Quite isolated now and in utter darkness, he stood for a few minutes deeply breathing and cursing his own fears and pusillanimity. Then he struck a light, and calmed by the sight of the familiar interior, sat down at his desk and tried to think. But though he was a man of great intellectual powers, he seemed to find it difficult to fix his thoughts or even to remain quiet. Involuntary shudders shook his frame, and from time to time his eye glanced fearfully towards the door as if he dreaded to see it open and admit some ghostly visitor.
Suddenly he leaped to his feet, went to a mirror and surveyed himself. Evidently the result was not encouraging for he uttered an exclamation of dismay and coming back to the desk, took up a book and tried to read. But the attempt was futile. With a low cry he flung the book aside, and rising to his feet began to talk, uttering low and fearful words from which he seemed himself to recoil without possessing the power of stopping them. The name of Ephraim Earle mingled often with these words, and always with that new short laugh of his so horrible to hear. And once he spoke another name, but it was said so softly that only from the tears which gushed impetuously from his eyes, could it be seen that it stirred the deepest chords of his nature.
The clock, which lagged sorely that night, struck eleven at last, and the sound seemed to rouse him, for he glanced toward his bed. But it was only to cry “Impossible!” and to cast a hunted look about the room which seemed like a prison to him.
At length he grasped the green door and began to pull at its hasps and fastenings. Careless of the result of these efforts he shook a small heathen god from its pedestal so that it fell rattling to the floor and lay in minute pieces at his feet. But he did not heed. Recklessly he pulled open the door, recklessly he passed into the space beyond. But once out of the room, once in another atmosphere than that peopled by his imagination, he seemed to grow calmer, and after a short survey of the narrow hall in which he found himself and a glance up the tiny, spiral staircase rising at his right, he stepped back into the office and took up the lamp. Carrying it with him up the narrow staircase he set it down in the hall above, and without looking to right or left, almost without noting the desolation of those midnight halls, he began pacing the floor back and forth with a restless, uneven tread, far removed from his usual slow and dignified gait.
At early morning he was still pacing there.
XIII.
A TEST.
“O Clarke, wait: there is the doctor now.” It was Polly who was speaking. She had come as far as the church in her search after Dr. Izard and had just seen him issuing from his own gate.
“He has a bag in his hand; he is going on one of his journeys.”
“No, no,” she protested, “I cannot have it.” And bounding forward she intercepted the doctor, just as he was about to step into his buggy. “O doctor, you are not going away; you are not going to leave me with this dreadful trouble; don’t, don’t, I pray!” The doctor, who in his abstraction had not noted her approach, started at the sound of her voice, and turning showed her a very haggard face.