Dr Teesdale was a man of good nerve, and he recovered himself almost immediately, ashamed of his temporary panic. The terror that had blanched his face was chiefly the effect of startled nerves, not of terrified heart, and yet deeply interested as he was in psychical phenomena, he could not command himself sufficiently to go back there. Or rather he commanded himself, but his muscles refused to act on the message. If this poor earth-bound spirit had any communication to make to him, he certainly much preferred that it should be made at a distance. As far as he could understand, its range was circumscribed. It haunted the prison yard, the condemned cell, the execution shed, it was more faintly felt in the infirmary. Then a further point suggested itself to his mind, and he went back to his room and sent for Warder Draycott, who had answered him on the telephone last night.
“You are quite sure,” he asked, “that nobody rang me up last night, just before I rang you up?”
There was a certain hesitation in the man’s manner which the doctor noticed.
“I don’t see how it could be possible, sir,” he said, “I had been sitting close by the telephone for half an hour before, and again before that. I must have seen him, if anyone had been to the instrument.”
“And you saw no one?” said the doctor with a slight emphasis.
The man became more markedly ill at ease.
“No, sir, I saw no one,” he said, with the same emphasis.
Dr Teesdale looked away from him.
“But you had perhaps the impression that there was some one there?” he asked, carelessly, as if it was a point of no interest.
Clearly Warder Draycott had something on his mind, which he found it hard to speak of.