“I thought I did. But where are they now? The fog’s thinner again. Look—I can make out trees ahead. But there are no lights any more.”
“Perhaps the people have gone to bed,” I suggested jocosely.
“Then hadn’t we better turn back, sir?”
“What—two yards from the gate?”
The boy was silent: certainly there was a gate ahead, and presumably, behind the dripping trees, some sort of dwelling. Unless there was just a field and the sea ... the sea whose hungry voice I heard asking and asking, close below us. No wonder the place was called the Bay of the Dead! But what could have induced the rosy benevolent Mary Pask to come and bury herself there? Of course the boy wouldn’t wait for me.... I knew that ... the Baie des Trépassés indeed! The sea whined down there as if it were feeding-time, and the Furies, its keepers, had forgotten it....
There was the gate! My hand had struck against it. I felt along to the latch, undid it, and brushed between wet bushes to the house-front. Not a candle-glint anywhere. If the house were indeed Miss Pask’s, she certainly kept early hours....
II
Night and fog were now one, and the darkness as thick as a blanket. I felt vainly about for a bell. At last my hand came in contact with a knocker and I lifted it. The clatter with which it fell sent a prolonged echo through the silence; but for a minute or two nothing else happened.
“There’s no one there, I tell you!” the boy called impatiently from the gate.
But there was. I had heard no steps inside, but presently a bolt shot back, and an old woman in a peasant’s cap pushed her head out. She had set her candle down on a table behind her, so that her face, aureoled with lacy wings, was in obscurity; but I knew she was old by the stoop of her shoulders and her fumbling movements. The candle-light, which made her invisible, fell full on my face, and she looked at me.