What had happened? Had his being just wrested itself from the bonds of a horrid nightmare? Had he been dreaming or thinking when the shock came? He could remember nothing, whether it had been dream or reflection, to which he could attribute the alert horror of this moment. It had dropped upon him from somewhere without himself; as though it had been a mighty, soundless peal of thunder, shaking his soul to its foundations. His thoughts he could recall with equanimity; there was nothing in them to cause him fear—and still fear filled him, the more greatly for having not form nor expression. Fear, or apprehension, filled him to such extent that the cold, tingling fingers of terror crept up his scalp, from neck to forehead, brushing all his hairs the wrong way; and a great, boiling sweat burst out next moment upon his face and body. So men have been made aware at times of the doings of death, and the schoolmaster, recalling cases of the kind, drew himself up palpitatingly in his bed. On the cane-bottomed chair by the head of it, it was his nightly custom to set his candle, which he thus extinguished, with a hand thrust out from between the sheets. Thrusting out the same hand now, he possessed himself, in agitated haste, of the match-box, struck nervously for a light with the match's unphosphorused end, and with the red tip of phosphorus on the unsand-papered side of the box; and lastly, after much work of the sort, drew into existence a fitful, wavering flame, that died in giving light to the candle. Then he pulled forth his watch by its chain from under the pillow, and holding it out from him, fixed a disturbed eye upon its face. Half-past twelve.
Half-past twelve! No more than that! Ages he seemed to have been battling with the fever of thought. Could the watch be true? He pressed it to his ear, and heard the active click-click, click-click heart go beating in its busy little body. It had not stopped then. It spoke the truth.
He replaced it under the pillow, and remained drawn up in bed, with both arms outstretched on the coverlet, as though debating action—though what to do, or what might be supposed to be required of him, he knew not. His heart, thumping against his ribs, gave abundant evidence that he had been rudely roused—if otherwise he had had any inclination to doubt. And there was the relaxed weakness about his legs, too, and his limp arms, that bore witness to the sharpness of the shock. Had the shock come upon him standing, his first instinct would have led him to sit down. Over and over in his mind he kept turning this awakening like a strange, unknown coin, seeking to find some decipherable superscription upon it, and learn what it might presage. It had come upon him suddenly. It was like to a clap of thunder without noise; the boom of a gun; the slam of a door. Something whose sound he had not heard, but whose shock had stirred him. Yet all he could think of was death. Somebody was dead; somebody was dying; somebody was going to die. To such extent did the idea of death possess him that it seemed to expire from him like a mighty stream, whose fount was in his brain. The whole room was filled with the awesome presence of it. Death was at the bed-foot; at the window curtain; shrouded the candle. And then, of a sudden, thoughts of death and thoughts of the girl, circling round each other, came into horrible collision, and commingled, and lo! death and the girl were one.
In his guilty state of mind, he was an easy prey for terror. He tried to rid himself of the idea with a hundred assurances drawn from pure reason. How could she be dead? She had never died before ... why should she die now? She was sleeping safely in her own bed, not four yards from him. Draw a bee-line through the wall at his head, through the landing beyond, and through the wall of the girl's room, and there she should surely be. Only last night he had been speaking to her; hardly more than four hours ago he had heard her voice. Death could not have come to her so soon. The idea was nonsense. But like a child, terrorised by things unseen, that the wisdom of grown-up logic cannot pacify, the more he reasoned the more his unreasonment grew. For all this ill-gotten authority over her that he had been wielding so unmercifully these days past ... to what might it not have driven her? Desperately he listened—with his face turned toward the wall—as though death were a thing audible, like the tick-tacking of the big clock in the passage below. But the tick-tacking of the big clock, and the irregular thudding of his own heart, and the long-drawn snores of the postmaster, were all that he could hear. This trinity of sounds hung like a creaking door before his hearing. He was sensible of a deep and deadly silence beyond, flowing like the sea of eternity; but despite his desperate fishing, he could draw up nothing from its depths. Last of all, wrought to the supreme pitch of suspense, he threw aside his coverings, slid from the bed, and stole across the room towards the door—a miserable figure of inquietude in his thin, bare legs and short scholastic night-gown, that took him pathetically somewhere by the bone of the knee. Again, at the door itself he listened for a while, trying to cancel those three intrusive factors—the snore, the clock, and his own heart—and base his calculations on the silence beyond; but he could not. If he would gain any reassurance for his disquieted spirit, he must go forth and inquire deeper of the surrounding stillness than this.
And he went forth, and saw the moonlight bathing all the landing through the little staircase window and issue idly in a pale, phosphorescent stream round the three sides of the girl's part-opened door.
Like a wide-mouthed statue of horror, he stood marble in the white moonlight and stared. Her door was open; her door that had been closed and locked upon her last night was open now—open so emptily and with such desolation, while the moonlight flowed placidly through it, like sea-water through the hollow hulk of a submerged vessel—that it seemed as if never it could have held the live, blood-warmed body of the girl. For a moment, the shock of what he saw was twin to the shock of what—so short a while back—he had failed to see. Then in his little, wasted cotton night-dress and his bare legs as he was, he started forward into action, pushed open the panels unhesitatingly with his fingers, and entered.
All to itself the moonlight possessed the room; filled it from floor to ceiling, from corner to corner. There was no girl. Her bed had been merely laid upon from the outside; she had not slept in it. There was her night-dress untouched in its embroidered case. Except for the callous, white moonlight, that showed him these things without a thought for his anguish, the room was empty as a sieve. The girl had gone; gone where and why and when, he could not tell. Whether with thoughts of death, or thoughts of flight, or thoughts of treachery—he could not tell. The discovery flew to his head like the vintage of bitter grapes. He searched madly about the room; threw up the white valances of her bed, lest perchance she were but hiding from him; opened her cupboards and beat his hands wildly among the darkness of skirts and hanging garments for some clasp of fugitive flesh and blood; part shut the door to assure himself she was not lurking behind its hinges, with her face in her hands and her forehead against the wall.
But she was not. He knew she was not when he searched. She was gone! she was gone!
And thence, with his thin, worn, calico lapels blowing about his legs, he scurried down the twisted staircase to see what the lower regions had to show him.
As soon as his feet flinched on the bristles of the fibre mat, they showed him all that they had to show. The two letters spread out side by side on the window table, white as driven snow in the moonlight. It needed no slow investigation to assure him what they were. Gravestones did not more certainly indicate what lay beneath them than did these two pallid envelopes. He was on them at once, like a hawk. "To Mr. Frewin," he read on the first, in Pam's neat, well-known script, and ripped it open regardlessly, as though he were gutting herrings. So did his heart beat at him from within, and so did his brain contract and swell, and so did his apprehensive hand tremble, that for some seconds the piece of paper, for all the words he distinguished on it, might have been a white, waving flag. But in the end he got control over himself, and wrested the girl's last message to him from the paper on which, to all intents and purposes, it was scarcely dry.