"There used to be steps here once, but before my time," said Millicent. She went down into the room. Pamela followed her, and understood why those two steps had been removed. Although the book-shelves rose on every wall from floor to ceiling, it was not as a library that this room was used. Heavy black curtains draped it with a barbaric profusion. The centre of the room was clear of furniture, and upon the carpet in that clear space was laid a purple drugget; and on the drugget opposite to one another stood two strong wooden crutches. The room was a mortuary chamber--nothing less. On those two crutches the dead were to lie awaiting burial.
Millie Stretton shook her shoulders with a kind of shiver.
"Oh, how I used to hate this room, hate knowing that it was here, prepared and ready!"
Pamela could understand how the knowledge would work upon a woman of emotions, whose nerves were already strung to exasperation by the life she led. For even to her there was something eerie in the disposition of the room. It looked out upon a dull yard of stone at the back of the house; the light was very dim and the noise of the streets hardly the faintest whisper; there was a chill and a dampness in the air.
"How I hated it," Millie repeated. "I used to lie awake and think of it. I used to imagine it more silent than any other of the silent rooms, and emptier--emptier because day and night it seemed to claim an inhabitant, and to claim it as a right. That was the horrible thing. The room was waiting--waiting for us to be carried down that wooden bridge and laid on the crutches here, each in our turn. It became just a symbol of the whole house. For what is the house, Pamela? A place that should have been a place of life, and is a place merely expecting death. Look at the books reaching up to the ceiling, never taken down, never read, for the room's a room for coffins. It wasn't merely a symbol of the house--that wasn't the worst of it. It was a sort of image of our lives, the old man's upstairs, Tony's and mine down here. We were all doing nothing, neither suffering nor enjoying, but just waiting--waiting for death. Nothing you see could happen in this house but death. Until it came there would only be silence and emptiness."
Millie Stretton finished her outburst, and stood dismayed as though the shadow of those past days were still about her. The words she had spoken must have seemed exaggerated and even theatrical, but for the aspect of her as she spoke them. Her whole frame shuddered, her face had the shrinking look of fear. She recovered herself, however, in a moment.
"But that time's past," she said. "Tony's gone and I--I am waiting for life now. I am only a lodger, you see. A month or two, and I pack my boxes."
She turned towards the door and stopped. The hall door had just at that moment opened. Pamela heard a man's footsteps sound heavily upon the floor of the hall and then upon the stairs.
"My father-in-law," said Millie.
"This was his doing?" asked Pamela.