The Journeying Boy (26 page)

Yet long before that tiny wash of light swept into the room he knew by some sufficient instinct what would be revealed by it. Watchers stood beside his bed, waiting in absolute stillness to know whether their inspection had aroused him. Mr Thewless kept his eyes shut and opened all his ears. A soft breathing was unquestionably distinguishable on either side of him.

The humble creatures that turn immobile at danger, and whom not even a thrusting stick or nudging toe can stir to any sign of life, have no monopoly of this primitive notion of self-protection. Mr Thewless had a very strong impulse simply to lie still, keep his eyes shut, and trust that the mysterious presences would depart. Indeed, this was less a proposal of his mind, a plan or craft to act on, than simply something that was happening to his body as it lay. Cautiously he endeavoured to flex a knee and was by no means convinced that he had the power to do so. He wondered if he could even open his mouth, and he remembered those worst nocturnal terrors of childhood in which there is reft from one the power of calling out.

And Mr Thewless endeavoured to seek security by returning into his dream. In his dream there had been safety amid innumerable hazards because…yes, because he had been in the charge of Humphrey Paxton. And suddenly, with an agility altogether surprising, Mr Thewless leapt out of bed. For Humphrey Paxton was
his
charge; he was responsible for the safety of the boy; and to hesitate in the face of undefined danger was to cling ignobly to the topsy-turvy realm of sleep. It might be by his own bedside that threatening figures hovered. Nevertheless, he knew himself to be a person of no consequence, and if they did so hover there this was merely incidental in some way to a design against the boy. Therefore it was the boy’s safety that was to be seen to.

Thus did Mr Thewless for the moment bring wisdom from his dream. He leapt from his bed, aware of startled movement on either side of him, and by some paranormal sense of direction also dredged up from sleep, precipitated himself across and out of the room. In an instant he was at the next door, and as he opened it and entered the dim illumination from the lighthouse swept across it. It was, of course, empty and the bed undisturbed; his mind in prompting him to sudden action had missed a step, and he had forgotten about Humphrey’s having been moved to another part of the house. He paused irresolutely, and as action failed him fear returned. There
were
people in his own room. It was a testing moment – and the more so because he saw before him a rational yet surely craven plan. The door on which his hand now rested had a key on its inner side. In an instant he could lock himself in, and from the refuge thus obtained raise a loud alarm. In a sense this was even his wisest, his most responsible, course. For if he returned to encounter the intruders alone it was very possible that he might be instantly and silently overpowered, and the villains might then achieve with impunity whatever further mischief they proposed.

But as these sensible considerations presented themselves to Mr Thewless’ mind something altogether more potent and primitive stirred in his blood. Sapper, it might be said, and not simple sapience took control; a glorious anger sang suddenly in his ears; he took a deep breath and marched back to his own room. The corridor which he had briefly to traverse was for the moment sufficiently lit through some skylight to make observation possible to his sharpened sense. Nothing stirred in the long vista it presented. The intruders must be awaiting him in his own room still.

Mr Thewless belonged to a clerkly caste whose immemorial weapon has been words. As he took the half-dozen further steps that would confront him with the enemy he absurdly tested out on his inner ear some form of words that would confound them. He would point out that they had been detected, that the household contained a considerable number of able-bodied men, that firearms were available to these and – since prevarication was surely permissible in a situation like the present – that the police had already been summoned by telephone. But at the same time as he prepared this mere logomachy he had the good sense to wish himself possessed of a poker or even an empty bottle. And in default of anything of the sort, he clenched his fists in a manner suggesting itself to him as the right posture for pugilistic encounter and walked into his room.

He was standing in the middle of it and nothing had happened. The glint of light came and went, revealing seeming emptiness. He walked boldly to his bedside and lit his candle. Still nothing revealed itself. He searched, and satisfied himself that he was alone. And at that, feeling slightly giddy, he sat down on the bed.

Deep in the mind there is a clock that never goes wrong. Hypnotists can exploit it as an alarm, enjoining one to blow one’s nose at four twenty-five next Thursday. Of this instrument, which is said to work with particular nicety during sleep, Mr Thewless was still sufficiently possessed to have an instinctive assurance that the interval during which he had been in Humphrey’s late room was insufficient to have permitted anyone to escape down the corridor. He stood up and had a second look under his bed. He crossed to the window and satisfied himself that no creature not possessed of wings could have departed that way with any hope of an unbroken neck. And at this he sat down again upon his bed, possessed by a new alarm. The nature of this may be guessed. He feared that his imagination had been playing tricks with him – and doing so with more resounding success than any substantial sanity would have allowed. He was now resigned to believing himself highly susceptible to melodrama viewed as a sort of infection or plague, and even to the hypothesis – nebulous but nevertheless haunting – that he and his pupil were in some degree of
rapport
in matters of the sort. Yes, that would be it. Humphrey had been having a nightmare on the lines upon which his fantasy commonly ran, and the shadow of it had fallen upon himself at the other end of the house. But at least Humphrey, whether or not he too had actually awakened to the conviction of lurking presences, had not made night hideous with his alarms; and Mr Thewless was thankful that he had himself at the critical moment at least managed to refrain from doing this. Assuredly it had all been a figment. The only thing to do was to go to sleep again.

His candle afforded only the most feeble illumination, but when he turned to light the oil lamp which had stood at the bottom of his bed he found that in his hasty rising he had overturned it and knocked it to the floor. This was both tiresome and embarrassing, as was also the evidence of an extreme of terrified violence with which he must have acted. For his bed was in quite surprising confusion, its various furnishings tumbled around it and a heavy mattress, of the kind comfortably constructed with an interior springing, dragged cornerwise to the floor. This he now set about remedying, an apparently simple if vexatious task which presently revealed itself as an unexpected difficulty. At first he made considerable progress, only to find upon scrutiny that he had employed as an under sheet what was demonstrably some species of linen coverlet. To leave matters so disposed might be to excite surprise and even ridicule in Mr Bolderwood’s domestics in the morning. He therefore started again. But this time he could find no sheets at all; the candle was burning unnervingly near its socket; and for a moment he paused between irritation and discouragement.

In this pause his conscience stirred. If it was indeed true that his recent alarming experience was no more than a sympathetic response to some nightmare or even hallucination of Humphrey’s was it not his duty to inform himself as to the boy’s condition now? That Humphrey had raised no outcry was a fact capable of a distressing equally with a reassuring interpretation. Indeed, the fact that this abnormal experience had come to his tutor as some sort of message from another mind was surely an indication of that mind’s having been perilously disturbed. And Mr Thewless had a sudden and vivid picture of the unfortunate child, prone to believe in sinister powers intent to shut him up in dark, confined spaces, lying strained and motionless in a bed round which he believed these powers to have gathered for a final onslaught. Humphrey’s removal to another part of the house had not left him altogether happy – not because he judged Ivor Bolderwood other than in every way reliable, but because it was to himself, after all, that the boy had been confided, and it was he, again, who was best acquainted with the distresses to which he was liable.

There was, then, nothing for it. He must go at once and see how Humphrey was getting on. If the boy proved to be peacefully sleeping there would be no harm done. And Mr Thewless, taking up his stump of candle in his holder, opened his door once more. As he did so, he remembered
why
Humphrey had been moved out of his first room. It was because he had unfortunately been let overhear the elder Mr Bolderwood remark that it was haunted.

Had Mr Thewless been asked if he believed in ghosts, he would have replied at some length, and in a fashion altogether philosophical or scientific. But all this would have boiled down to the statement that he
did
. Supernatural appearances were for him, in theory, an essentially harmless and highly interesting class of phenomena, for long – most unfortunately – merely vestigial in human experience, from an intelligent study of which it might be possible to draw important conclusions on the growth and structure of the human mind. Thus if manifestations of this order lurked in Humphrey’s late room; if it had been anything of the sort that had intruded upon himself; if, out in the corridor now, forces aside from the common order of Nature waited patiently for any move Mr Thewless might make: if these things were so the circumstance was to be regarded essentially in the light of a ‘find’. A philologist who stumbles upon some substantial vestige of a dying language, or an anthropologist who peers over a rock and surprises some last rehearsal of the immemorial ceremonies of a vanishing tribe, presented – again in theory – a fair parallel to Mr Thewless’ situation now. And yet he did not feel quite like this. Killyboffin Hall showed several aspects to the world, and if the one predominant among these was benign, being represented by the cheerful irascibility and muddle of its owner, there was yet another which was distinctly inimical to the easy poise of highly educated persons. The mere manner in which the winds blew through the place, and the diversity of odd acoustic effects they produced, were things in themselves discomposing. The recurrent washes of faint light through this upper story, like an infinitely distant reflection of the flicker and flare of some infernal bonfire, brought another sense into the service of unsettlement. And again – for by this time Mr Thewless had got himself fairly into the corridor – there was the powerful tide of suggestion that seemed to sweep in from the untenanted quarters of the house, from the vistas of shrouded objects – or, better, forms that every branching corridor and open door revealed. Into one of these – it was some piece of sheeted statuary which, unaccountably, he had not noticed before – he almost bumped as he turned left from his room and addressed himself to the task, not altogether simple, of making his way to Humphrey’s new quarters.

There was a staircase to go down and presently another to ascend, with some stretch of corridor intervening and at either end. But he was now, he believed, thoroughly awake, and he set off confidently enough. If his wandering disturbed his hosts he might look a little foolish, but it was reasonable to suppose that they would accept his explanations sympathetically. And at least there seemed to be no possibility of a tiresome encounter with wakeful servants, since one of Mr Bolderwood’s whims had effectively barred these from the main part of the building. He advanced, therefore, with his candlestick held before him, his free hand shielding as effectively as possible its uncertain flame. He had, he presently discovered, forgotten to bring his matches, so that an extinguishing puff of wind might be awkward unless he cared to go back and remedy the omission. But this he found himself obscurely disinclined to do. And the candle, for that matter, seemed not vital to him, for all along this corridor, and over the stairhead which he now glimpsed dimly before him, there still through sundry uncurtained windows played the intermittent gleam from the lighthouse – as also, he now noticed, a steady and yet more tenuous illumination which spoke of the waning moon as having emerged from cloud.

All this was almost cheerful. Nevertheless, Mr Thewless, his recent experiences having been as they were, would have been insensitive indeed had he not powerfully owned an impulse to peer warily about him as his bare feet (he had not paused for slippers or dressing-gown) felt cautiously over the expanses of worn carpet which he trod. First there was a line of large pictures so darkened that they might have been windows giving upon a starless night; his candle as he passed fleetingly conjured from their lower margins, above the dull gleam of tarnished gold frames, marble steps, the nether folds of flowing draperies, broken lances, and abandoned armour, here and there a human limb splayed out in some martial disaster or, it might be, voluptuous excess. These appearances were unalarming in themselves; yet their suggestion of violent matters transacting themselves just beyond his present circumscribed field of vision was not without its effect upon Mr Thewless, and irrational apprehensiveness would doubtless have gained upon him again even had it not been for the sudden appearance of the dog.

It was a creature that swept him back at once into that world of prodigies within which his railway journey had for a time submerged him; this less because of its evident ferocity as it stood suddenly and solidly before him than because of its unnatural size. It was a dog quite as big – and that in the sense of quite as
tall
– as Mr Thewless himself; and it seemed to have sprung from nowhere in this silent house and to be regarding the pyjama’d figure before it much in the light of a wholly unexpected nocturnal snack. In this crisis Mr Thewless’ brain worked very well. From the size of the animal he concluded that it was extinct; if it was extinct it was stuffed; and a stuffed dog needs no collops. Nevertheless, the intellectual conviction that he was merely in the presence of a pretty museum specimen of the ancient Irish wolf-hound did not altogether end the matter. There was a glint in the creature’s verisimilar glass eye that almost defied the reassuring voice of reason; and it was from the moment of this encounter that Mr Thewless looked not merely about him but
behind
. The stuffed hound remained harmlessly immobile, but it had done its work.