it had been. Some
insistent inner consciousness had seized upon and believed it in spite
of him and had set all his waking being in tune to it. That was the
explanation of his undue spirits and hope. If Penzance had spoken a
truth he would have had a natural, sane right to feel all this and more.
But the truth was that he, in his guise--was one of those who are "on
the roadside everywhere--all over the world." Poetically figurative as
the thing sounded, it was prosaic fact.

So, still hearing the distant sounds of the hoofs beating in cheerful
diminuendo on the roadway, he turned about and went back to talk to
Bolter.

CHAPTER XXXVII

CLOSED CORRIDORS

To spend one's days perforce in an enormous house alone is a thing
likely to play unholy tricks with a man's mind and lead it to gloomy
workings. To know the existence of a hundred or so of closed doors
shut on the darkness of unoccupied rooms; to be conscious of flights
of unmounted stairs, of stretches of untrodden corridors, of unending
walls, from which the pictured eyes of long dead men and women stare,
as if seeing things which human eyes behold not--is an eerie and
unwholesome thing. Mount Dunstan slept in a large four-post bed in a
chamber in which he might have died or been murdered a score of times
without being able to communicate with the remote servants' quarters
below stairs, where lay the one man and one woman who attended him.
When he came late to his room and prepared for sleep by the light of two
flickering candles the silence of the dead in tombs was about him; but
it was only a more profound and insistent thing than the silence of the
day, because it was the silence of the night, which is a presence. He
used to tell himself with secret smiles at the fact that at certain
times the fantasy was half believable--that there were things which
walked about softly at night--things which did not want to be dead.
He himself had picked them out from among the pictures in the
gallery--pretty, light, petulant women; adventurous-eyed, full-blooded,
eager men. His theory was that they hated their stone coffins, and
fought their way back through the grey mists to try to talk and make
love and to be seen of warm things which were alive. But it was not to
be done, because they had no bodies and no voices, and when they beat
upon closed doors they would not open. Still they came back--came
back. And sometimes there was a rustle and a sweep through the air in a