The step on the stair

by Anna Katharine Green

The light which I had been told to extinguish was near my uncle’s hand as he lay in bed.

Seeing that he was, as Edgar said, peacefully asleep, I carefully pulled the chain attached to the flaming bulb.

Instantly the common-places of life vanished and the room was given over to mystery and magic. All that was garish or simply plain to the view was gone, for wherever there was light there were also shadows, and shadows of that shifting and half-revealing kind which can only be gotten by the fitful leaping of a few expiring flames on a hearth-stone.

Uncle’s fire never went out. Night or day there was always a blaze. It was his company, he said, and never more so than when he woke in the wee small hours with the moon shut out and silence through all the house. It would be my task before I left him for the night to pile on fresh fuel and put up the screen, which being made of glass, allowed the full play of the dancing flames to be seen.

Reveling in the mystic sight, I drew up a chair and sat before Orpha’s portrait. Edgar was below stairs and doubtless in her company. Why, then, should I not have my hour with her here? The beauty of her pictured countenance which was apparent enough by day, was well nigh unearthly in the soft orange glow which vivified the brown of her hair and heightened the expression of eye and lip, only to leave them again in mystery as the flame died down and the shadows fell.

I could talk to her thus, and as I sat there looking and longing, words fell from my lips which happily there was no one to hear. It was my hour of delight snatched in an unguarded hour from the hands of Fate.

She herself might never listen, but this semblance of herself could not choose but do so. In this presence I could urge my plea and exhaust myself in loving speeches, and no displeasure could she show and even at times must she smile as the shadows again shifted. It was a hollow amends for many a dreary hour in which I got nothing but the same sweet show of patience she gave to all about her. But a man welcomes dream food if he can get no other and for a full hour I sat there talking to my love and catching from time to time in my presumptuous fancy faint whispers in response which were for no other ears than mine.

At last, fancy prevailed utterly, and rising, I flung out my arms in inappeasable longing towards her image, when, simultaneously with this action I felt my attention drawn irresistibly aside and my head turn slowly and without my volition more and more away from her, as if in response to some call at my back which I felt forced to heed.

Yet I had heard no sound and had no real expectation of seeing any one behind me unless it was my uncle who had wakened and needed me.

And this was what had happened. In the shadow made by the curtains hanging straight down from the head-board on either side of his bed, I saw the gleam of two burning eye-balls. But did I? When I looked again there was nothing to be seen there but the shadowy outlines of a sleeping man. My fancy had betrayed me as in the hour of secret converse I had just held with the lady of my dreams.