She left it, and paused to trim the wick of the candle before she tried the buhl cabinet next.
At the moment when she raised her hand to the candle, she heard the stillness of the Banqueting-Hall shudder with the terror of a sound--a sound faint and momentary, like the distant rushing of the wind.
The sliding door in the drawing-room had moved.
Which way had it moved? Had an unknown hand pushed it back in its socket further than she had pushed it, or pulled it to again, and closed it?
The horror of being shut out all night, by some undiscoverable agency, from the life of the house, was stronger in her than the horror of looking across the Banqueting-Hall. She made desperately for the door of the room.
It had fallen to silently after her when she had come in, but it was not closed. She pulled it open, and looked.
The sight that met her eyes rooted her, panic-stricken, to the spot.
Close to the first of the row of windows, counting from the drawing-room, and full in the gleam of it, she saw a solitary figure. It stood motionless, rising out of the furthest strip of moonlight on the floor. As she looked, it suddenly disappeared. In another instant she saw it again, in the second strip of moonlight--lost it again--saw it in the third strip--lost it once more--and saw it in the fourth. Moment by moment it advanced, now mysteriously lost in the shadow, now suddenly visible again in the light, until it reached the fifth and nearest strip of moonlight. There it paused, and strayed aside slowly to the middle of the Hall. It stopped at the tripod, and stood, shivering audibly in the silence, with its hands raised over the dead ashes, in the action of warming them at a fire. It turned back again, moving down the path of the moonlight, stopped at the fifth window, turned once more, and came on softly through the shadow straight to the place where Magdalen stood.
Her voice was dumb, her will was helpless. Every sense in her but the seeing sense was paralyzed. The seeing sense--held fast in the fetters of its own terror--looked unchangeably straightforward, as it had looked from the first. There she stood in the door-way, full in the path of the figure advancing on her through the shadow, nearer and nearer, step by step.
It came close.
The bonds of horror that held her burst asunder when it was within arm"s-length. She started back. The light of the candle on the table fell full on its face, and showed her--Admiral Bartram.
A long, gray dressing-gown was wrapped round him. His head was uncovered; his feet were bare. In his left hand he carried his little basket of keys. He pa.s.sed Magdalen slowly, his lips whispering without intermission, his open eyes staring straight before him with the gla.s.sy stare of death. His eyes revealed to her the terrifying truth. He was walking in his sleep.
The terror of seeing him as she saw him now was not the terror she had felt when her eyes first lighted on him--an apparition in the moon-light, a specter in the ghostly Hall. This time she could struggle against the shock; she could feel the depth of her own fear.
He pa.s.sed her, and stopped in the middle of the room. Magdalen ventured near enough to him to be within reach of his voice as he muttered to himself. She ventured nearer still, and heard the name of her dead husband fall distinctly from the sleep-walker"s lips.
"Noel!" he said, in the low monotonous tones of a dreamer talking in his sleep, "my good fellow, Noel, take it back again! It worries me day and night. I don"t know where it"s safe; I don"t know where to put it. Take it back, Noel--take it back!"
As those words escaped him, he walked to the buhl cabinet. He sat down in the chair placed before it, and searched in the basket among his keys. Magdalen softly followed him, and stood behind his chair, waiting with the candle in her hand. He found the key, and unlocked the cabinet.
Without an instant"s hesitation, he drew out a drawer, the second of a row. The one thing in the drawer was a folded letter. He removed it, and put it down before him on the table. "Take it back, Noel!" he repeated, mechanically; "take it back!"
Magdalen looked over his shoulder and read these lines, traced in her husband"s handwriting, at the top of the letter: _To be kept in your own possession, and to be opened by yourself only on the day of my decease.
Noel Vanstone._ She saw the words plainly, with the admiral"s name and the admiral"s address written under them.
The Trust within reach of her hand! The Trust traced to its hiding-place at last!
She took one step forward, to steal round his chair and to s.n.a.t.c.h the letter from the table. At the instant when she moved, he took it up once more, locked the cabinet, and, rising, turned and faced her.
In the impulse of the moment, she stretched out her hand toward the hand in which he held the letter. The yellow candle-light fell full on him.
The awful death-in-life of his face--the mystery of the sleeping body, moving in unconscious obedience to the dreaming mind--daunted her. Her hand trembled, and dropped again at her side.
He put the key of the cabinet back in the basket, and crossed the room to the bureau, with the basket in one hand and the letter in the other.
Magdalen set the candle on the table again, and watched him. As he had opened the cabinet, so he now opened the bureau. Once more Magdalen stretched out her hand, and once more she recoiled before the mystery and the terror of his sleep. He put the letter in a drawer at the back of the bureau, and closed the heavy oaken lid again. "Yes," he said.
"Safer there, as you say, Noel--safer there." So he spoke. So, time after time, the words that betrayed him revealed the dead man living and speaking again in the dream.
Had he locked the bureau? Magdalen had not heard the lock turn. As he slowly moved away, walking back once more toward the middle of the room, she tried the lid. It was locked. That discovery made, she looked to see what he was doing next. He was leaving the room again, with the basket of keys in his hand. When her first glance overtook him, he was crossing the threshold of the door.
Some inscrutable fascination possessed her, some mysterious attraction drew her after him, in spite of herself. She took up the candle and followed him mechanically, as if she too were walking in her sleep.
One behind the other, in slow and noiseless progress, they crossed the Banqueting-Hall. One behind the other, they pa.s.sed through the drawing-room, and along the corridor, and up the stairs. She followed him to his own door. He went in, and shut it behind him softly. She stopped, and looked toward the truckle-bed. It was pushed aside at the foot, some little distance away from the bedroom door. Who had moved it?
She held the candle close and looked toward the pillow, with a sudden curiosity and a sudden doubt.
The truckle-bed was empty.
The discovery startled her for the moment, and for the moment only.
Plain as the inferences were to be drawn from it, she never drew them.
Her mind, slowly recovering the exercise of its faculties, was still under the influence of the earlier and the deeper impressions produced on it. Her mind followed the admiral into his room, as her body had followed him across the Banqueting-Hall.
Had he lain down again in his bed? Was he still asleep? She listened at the door. Not a sound was audible in the room. She tried the door, and, finding it not locked, softly opened it a few inches and listened again.
The rise and fall of his low, regular breathing instantly caught her ear. He was still asleep.
She went into the room, and, shading th e candle-light with her hand, approached the bedside to look at him. The dream was past; the old man"s sleep was deep and peaceful; his lips were still; his quiet hand was laid over the coverlet in motionless repose. He lay with his face turned toward the right-hand side of the bed. A little table stood there within reach of his hand. Four objects were placed on it; his candle, his matches, his customary night drink of lemonade, and his basket of keys.
The idea of possessing herself of his keys that night (if an opportunity offered when the basket was not in his hand) had first crossed her mind when she saw him go into his room. She had lost it again for the moment, in the surprise of discovering the empty truckle-bed. She now recovered it the instant the table attracted her attention. It was useless to waste time in trying to choose the one key wanted from the rest--the one key was not well enough known to her to be readily identified. She took all the keys from the table, in the basket as they lay, and noiselessly closed the door behind her on leaving the room.
The truckle-bed, as she pa.s.sed it, obtruded itself again on her attention, and forced her to think of it. After a moment"s consideration, she moved the foot of the bed back to its customary position across the door. Whether he was in the house or out of it, the veteran might return to his deserted post at any moment. If he saw the bed moved from its usual place, he might suspect something wrong, he might rouse his master, and the loss of the keys might be discovered.
Nothing happened as she descended the stairs, nothing happened as she pa.s.sed along the corridor; the house was as silent and as solitary as ever. She crossed the Banqueting-Hall this time without hesitation; the events of the night had hardened her mind against all imaginary terrors.
"Now, I have got it!" she whispered to herself, in an irrepressible outburst of exaltation, as she entered the first of the east rooms and put her candle on the top of the old bureau.
Even yet there was a trial in store for her patience. Some minutes elapsed--minutes that seemed hours--before she found the right key and raised the lid of the bureau. At last she drew out the inner drawer! At last she had the letter in her hand!
It had been sealed, but the seal was broken. She opened it on the spot, to make sure that she had actually possessed herself of the Trust before leaving the room. The end of the letter was the first part of it she turned to. It came to its conclusion high on the third page, and it was signed by Noel Vanstone. Below the name these lines were added in the admiral"s handwriting:
"This letter was received by me at the same time with the will of my friend, Noel Vanstone. In the event of my death, without leaving any other directions respecting it, I beg my nephew and my executors to understand that I consider the requests made in this doc.u.ment as absolutely binding on me.
"ARTHUR EVERARD BARTRAM."
She left those lines unread. She just noticed that they were not in Noel Vanstone"s handwriting; and, pa.s.sing over them instantly, as immaterial to the object in view, turned the leaves of the letter, and transferred her attention to the opening sentences on the first page. She read these words:
"DEAR ADMIRAL BARTRAM--When you open my Will (in which you are named my sole executor), you will find that I have bequeathed the whole residue of my estate--after payment of one legacy of five thousand pounds--to yourself. It is the purpose of my letter to tell you privately what the object is for which I have left you the fortune which is now placed in your hands.
"I beg you to consider this large legacy as intended--"
She had proceeded thus far with breathless curiosity and interest, when her attention suddenly failed her. Something--she was too deeply absorbed to know what--had got between her and the letter. Was it a sound in the Banqueting-Hall again? She looked over her shoulder at the door behind her, and listened. Nothing was to be heard, nothing was to be seen. She returned to the letter.
The writing was cramped and close. In her impatient curiosity to read more, she failed to find the lost place again. Her eyes, attracted by a blot, lighted on a sentence lower in the page than the sentence at which she had left off. The first three words she saw riveted her attention anew--they were the first words she had met with in the letter which directly referred to George Bartram. In the sudden excitement of that discovery, she read the rest of the sentence eagerly, before she made any second attempt to return to the lost place:
"If your nephew fails to comply with these conditions--that is to say, if, being either a bachelor or a widower at the time of my decease, he fails to marry in all respects as I have here instructed him to marry, within six calendar months from that time--it is my desire that he shall not receive--"
She had read to that point, to that last word and no further, when a hand pa.s.sed suddenly from behind her between the letter and her eye, and gripped her fast by the wrist in an instant.
She turned with a shriek of terror, and found herself face to face with old Mazey.