He found them both securely locked and bolted, and, moreover, the locks and bolts were both so strong and so rusty that they required some considerable exertion to move them.
No one could have entered through the doors, that was certain.
He looked into both closets that flanked the fireplace, but the bare plastered walls and oaken shelves afforded no opportunity of concealment or of passage.
Every other nook and corner of the room was clearly visible in the bright sunshine. Even the space under the high bedstead was a vista. The plastered walls of the room, like those of the closets, gave no chance of a sliding panel for entrance or exit through a secret passage. Nor could any one have come in or gone out through the windows, which, besides having been securely fastened with oaken shutters secured by strong and rusty iron hooks and bolts, were full fifty feet above the ground, with a sheer descent of stone wall below them, and no tree, or vine, or porch, or balcony to assist the climber.
No! it was utterly and entirely impossible that any human being, besides himself, could have been concealed in the room when he went to bed, or could have entered it afterward.
And yet he had been awakened from a deep and dreamless sleep by a light touch on his forehead, and had perceived a benignant presence that he could not see, a presence which, to his half-conscious question of “Who is there?” had answered in murmuring music, soft as the notes of an Æolian harp:
“It is I, your mother. David Gryphyn, arise, and go hence; get to your home—my mother has somewhat to say to you.”
And the soft voice sunk into silence, and when he started up and opened the window-shutters, letting in the rays of the rising sun, there was nothing to be seen but the great bare walls and floor of the room, with its scant and rude furniture.
David Lindsay sat down on one of the rough chairs, and took his head between his hands to think it over. He could make nothing of it. The voice had said: “It is I, your mother.” But the voice was not at all like that of his mother, as he remembered hers. Again, the mysterious visitant had said, “David Gryphyn.” But his name was not David Gryphyn; it was David Lindsay. Finally, it had concluded with these unaccountable words—“Go hence and get to your home, for my mother has somewhat to communicate to you.” But his mother had no mother living on this earth, he knew. His mother had been an orphan when his father, James Lindsay, had married her. The old woman at his home, Dame Lindsay, was his grandmother on his father’s side.
The dream, or vision, strange and real and superhuman as it seemed, was an absurdly mixed-up affair, caused, no doubt, by confused memories and thoughts jumbled up together in his disturbed brain. So David Lindsay said to himself, yet he could not shake off the supernatural, perhaps even the superstitious, effects left upon his mind.