She turned it in the rusty lock with a strength which, at any other time, she would have been utterly incapable of exerting; she opened the door with a blow of her hand, which burst it away at one stroke from the jambs to which it stuck. Panting for breath, she flew across the forsaken north hall, without stopping for one second to push the door to behind her. The creeping creatures, the noisome house-reptiles that possessed the place, crawled away, shadow-like, on either side of her toward the walls. She never noticed them, never turned away for them. Across the hall, and up the stairs at the end of it, she ran, till she gained the open landing at the top--and there she suddenly checked herself in front of the first door.
The first door of the long range of rooms that opened on the landing; the door that fronted the topmost of the flight of stairs. She stopped; she looked at it--it was not the door she had come to open; and yet she could not tear herself away from it. Scrawled on the panel in white chalk was the figure--"I." And when she looked down at the hunch of keys in her hands, there was the figure "I." on a label, answering to it.
She tried to think, to follow out anyone of all the thronging suspicions that beset her to the conclusion at which it might point. The effort was useless; her mind was gone; her bodily senses of seeing and hearing--senses which had now become painfully and incomprehensibly sharpened--seemed to be the sole relics of intelligence that she had left to guide her. She put her hand over her eyes, and waited a little so, and then went on slowly along the landing, looking at the doors.
No. "II.," No. "III.," No. "IV.," traced on the panels in the same white chalk, and answering to the numbered labels on the keys, the figures on which were written in ink. No. "IV." the middle room of the first floor range of eight. She stopped there again, trembling from head to foot. It was the door of the Myrtle Room.
Did the chalked numbers stop there? She looked on down the landing. No. The four doors remaining were regularly numbered on to "VIII."
She came back again to the door of the Myrtle Room, sought out the key labeled with the figure "IV."--hesitated--and looked back distrustfully over the deserted hall.
The canvases of the old family pictures, which she had seen bulging out of their frames in the past time when she hid the letter, had, for the most part, rotted away from them now, and lay in great black ragged strips on the floor of the hall. Islands and continents of damp spread like the map of some strange region over the lofty vaulted ceiling. Cobwebs, heavy with dust, hung down in festoons from broken cornices. Dirt stains lay on the stone pavement, like gross reflections of the damp stains on the ceiling. The broad flight of stairs leading up to the open landing before the rooms of the first floor had sunk down bodily toward one side. The banisters which protected the outer edge of the landing were broken away into ragged gaps. The light of day was stained, the air of heaven was stilled, the sounds of earth were silenced in the north hall.
Silenced? Were all sounds silenced? Or was there something stirring that just touched the sense of hearing, that just deepened the dismal stillness, and no more?
Sarah listened, keeping her face still set toward the hall--listened, and heard a faint sound behind her. Was it outside the door on which her back was turned? Or was it inside--in the Myrtle Room?
Inside. With the first conviction of that, all thought, all sensation left her. She forgot the suspicious numbering of the doors; she became insensible to the lapse of time, unconscious of the risk of discovery. All exercise of her other faculties was now merged in the exercise of the one faculty of listening.
It was a still, faint, stealthily rustling sound; and it moved to and fro at intervals, to and fro softly, now at one end, now at the other of the Myrtle Room. There were moments when it grew suddenly distinct--other moments when it died away in gradations too light to follow. Sometimes it seemed to sweep over the floor at a bound--sometimes it crept with slow, continuous rustlings that just wavered on the verge of absolute silence.
Her feet still rooted to the spot on which she stood, Sarah turned her head slowly, inch by inch, toward the door of the Myrtle Room. A moment before, while she was as yet unconscious of the faint sound moving to and fro within it, she had been drawing her breath heavily and quickly. She might have been dead now, her bosom was so still, her breathing so noiseless. The same mysterious change came over her face which had altered it when the darkness began to gather in the little parlor at Truro. The same fearful look of inquiry which she had then fixed on the vacant corner of the room was in her eyes now, as they slowly turned on the door.
"Mistress!" she whispered. "Am I too late? Are you there before me?"
The stealthily rustling sound inside paused--renewed itself--died away again faintly; away at the lower end of the room.
Her eyes still remained fixed on the Myrtle Room, strained, and opened wider and wider--opened as if they would look through the very door itself--opened as if they were watching for the opaque wood to turn transparent, and show what was behind it.
"Over the lonesome floor, over the lonesome floor--how light it moves!" she whispered again. "Mistress! does the black dress I made for you rustle no louder than that?"
The sound stopped again--then suddenly advanced at one stealthy sweep close to the inside of the door.
If she could have moved at that moment; if she could have looked down to the line of open space between the bottom of the door and the flooring below, when the faintly rustling sound came nearest to her, she might have seen the insignificant cause that produced it lying self-betrayed under the door, partly outside, partly inside, in the shape of a fragment of faded red paper from the wall of the Myrtle Room. Time and damp had loosened the paper all round the apartment. Two or three yards of it had been torn off by the builder while he was examining the walls--sometimes in large pieces, sometimes in small pieces, just as it happened to come away--and had been thrown down by him on the bare, boarded floor, to become the sport of the wind, whenever it happened to blow through the broken panes of glass in the window. If she had only moved! If she had only looked down for one little second of time!
She was past moving and past looking: the paroxysm of superstitious horror that possessed her held her still in every limb and every feature. She never started, she uttered no cry, when the rustling noise came nearest. The one outward sign which showed how the terror of its approach shook her to the very soul expressed itself only in the changed action of her right hand, in which she still held the keys. At the instant when the wind wafted the fragment of paper closest to the door, her fingers lost their power of contraction, and became as nerveless and helpless as if she had fainted. The heavy bunch of keys slipped from her suddenly loosened grasp, dropped at her side on the outer edge of the landing, rolled off through a gap in the broken banister, and fell on the stone pavement below, with a crash which made the sleeping echoes shriek again, as if they were sentient beings writhing under the torture of sound!
The crash of the falling keys, ringing and ringing again through the stillness, woke her, as it were, to instant consciousness of present events and present perils. She started, staggered backward, and raised both her hands wildly to her head--paused so for a few seconds--then made for the top of the stairs with the purpose of descending into the hall to recover the keys.
Before she had advanced three paces the shrill sound of a woman's scream came from the door of communication at the opposite end of the hall. The scream was twice repeated at a greater distance off, and was followed by a confused noise of rapidly advancing voices and footsteps.
She staggered desperately a few paces farther, and reached the first of the row of doors that opened on the landing.