Under any other circumstances,he would have gone down to the public-house parlour,would have called for his grog,and would have laughed and talked with the company assembled as familiarly as if he had known them all his life.But the very thought of whiling away the time in this manner was distasteful to him.The new situation in which he was placed seemed to have altered him to himself already.Thus far,his life had been the common,trifling,prosaic,surface-life of a prosperous young man,with no troubles to conquer,and no trials to face.He had lost no relation whom he loved,no friend whom he treasured.Till this night,what share he had of the immortal inheritance that is divided amongst us all,had laid dormant within him.Till this night,Death and he had not once met,even in thought.
He took a few turns up and down the room -then stopped.The noise made by his boots on the poorly carpeted floor,jarred on his ear.
He hesitated a little,and ended by taking the boots off,and walking backwards and forwards noiselessly.All desire to sleep or to rest had left him.The bare thought of lying down on the unoccupied bed instantly drew the picture on his mind of a dreadful mimicry of the position of the dead man.Who was he?What was the story of his past life?Poor he must have been,or he would not have stopped at such a place as The Two Robins Inn -and weakened,probably,by long illness,or he could hardly have died in the manner in which the landlord had described.Poor,ill,lonely,-dead in a strange place;dead,with nobody but a stranger to pity him.A sad story:truly,on the mere face of it,a very sad story.
While these thoughts were passing through his mind,he had stopped insensibly at the window,close to which stood the foot of the bed with the closed curtains.At first he looked at it absently;then he became conscious that his eyes were fixed on it;and then,a perverse desire took possession of him to do the very thing which he had resolved not to do,up to this time -to look at the dead man.
He stretched out his hand towards the curtains;but checked himself in the very act of undrawing them,turned his back sharply on the bed,and walked towards the chimney-piece,to see what things were placed on it,and to try if he could keep the dead man out of his mind in that way.
There was a pewter inkstand on the chimney-piece,with some mildewed remains of ink in the bottle.There were two coarse china ornaments of the commonest kind;and there was a square of embossed card,dirty and fly-blown,with a collection of wretched riddles printed on it,in all sorts of zig-zag directions,and in variously coloured inks.He took the card,and went away,to read it,to the table on which the candle was placed;sitting down,with his back resolutely turned to the curtained bed.
He read the first riddle,the second,the third,all in one corner of the card -then turned it round impatiently to look at another.
Before he could begin reading the riddles printed here,the sound of the church-clock stopped him.Eleven.He had got through an hour of the time,in the room with the dead man.
Once more he looked at the card.It was not easy to make out the letters printed on it,in consequence of the dimness of the light which the landlord had left him -a common tallow candle,furnished with a pair of heavy old-fashioned steel snuffers.Up to this time,his mind had been too much occupied to think of the light.
He had left the wick of the candle unsnuffed,till it had risen higher than the flame,and had burnt into an odd pent-house shape at the top,from which morsels of the charred cotton fell off,from time to time,in little flakes.He took up the snuffers now,and trimmed the wick.The light brightened directly,and the room became less dismal.
Again he turned to the riddles;reading them doggedly and resolutely,now in one corner of the card,now in another.All his efforts,however,could not fix his attention on them.He pursued his occupation mechanically,deriving no sort of impression from what he was reading.It was as if a shadow from the curtained bed had got between his mind and the gaily printed letters -a shadow that nothing could dispel.At last,he gave up the struggle,and threw the card from him impatiently,and took to walking softly up and down the room again.
The dead man,the dead man,the HIDDEN dead man on the bed!There was the one persistent idea still haunting him.Hidden?Was it only the body being there,or was it the body being there,concealed,that was preying on his mind?He stopped at the window,with that doubt in him;once more listening to the pattering rain,once more looking out into the black darkness.
Still the dead man!The darkness forced his mind back upon itself,and set his memory at work,reviving,with a painfully-vivid distinctness the momentary impression it had received from the first sight of the corpse.Before long the face seemed to be hovering out in the middle of the darkness,confronting him through the window,with the paleness whiter,with the dreadful dull line of light between the imperfectly-closed eyelids broader than he had seen it -with the parted lips slowly dropping farther and farther away from each other -with the features growing larger and moving closer,till they seemed to fill the window and to silence the rain,and to shut out the night.
The sound of a voice,shouting below-stairs,woke him suddenly from the dream of his own distempered fancy.He recognised it as the voice of the landlord.'Shut up at twelve,Ben,'he heard it say.
'I'm off to bed.'
He wiped away the damp that had gathered on his forehead,reasoned with himself for a little while,and resolved to shake his mind free of the ghastly counterfeit which still clung to it,by forcing himself to confront,if it was only for a moment,the solemn reality.Without allowing himself an instant to hesitate,he parted the curtains at the foot of the bed,and looked through.