Poor healthy Baby was in truth ready to tumble over with fatigue, and had found her head, to her own fierce displeasure, nodding portentously from time to time. She went forth with the uncertain gait of the sleep-drunken, but paused at the door to give Jani minute and repeated instructions, which the latter, vividly alert, received with undisguised scorn. With much satisfaction the ayah re-entered her mistress' room, and locked the door upon her drowsy rival.
CHAPTER XXI
Aspasia awoke from a heavy dreamless sleep with a sense of panic. Her heart was beating violently. She sat up in bed, listening eagerly, through the hammering of her pulses.
It is the nature of such old haunted places as Saltwoods that they impress you with their stillness by day and their stirring by night. Then the old boards creak as if to the tread of forgotten steps; old echoes answer to voices long silent; there is a rustle down the narrow passages as of garments the very texture of which is forgotten; there are sighs in the night airs, and little cold blasts wandering round corners, even on the stillest night. You tell yourself that it is the crumbling brick and wood work setting ever a little more towards destruction; but it seems rather as if the years-laden habitation had acquired a sentient being of its own; that when, like the aged, it lies wakeful in the night, the memories of the past come back to it; that it laments, with sighs, lost life, lost mirth, lost dignity.
But Baby would at no time, have had, in her practical young mind, room for such fancies as these; and now, the very real well-grounded fears which were strong upon her lent every stealthy creak about her a hideous material significance, every sighing breath the echo of a present tragedy.
Supposing Muhammed were really to creep into the Runkle's room—Sir Arthur might not have locked his door. It is all very well, in a fit of rage, to wish an irritating relative disposed of; it is a very different thing to wake in the middle of the night and think of the murderer at his work. Poor old Runkle...! Or, suppose Lady Gerardine were to do herself a mischief, were to ... there are ideas to which one cannot bear to give concrete shape, even in one's own imagination.
The girl lit a candle, sprang out of bed, and huddled on a dressing-gown. How foolish, how selfish, how wicked she had been to leave the fevered woman alone with Jani—Jani, the most helpless and unreasoning of human beings!
The old house might have been in league with the evil passions it housed that night, so loudly did it seem to protest against Aspasia's interference.
Heard any one ever door so groan on its hinges, ever boards so complain under tread of light foot? What menacing shadows leapt from every corner! It was enough to scare any less courageous heart from its purpose. But on went Baby, down the little stairs, past Lady Aspasia's door (the creature snored—it was quite what Baby expected of her); round the corner of the passage, past Sir Arthur's little room. What a dead silence in there! She was afraid to listen to the suggestion, and scurried by, past M. Châtelard's room. Her aunt's door at last in sight. Baby stopped with a great start, her heart in her mouth, the candle almost dropping from her grasp—what was that black thing lying at such sinister length across the threshold? A heap of clothes? ... Jani? No—diminutive Jani could never spread to such bulk. Then what?
The thing moved slowly, reared itself to its knees, turned a wild black head, a wild black-bearded face, fierce eyes, towards Aspasia; then rose, with a spring.