CLOSED CORRIDORS
To spend one's days perforce in an enormous house alone is a thing likely to play unholy tricks with a man's mind and lead it to gloomy workings.To know the existence of a hundred or so of closed doors shut on the darkness of unoccupied rooms;to be conscious of flights of unmounted stairs, of stretches of untrodden corridors, of unending walls, from which the pictured eyes of long dead men and women stare, as if seeing things which human eyes behold not--is an eerie and unwholesome thing.Mount Dunstan slept in a large four-post bed in a chamber in which he might have died or been murdered a score of times without being able to communicate with the remote servants' quarters below stairs, where lay the one man and one woman who attended him.When he came late to his room and prepared for sleep by the light of two flickering candles the silence of the dead in tombs was about him; but it was only a more profound and insistent thing than the silence of the day, because it was the silence of the night, which is a presence.He used to tell himself with secret smiles at the fact that at certain times the fantasy was half believable--that there were things which walked about softly at night--things which did not want to be dead.He himself had picked them out from among the pictures in the gallery--pretty, light, petulant women; adventurous-eyed, full-blooded, eager men.His theory was that they hated their stone coffins, and fought their way back through the grey mists to try to talk and make love and to be seen of warm things which were alive.But it was not to be done, because they had no bodies and no voices, and when they beat upon closed doors they would not open.Still they came back--came back.And sometimes there was a rustle and a sweep through the air in a passage, or a creak, or a sense of waiting which was almost a sound.
"Perhaps some of them have gone when they have been as I am," he had said one black night, when he had sat in his room staring at the floor."If a man was dragged out when he had not LIVED a day, he would come back I should come back if--God! A man COULD not be dragged away--like THIS!"And to sit alone and think of it was an awful and a lonely thing--a lonely thing.
But loneliness was nothing new, only that in these months his had strangely intensified itself.This, though he was not aware of it, was because the soul and body which were the completing parts of him were within reach--and without it.
When he went down to breakfast he sat singly at his table, round which twenty people might have laughed and talked.
Between the dining-room and the library he spent his days when he was not out of doors.Since he could not afford servants, the many other rooms must be kept closed.It was a ghastly and melancholy thing to make, as he must sometimes, a sort of precautionary visit to the state apartments.He was the last Mount Dunstan, and he would never see them opened again for use, but so long as he lived under the roof he might by prevision check, in a measure, the too rapid encroachments of decay.To have a leak stopped here, a nail driven or a support put there, seemed decent things to do.
"Whom am I doing it for?" he said to Mr.Penzance."Iam doing it for myself--because I cannot help it.The place seems to me like some gorgeous old warrior come to the end of his days It has stood the war of things for century after century--the war of things.It is going now I am all that is left to it.It is all I have.So I patch it up when I can afford it, with a crutch or a splint and a bandage."Late in the afternoon of the day on which Miss Vanderpoel rode away from West Ways with Lord Westholt, a stealthy and darkly purple cloud rose, lifting its ominous bulk against a chrysoprase and pink horizon.It was the kind of cloud which speaks of but one thing to those who watch clouds, or even casually consider them.So Lady Anstruthers felt some surprise when she saw Sir Nigel mount his horse before the stone steps and ride away, as it were, into the very heart of the coming storm.
"Nigel will be caught in the rain," she said to her sister.
"I wonder why he goes out now.It would be better to wait until to-morrow."But Sir Nigel did not think so.He had calculated matters with some nicety.He was not exactly on such terms with Mount Dunstan as would make a casual call seem an entirely natural thing, and he wished to drop in upon him for a casual call and in an unpremeditated manner.He meant to reach the Mount about the time the storm broke, under which circumstance nothing could bear more lightly an air of being unpremeditated than to take refuge in a chance passing.
Mount Dunstan was in the library.He had sat smoking his pipe while he watched the purple cloud roll up and spread itself, blotting out the chrysoprase and pink and blue, and when the branches of the trees began to toss about he had looked on with pleasure as the rush of big rain drops came down and pelted things.It was a fine storm, and there were some imposing claps of thunder and jagged flashes of lightning.As one splendid rattle shook the air he was surprised to hear a summons at the great hall door.Who on earth could be turning up at this time? His man Reeve announced the arrival a few moments later, and it was Sir Nigel Anstruthers.He had, he explained, been riding through the village when the deluge descended, and it had occurred to him to turn in at the park gates and ask a temporary shelter.Mount Dunstan received him with sufficient courtesy.His appearance was not a thing to rejoice over, but it could be endured.Whisky and soda and a smoke would serve to pass the hour, if the storm lasted so long.
Conversation was not the easiest thing in the world under the circumstances, but Sir Nigel led the way steadily after he had taken his seat and accepted the hospitalities offered.