My bedroom and dressing room were above the big living-room on the
first floor. On the second floor a long corridor ran the length of the
house, with rooms opening from both sides. In the wings were small
corridors crossing the main one--the plan was simplicity itself. And
just as I got back into bed, I heard a sound from the east wing,
apparently, that made me stop, frozen, with one bedroom slipper half
off, and listen. It was a rattling metallic sound, and it reverberated
along the empty halls like the crash of doom. It was for all the world
as if something heavy, perhaps a piece of steel, had rolled clattering
and jangling down the hard-wood stairs leading to the card-room.
In the silence that followed Liddy stirred and snored again. I was
exasperated: first she kept me awake by silly alarms, then when she was
needed she slept like Joe Jefferson, or Rip,--they are always the same
to me. I went in and aroused her, and I give her credit for being wide
awake the minute I spoke.
"Get up," I said, "if you don't want to be murdered in your bed."
"Where? How?" she yelled vociferously, and jumped up.
"There's somebody in the house," I said. "Get up. We'll have to get
to the telephone."
"Not out in the hall!" she gasped; "Oh, Miss Rachel, not out in the
hall!" trying to hold me back. But I am a large woman and Liddy is
small. We got to the door, somehow, and Liddy held a brass andiron,
which it was all she could do to lift, let alone brain anybody with. I
listened, and, hearing nothing, opened the door a little and peered
into the hall. It was a black void, full of terrible suggestion, and
my candle only emphasized the gloom. Liddy squealed and drew me back
again, and as the door slammed, the mirror I had put on the transom
came down and hit her on the head. That completed our demoralization.
It was some time before I could persuade her she had not been attacked
from behind by a burglar, and when she found the mirror smashed on the
floor she wasn't much better.
"There's going to be a death!" she wailed. "Oh, Miss Rachel, there's
going to be a death!"
"There will be," I said grimly, "if you don't keep quiet, Liddy Allen."
And so we sat there until morning, wondering if the candle would last
until dawn, and arranging what trains we could take back to town. If
we had only stuck to that decision and gone back before it was too late!
The sun came finally, and from my window I watched the trees along the
drive take shadowy form, gradually lose their ghostlike appearance,
become gray and then green. The Greenwood Club showed itself a dab of
white against the hill across the valley, and an early robin or two
hopped around in the dew. Not until the milk-boy and the sun came,
about the same time, did I dare to open the door into the hall and look
around. Everything was as we had left it. Trunks were heaped here and
there, ready for the trunk-room, and through an end window of stained
glass came a streak of red and yellow daylight that was eminently
cheerful. The milk-boy was pounding somewhere below, and the day had
begun.