state of abject terror I found myself transported into
an insensate anger. I shouted curses upon Broughton. I dived rather
than climbed over the bed-end on to the sofa. I tore at the robed
skeleton--how well the whole thing had been carried out, I thought--I
broke the skull against the floor, and stamped upon its dry bones. I
flung the head away under the bed, and rent the brittle bones of the
trunk in pieces. I snapped the thin thigh-bones across my knee, and
flung them in different directions. The shin-bones I set up against
a stool and broke with my heel. I raged like a Berserker against the
loathly thing, and stripped the ribs from the backbone and slung the
breastbone against the cupboard. My fury increased as the work of
destruction went on. I tore the frail rotten veil into twenty pieces,
and the dust went up over everything, over the clean blotting-paper and
the silver inkstand. At last my work was done. There was but a raffle
of broken bones and strips of parchment and crumbling wool. Then,
picking up a piece of the skull--it was the cheek and temple bone of
the right side, I remember--I opened the door and went down the passage
to Broughton's dressing-room. I remember still how my sweat-dripping
pajamas clung to me as I walked. At the door I kicked and entered.
"Broughton was in bed. He had already turned the light on and seemed
shrunken and horrified. For a moment he could hardly pull himself
together. Then I spoke. I don't know what I said. Only I know that from
a heart full and over-full with hatred and contempt, spurred on by
shame of my own recent cowardice, I let my tongue run on. He answered
nothing. I was amazed at my own fluency. My hair still clung lankily
to my wet temples, my hand was bleeding profusely, and I must have
looked a strange sight. Broughton huddled himself up at the head of
the bed just as I had. Still he made no answer, no defence. He seemed
preoccupied with something besides my reproaches, and once or twice
moistened his lips with his tongue. But he could say nothing, though he
moved his hands now and then, just as a baby who cannot speak moves his
hands.
"At last the door into Mrs. Broughton's room opened and she came in,
white and terrified. 'What is it? What is it? Oh, in God's name! what
is it?' she cried again and again, and then she went up to her husband
and sat on the bed; and the two faced me in speechless terror. I told
her what the matter was. I spared her husband not a word for her
presence there. Yet he seemed hardly to understand. I told the pair
that I had spoiled their cowardly joke for them. Broughton looked up.
"'I have smashed the foul thing into a hundred pieces,' I said.
Broughton licked his lips again and his mouth worked. 'By God!' I
shouted, 'it would serve you right if I thrashed you within an inch
of your life. I will take care that not a decent man or woman of my
acquaintance ever speaks to you again. And there,' I added, throwing
the broken piece of the skull upon the floor beside his bed, 'there is
a souvenir for you, of your damned work to-night!'
"Broughton saw the bone, and in a moment it was his turn to frighten
me. He squealed like a hare caught in a trap. He screamed and screamed
till Mrs. Broughton, almost as terrified as I, held on to him and
coaxed him like a child to be quiet. But Broughton--and as he moved I
thought that ten minutes ago I perhaps looked as terribly ill as he
did--thrust her from him, and scrambled out of the bed on to the floor,
and still screaming put out his hand to the bone. It had blood on it
from my hand. He paid no attention to me whatever. In truth I said
nothing. This was a new turn indeed to the horrors of the evening. He
rose from the floor with the bone in his hand, and stood silent. He
seemed to be listening. 'Time, time, perhaps,' he muttered, and almost
at the same moment fell at full length on the carpet, cutting his head
against the fender. The bone flew from his hand and came to rest near
the door. I picked Broughton up, haggard and broken, with blood over
his face. He whispered hoarsely and quickly, 'Listen, listen!' We
listened.
"After ten seconds' utter quiet, I seemed to hear something. I could
not be sure, but at last there was no doubt. There was a quiet sound
as of one moving along the passage. Little regular steps came towards
us over the hard oak flooring. Broughton moved to where his wife
sat, white and speechless, on the bed, and pressed her face into his
shoulder.
"Then the last thing that I could see as he turned the light out, he
fell forward with his own head pressed into the pillow of the bed.
Something in their company, something in their cowardice, helped me,
and I faced the open doorway of the room, which was outlined fairly
clearly against the dimly lighted passage. I put out one hand and
touched Mrs. Broughton's shoulder in the darkness. But at the last
moment I too failed. I sank on my knees and put my face in the bed.
Only, we all heard. The footsteps came to the door, and there they
stopped. The piece of bone was lying a yard inside the door. There was
a rustle of moving stuff, and the thing was in the room. Mrs. Broughton
was silent: I could hear Broughton's voice praying, muffled in the
pillow: I was cursing my own cowardice. Then the steps moved out again
on the oak boards of the passage, and I heard the sounds dying away. In
a flash of remorse I went to the door and looked out. There at the end
of the corridor was a small bowed figure in a gray veil--I knew it only
too well. But this time there was a pathos in the drooped head that
left me standing with my forehead bowed in shame against the jamb of
the door.
"'You can turn the light on,' I said, and there was an answering flare.
There was no bone at my feet. Mrs. Broughton had fainted. Broughton was
almost useless, and it took me ten minutes to bring her to. Broughton
only said one thing worth remembering. For the most part he went on
muttering prayers. But I was glad afterwards to recollect that he had
said that thing. He said in a colorless voice, half as a question,
half as a reproach, 'You didn't speak to her.'
"We spent the remainder of the night together. Mrs. Broughton actually
fell off into a kind of sleep before dawn, but she suffered so horribly
in her dreams that I shook her into consciousness again. Never was dawn
so long in coming. Three or four times Broughton spoke to himself. Mrs.
Broughton would then just tighten her hold on his arm, but she could
say nothing. As for me, I can honestly say that I grew worse as the
hours passed and the light strengthened. The two violent reactions had
battered down my steadiness of view, and I felt that the foundations of
my life had been built upon the sand. I said nothing, and after binding
up my hand with a towel, I did not move. It was better so. They helped
me and I helped them, and we all three knew that our reason had gone
very near to ruin that night. At last, when the light came in pretty
strongly, and the birds outside were chattering and singing, we felt
that we must do something. Yet we never moved. You might have thought
that we should particularly dislike being found as we were by the
servants: yet nothing of the kind mattered a straw, and an overpowering
listlessness bound us as we sat, until Chapman, Broughton's man,
actually knocked and opened the door. None of us moved. Broughton,
speaking hardly and stiffly, said: 'Chapman, you can come back in
five minutes.' Chapman was a discreet man, but it would have made no
difference if he had carried his news to the 'room' at once.
"We looked at each other and I said I must go back. I meant to wait
outside till Chapman returned. I simply dared not re-enter my bedroom
alone. Broughton roused himself and said that he would come with me.
Mrs. Broughton agreed to remain in her own room for five minutes if the
blinds were drawn up and all the doors left open.
"So Broughton and I, leaning stiffly one against the other, went down
to my room. By the morning light that filtered past the blinds we could
see our way, and I released the blinds. There was nothing wrong in the
room from end to end, except smears of my own blood on the bed, on the
sofa, and on the carpet where I had torn the thing to pieces."
Colvin had finished his story. There was nothing to say. Seven bells
stuttered out from the fo'c'sle, and the answering cry wailed through
the darkness. I took him downstairs.
"Of course I am much better now, but it is a kindness of you to let me
sleep in your cabin."