Part 92 (1/2)
She left it, and paused to trim the wick of the candle before she tried the buhl cabinet next.
At the moment when she raised her hand to the candle, she heard the stillness of the Banqueting-Hall shudder with the terror of a sound--a sound faint and momentary, like the distant rus.h.i.+ng of the wind.
The sliding door in the drawing-room had moved.
Which way had it moved? Had an unknown hand pushed it back in its socket further than she had pushed it, or pulled it to again, and closed it?
The horror of being shut out all night, by some undiscoverable agency, from the life of the house, was stronger in her than the horror of looking across the Banqueting-Hall. She made desperately for the door of the room.
It had fallen to silently after her when she had come in, but it was not closed. She pulled it open, and looked.
The sight that met her eyes rooted her, panic-stricken, to the spot.
Close to the first of the row of windows, counting from the drawing-room, and full in the gleam of it, she saw a solitary figure. It stood motionless, rising out of the furthest strip of moonlight on the floor. As she looked, it suddenly disappeared. In another instant she saw it again, in the second strip of moonlight--lost it again--saw it in the third strip--lost it once more--and saw it in the fourth. Moment by moment it advanced, now mysteriously lost in the shadow, now suddenly visible again in the light, until it reached the fifth and nearest strip of moonlight. There it paused, and strayed aside slowly to the middle of the Hall. It stopped at the tripod, and stood, s.h.i.+vering audibly in the silence, with its hands raised over the dead ashes, in the action of warming them at a fire. It turned back again, moving down the path of the moonlight, stopped at the fifth window, turned once more, and came on softly through the shadow straight to the place where Magdalen stood.
Her voice was dumb, her will was helpless. Every sense in her but the seeing sense was paralyzed. The seeing sense--held fast in the fetters of its own terror--looked unchangeably straightforward, as it had looked from the first. There she stood in the door-way, full in the path of the figure advancing on her through the shadow, nearer and nearer, step by step.
It came close.
The bonds of horror that held her burst asunder when it was within arm's-length. She started back. The light of the candle on the table fell full on its face, and showed her--Admiral Bartram.
A long, gray dressing-gown was wrapped round him. His head was uncovered; his feet were bare. In his left hand he carried his little basket of keys. He pa.s.sed Magdalen slowly, his lips whispering without intermission, his open eyes staring straight before him with the gla.s.sy stare of death. His eyes revealed to her the terrifying truth. He was walking in his sleep.
The terror of seeing him as she saw him now was not the terror she had felt when her eyes first lighted on him--an apparition in the moon-light, a specter in the ghostly Hall. This time she could struggle against the shock; she could feel the depth of her own fear.
He pa.s.sed her, and stopped in the middle of the room. Magdalen ventured near enough to him to be within reach of his voice as he muttered to himself. She ventured nearer still, and heard the name of her dead husband fall distinctly from the sleep-walker's lips.
”Noel!” he said, in the low monotonous tones of a dreamer talking in his sleep, ”my good fellow, Noel, take it back again! It worries me day and night. I don't know where it's safe; I don't know where to put it. Take it back, Noel--take it back!”
As those words escaped him, he walked to the buhl cabinet. He sat down in the chair placed before it, and searched in the basket among his keys. Magdalen softly followed him, and stood behind his chair, waiting with the candle in her hand. He found the key, and unlocked the cabinet.
Without an instant's hesitation, he drew out a drawer, the second of a row. The one thing in the drawer was a folded letter. He removed it, and put it down before him on the table. ”Take it back, Noel!” he repeated, mechanically; ”take it back!”
Magdalen looked over his shoulder and read these lines, traced in her husband's handwriting, at the top of the letter: _To be kept in your own possession, and to be opened by yourself only on the day of my decease.
Noel Vanstone._ She saw the words plainly, with the admiral's name and the admiral's address written under them.
The Trust within reach of her hand! The Trust traced to its hiding-place at last!
She took one step forward, to steal round his chair and to s.n.a.t.c.h the letter from the table. At the instant when she moved, he took it up once more, locked the cabinet, and, rising, turned and faced her.
In the impulse of the moment, she stretched out her hand toward the hand in which he held the letter. The yellow candle-light fell full on him.
The awful death-in-life of his face--the mystery of the sleeping body, moving in unconscious obedience to the dreaming mind--daunted her. Her hand trembled, and dropped again at her side.
He put the key of the cabinet back in the basket, and crossed the room to the bureau, with the basket in one hand and the letter in the other.
Magdalen set the candle on the table again, and watched him. As he had opened the cabinet, so he now opened the bureau. Once more Magdalen stretched out her hand, and once more she recoiled before the mystery and the terror of his sleep. He put the letter in a drawer at the back of the bureau, and closed the heavy oaken lid again. ”Yes,” he said.
”Safer there, as you say, Noel--safer there.” So he spoke. So, time after time, the words that betrayed him revealed the dead man living and speaking again in the dream.
Had he locked the bureau? Magdalen had not heard the lock turn. As he slowly moved away, walking back once more toward the middle of the room, she tried the lid. It was locked. That discovery made, she looked to see what he was doing next. He was leaving the room again, with the basket of keys in his hand. When her first glance overtook him, he was crossing the threshold of the door.