No Name, Wilkie Collins [reading the story of the TXT] 📗

better account than she had turned them thus far, it was a chance to be tried. If there was a possibility, however remote, that the Trust might be hidden in any one of the locked repositories in the east wing, it was a possibility to be put to the test. When? Her own experience answered the question. At the time when no prying eyes were open, and no accidents were to be feared⁠—when the house was quiet⁠—in the dead of night.

She knew enough of her changed self to dread the enervating influence of delay. She determined to run the risk headlong that night.

More blunders escaped her when dinnertime came; the admiral’s criticisms on her waiting at table were sharper than ever. His hardest words inflicted no pain on her; she scarcely heard him⁠—her mind was dull to every sense but the sense of the coming trial. The evening which had passed slowly to her on the night of her first experiment with the keys passed quickly now. When bedtime came, bedtime took her by surprise.

She waited longer on this occasion than she had waited before. The admiral was at home; he might alter his mind and go downstairs again, after he had gone up to his room; he might have forgotten something in the library and might return to fetch it. Midnight struck from the clock in the servants’ hall before she ventured out of her room, with the keys again in her pocket, with the candle again in her hand.

At the first of the stairs on which she set her foot to descend, an all-mastering hesitation, an unintelligible shrinking from some peril unknown, seized her on a sudden. She waited, and reasoned with herself. She had recoiled from no sacrifices, she had yielded to no fears, in carrying out the stratagem by which she had gained admission to St. Crux; and now, when the long array of difficulties at the outset had been patiently conquered, now, when by sheer force of resolution the starting-point was gained, she hesitated to advance. “I shrank from nothing to get here,” she said to herself. “What madness possesses me that I shrink now?”

Every pulse in her quickened at the thought, with an animating shame that nerved her to go on. She descended the stairs, from the third floor to the second, from the second to the first, without trusting herself to pause again within easy reach of her own room. In another minute, she had reached the end of the corridor, had crossed the vestibule, and had entered the drawing-room. It was only when her grasp was on the heavy brass handle of the sliding door⁠—it was only at the moment before she pushed the door back⁠—that she waited to take breath. The banqueting-hall was close on the other side of the wooden partition against which she stood; her excited imagination felt the deathlike chill of it flowing over her already.

She pushed back the sliding door a few inches⁠—and stopped in momentary alarm. When the admiral had closed it in her presence that day, she had heard no noise. When old Mazey had opened it to show her the rooms in the east wing, she had heard no noise. Now, in the night silence, she noticed for the first time that the door made a sound⁠—a dull, rushing sound, like the wind.

She roused herself, and pushed it further back⁠—pushed it halfway into the hollow chamber in the wall constructed to receive it. She advanced boldly into the gap, and met the night view of the banqueting-hall face to face.

The moon was rounding the southern side of the house. Her paling beams streamed through the nearer windows, and lay in long strips of slanting light on the marble pavement of the hall. The black shadows of the pediments between each window, alternating with the strips of light, heightened the wan glare of the moonshine on the floor. Toward its lower end, the hall melted mysteriously into darkness. The ceiling was lost to view; the yawning fireplace, the overhanging mantelpiece, the long row of battle pictures above, were all swallowed up in night. But one visible object was discernible, besides the gleaming windows and the moon-striped floor. Midway in the last and furthest of the strips of light, the tripod rose erect on its gaunt black legs, like a monster called to life by the moon⁠—a monster rising through the light, and melting invisibly into the upper shadows of the hall. Far and near, all sound lay dead, drowned in the stagnant cold. The soothing hush of night was awful here. The deep abysses of darkness hid abysses of silence more immeasurable still.

She stood motionless in the doorway, with straining eyes, with straining ears. She looked for some moving thing, she listened for some rising sound, and looked and listened in vain. A quick ceaseless shivering ran through her from head to foot. The shivering of fear, or the shivering of cold? The bare doubt roused her resolute will. “Now,” she thought, advancing a step through the doorway, “or never! I’ll count the strips of moonlight three times over, and cross the hall.”

“One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five.”

As the final number passed her lips at the third time of counting, she crossed the hall. Looking for nothing, listening for nothing, one hand holding the candle, the other mechanically grasping the folds of her dress, she sped, ghostlike, down the length of the ghostly place. She reached the door of the first of the eastern rooms, opened it, and ran in. The sudden relief of attaining a refuge, the sudden entrance into a new atmosphere, overpowered her for the moment. She had just time to put the candle safely on a table before she dropped giddy and breathless into the nearest chair.

Little by little she felt the rest quieting her. In a few minutes she became conscious of the triumph of having won her way to the east