had left that one open, hadn't he left this one
closed, and wasn't he now in _most_ immediate presence of some
inconceivable occult activity? It was as sharp, the question, as a knife
in his side, but the answer hung fire still and seemed to lose itself in
the vague darkness to which the thin admitted dawn, glimmering archwise
over the whole outer door, made a semicircular margin, a cold silvery
nimbus that seemed to play a little as he looked--to shift and expand and
contract.

It was as if there had been something within it, protected by
indistinctness and corresponding in extent with the opaque surface
behind, the painted panels of the last barrier to his escape, of which
the key was in his pocket. The indistinctness mocked him even while he
stared, affected him as somehow shrouding or challenging certitude, so
that after faltering an instant on his step he let himself go with the
sense that here _was_ at last something to meet, to touch, to take, to
know--something all unnatural and dreadful, but to advance upon which was
the condition for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat. The
penumbra, dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood
in it as still as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored
sentinel guarding a treasure. Brydon was to know afterwards, was to
recall and make out, the particular thing he had believed during the rest
of his descent. He saw, in its great grey glimmering margin, the central
vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking the very form toward
which, for so many days, the passion of his curiosity had yearned. It
gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a
personal presence.

Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and
stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay. This
only could it be--this only till he recognised, with his advance, that
what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that covered it and
in which, so far from being offered in defiance, it was buried, as for
dark deprecation. So Brydon, before him, took him in; with every fact of
him now, in the higher light, hard and acute--his planted stillness, his
vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer
actuality of evening-dress, of dangling double eye-glass, of gleaming
silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and
polished shoe. No portrait by a great