“That wouldn’t be needed,” he told himself. And his ears ached with listening—listening for the sound that, it seemed, must break at last from that crowded silence.
He never knew how long he sat there. To move, to go up, to batter at the door and clamour to be let out—that one could have done if one had had a lantern, or even a full matchbox. But in the dark, not knowing the turnings, to feel one’s way among these things that were so like life and yet were not alive—to touch, perhaps, these faces that were not dead, and yet felt like death. His heart beat heavily in his throat at the thought.
No, he must sit still till morning. He had been hypnotised into this state, he told himself, by Edward, no doubt; it was not natural to him.
Then suddenly the silence was shattered. In the dark something moved. And, after those sounds that the silence teemed with, the noise seemed to him thunder-loud. Yet it was only a very, very little sound, just the rustling of drapery, as though something had turned in its sleep. And there was a sigh—not far off.
Vincent’s muscles and tendons tightened like fine-drawn wire. He listened. There was nothing more: only the silence, the thick silence.
The sound had seemed to come from a part of the vault where, long ago, when there was light, he had seen a grave being dug for the body of a young girl martyr.
“I will get up and go out,” said Vincent. “I have three matches. I am off my head. I shall really be nervous presently if I don’t look out.”
He got up and struck a match, refused his eyes the sight of the corpse whose waxen face he had felt in the blackness, and made his way through the crowd of figures. By the match’s flicker they seemed to make way for him, to turn their heads to look after him. The match lasted till he got to a turn of the rock-hewn passage. His next match showed him the burial scene: the little, thin body of the martyr, palm in hand, lying on the rock floor in patient waiting, the grave-digger, the mourners. Some standing, some kneeling, one crouched on the ground.
This was where that sound had come from, that rustle, that sigh. He had thought he was going away from it: instead, he had come straight to the spot where, if anywhere, his nerves might be expected to play him false.
“Bah!” he said, and he said it aloud, “the silly things are only wax. Who’s afraid?” His voice sounded loud in the silence that lives with the wax people. “They’re only wax,” he said again, and touched with his foot, contemptuously, the crouching figure in the mantle.