"Go back," said Bohun. "Go back, I tell you!" he snarled, as the other hesitated. "I don't need you. I don't need anybody."
He sat down slowly on the top step, and put his head in his hands.
Bennett moved past him. He knew without self-illusion that he was afraid to go in there that he felt empty and shaken at facing the dark, but it had to be done. He cursed himself because his right hand trembled; and he seized his own wrist with the other hand, idiotically.
"Are there," he said, "are there any lights?"
"lights?" repeated Bohun, after a pause. "In? — Oh. Oh, yes. Certainly. Electric lights. Funny. I forgot to turn on lights; forgot all about it. Funny. Ho ho! I "
The jump in his voice made Bennett hurry inside.
So far as he could tell in almost complete darkness, he was in a little anteroom which smelt of old wood and musty silks; but there was a newer perfume trailing through. It brought the face of Marcia Tait too vividly before his mind. He did not, of course, believe she was really dead. That vital loveliness the hand you had touched, the mouth you had (if only once) kissed, and then damned her for making a fool of you — these things did not suddenly dwindle to the flat lines of a drawing, or the wax stillness of a dummy in a coffin. Impossible. She was here, she was all about, palpable even in absence; and so was the flame. But he felt a growing sense of emptiness. Groping in the wall to the left, hurriedly, he found a door open. Inside that, he groped after an electric switch, found one, and hesitated a second before he turned it on…
Nothing. Nothing, when the light went on.
He was in a museum, or a drawing-room — a real drawing-room — of the Stuart times. Nothing had changed, except that the satin had frayed, the colors faded and gone dry. There were the three high arched windows with their square panes. There was the carven fireplace with its blackened stone hood, the floor laid out in chequered squares of black-and-white marble. And it was lit by candle-flames slowly wavering and shifting in brass candelabra on the, walls. So subtly had the illusion been managed that for second Bennett doubted his own sense, and half-expected not to find an electric switch in the wall when he looked. There was suggestion, too, in a disarranged chair with the Stuart arms worked into its oak filigree, in the ashes of a small fire that had gone out. There was a tall door at the rear of the room. When he opened it on darkness, he hesitated still more before the switch clicked.
Only two candelabra burned here, and the shadows were thick. He saw a shadow of the tall bedstead with its red canopy, the dull gleams in many mirrors of a small square room, and then he saw her.