Not a sound reached us. The hill, inside and out, was wrapped in deadliest silence. The next instant a soft glow spread itself below me, and I went down into it, tingling with the horror of what it should reveal.
Not a sound; not even the snarl of the badger, which I believe I should have welcomed. The brute, scared out of his security, I think, had betaken himself to other quarters. We reached the floor, and crept on.
Again the dead came about us; but now, knowing and holding the road to flight, I could recover nothing of the sad appeal to comradeship with which they had before greeted me. They were terrors apart: ghastly chuckling grotesques without name in the kind world I had left. I hated them as they hated me.
Suddenly Harry uttered a little cry, and, stooping, rose again with some object in his hand.
“Look!” he whispered, and held it to the light.
It was the bowl, broken off short, of a blackened death’s-head pipe, such as was familiar to us in the lips of Joel Rampick.
Do you know what the French call a pièce de conviction? Here it was, and we needed nothing further.
He had been here, and he shared our secret. What was he going to do?
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FEAST OF LANTERNS.
I remember I ate a very large supper that night, to the happy reassurance of Uncle Jenico. That suffocating tightness of the midriff, which anxiety brings, seems to expand, in its reaction, to a quite exaggerated emptiness. Have we not all had that experience? What meals we’ve made after a visit to the dentist’s! Who would have thought that this Berserker, dashing his beard with wine and roaring contempt of wounds and death, was the same individual who in the morning cowered sick-cropped in Mr. Forceps’s waiting-room? The thought of having vindicated, and proved, and so honourably acquitted one’s self of further responsibility to a much-dreaded task, is one of the most appetizing reflections in the world. And besides, I had arrears to make up.