第16章

There was a sad, peaceful, white face, with the awful mystery of stillness on it, laid back upon the pillow.No stir, no change there! He only looked at it for a moment before he closed the curtains again - but that moment steadied him, calmed him, restored him - mind and body - to himself.

He returned to his old occupation of walking up and down the room; persevering in it, this time, till the clock struck again. Twelve.

As the sound of the clock-bell died away, it was succeeded by the confused noise, down-stairs, of the drinkers in the tap-room leaving the house.The next sound, after an interval of silence, was caused by the barring of the door, and the closing of the shutters, at the back of the Inn.Then the silence followed again, and was disturbed no more.

He was alone now - absolutely, utterly, alone with the dead man, till the next morning.

The wick of the candle wanted trimming again.He took up the snuffers - but paused suddenly on the very point of using them, and looked attentively at the candle - then back, over his shoulder, at the curtained bed- then again at the candle.It had been lighted, for the first time, to show him the way up-stairs, and three parts of it, at least, were already consumed.In another hour it would be burnt out.In another hour - unless he called at once to the man who had shut up the Inn, for a fresh candle - he would be left in the dark.

Strongly as his mind had been affected since he had entered his room,his unreasonable dread of encountering ridicule, and of exposing his courage to suspicion, had not altogether lost its influence over him, even yet.He lingered irresolutely by the table, waiting till he could prevail on himself to open the door, and call, from the landing, to the man who had shut up the Inn.In his present hesitating frame of mind, it was a kind of relief to gain a few moments only by engaging in the trifling occupation of snuffing the candle.His hand trembled a little, and the snuffers were heavy and awkward to use.When he closed them on the wick, he closed them a hair's breadth too low.In an instant the candle was out, and the room was plunged in pitch darkness.

The one impression which the absence of light immediately produced on his mind, was distrust of the curtained bed - distrust which shaped itself into no distinct idea, but which was powerful enough in its very vagueness, to bind him down to his chair, to make his heart beat fast, and to set him listening intently.No sound stirred in the room but the familiar sound of the rain against the window, louder and sharper now than he had heard it yet.

Still the vague distrust, the inexpressible dread possessed him, and kept him to his chair.He had put his carpet-bag on the table, when he first entered the room; and he now took the key from his pocket, reached out his hand softly, opened the bag, and groped in it for his travelling writing-case, in which he knew that there was a small store of matches.When he had got one of the matches, he waited before he struck it on the coarse wooden table, and listened intently again, without knowing why.Still there was no sound in the room but the steady, ceaseless, rattling sound of the rain.

He lighted the candle again, without another moment of delay and, on the instant of its burning up, the first object in the room that his eyes sought for was the curtained bed.

Just before the light had been put out, he had looked in that direction, and had seen no change, no disarrangement of any sort, in the folds of the closely-drawn curtains.

When he looked at the bed, now, he saw, hanging over the side of it, a long white hand.

It lay perfectly motionless, midway on the side of the bed, where the curtain at the head and the curtain at the foot met.Nothing more was visible. The clinging curtains hid everything but the long white hand.

He stood looking at it unable to stir, unable to call out; feeling nothing, knowing nothing, every faculty he possessed gathered up and lost in the one seeing faculty.How long that first panic held him he never could tell afterwards.It might have been only for a moment; it might have been for many minutes together.How he got to the bed - whether he ran to it headlong, or whether he approached it slowly - how he wrought himself up to unclose the curtains and look in, he never has remembered, and never will remember to his dying day.It is enough that he did go to the bed, and that he did look inside the curtains.

The man had moved.One of his arms was outside the clothes; his face was turned a little on the pillow; his eyelids were wide open.Changed as to position, and as to one of the features, the face was, otherwise, fearfully and wonderfully unaltered.The dead paleness and the dead quiet were on it stillOne glance showed Arthur this - one glance, before he flew breathlessly to the door, and alarmed the house.

The man whom the landlord called 'Ben,' was the first to appear on the stairs.In three words, Arthur told him what had happened, and sent him for the nearest doctor.

I, who tell you this story, was then staying with a medical friend of mine, in practice at Doncaster, taking care of his patients for him, during his absence in London; and I, for the time being, was the nearest doctor.They had sent for me from the Inn, when the stranger was taken ill in the afternoon; but I was not at home, and medical assistance was sought for elsewhere.When the man from The Two Robins rang the night-bell, I was just thinking of going to bed.Naturally enough, I did not believe a word of his story about 'a dead man who had come to life again.' However, I put on my hat, armed myself with one or two bottles of restorative medicine, and ran to the Inn, expecting to find nothing more remarkable, when I got there, than a patient in a fit.