It was fortunate for me that I had to take precautions to ensure (so far
as I could) the safety of my dreaded visitor; for, this thought pressing
on me when I awoke, held other thoughts in a confused concourse at a
distance.
The impossibility of keeping him concealed in the chambers was
self-evident. It could not be done, and the attempt to do it would
inevitably engender suspicion. True, I had no Avenger in my service now,
but I was looked after by an inflammatory old female, assisted by an
animated rag-bag whom she called her niece, and to keep a room secret
from them would be to invite curiosity and exaggeration. They both had
weak eyes, which I had long attributed to their chronically looking in
at keyholes, and they were always at hand when not wanted; indeed that
was their only reliable quality besides larceny. Not to get up a mystery
with these people, I resolved to announce in the morning that my uncle
had unexpectedly come from the country.
This course I decided on while I was yet groping about in the darkness
for the means of getting a light. Not stumbling on the means after all,
I was fain to go out to the adjacent Lodge and get the watchman there to
come with his lantern. Now, in groping my way down the black staircase I
fell over something, and that something was a man crouching in a corner.
As the man made no answer when I asked him what he did there, but eluded
my touch in silence, I ran to the Lodge and urged the watchman to come
quickly; telling him of the incident on the way back. The wind being as
fierce as ever, we did not care to endanger the light in the lantern by
rekindling the extinguished lamps on the staircase, but we examined the
staircase from the bottom to the top and found no one there. It then
occurred to me as possible that the man might have slipped into my
rooms; so, lighting my candle at the watchman's, and leaving him
standing at the door, I examined them carefully, including the room in
which my dreaded guest lay asleep. All was quiet, and assuredly no other
man was in those chambers.
It troubled me that there should have been a lurker on the stairs, on
that night of all nights in the year, and I asked the watchman, on the
chance of eliciting some hopeful explanation as I handed him a dram
at the door, whether he had admitted at his gate any gentleman who had
perceptibly been dining out? Yes, he said; at different times of the
night, three. One lived in Fountain Court, and the other two lived in
the Lane, and he had seen them all go home. Again, the only other man
who dwelt in the house of which my chambers formed a part had been in
the country for some weeks, and he certainly had not returned in the
night, because we had seen his door with his seal on it as we came
up-stairs.