How still and quiet the big room was. Still and quiet as death itself.
The table at which I was seated stood against the inner wall and toward the end of the room nearest the front of the house. The piano jutted out immediately before me, and over the top of it I could see the large French window that looked on to the garden from the other end, paneled in silver-gray by the moonlit sky, while between it and my own little circle of warmer light there lay a belt of shadows and dim uncertainties.
The faint tick, tick, of the dining-room clock was the only sound to reach my ears. The curtains hung in the open windows, limp and still. I felt myself on the brink of fear.
Fear! Afraid of what? A grown man afraid of a quiet room at night! Ridiculous! Absurd, do you say? Then you know nothing of fear. To you a soft step and a shadow that moves mean naught. “Children’s Terror” has never held you in its grip. Fear! The anticipation of something unknown and inexplicable, intangible, shadowy and unreal—can not be argued and defined. Give it a name, know it well enough to name it, define and analyze it, meet it face to face, and fear—true bloodcurdling fear—evaporates at once. But leave it vague and shadowy, unexplained and undefined, then a still room at the dead of night, the quiet tick, tick, of a distant clock, the creak of a board in an old, old house, and an ever-increasing desire to look furtively behind, may be enough to make the bravest pulses race, when nerves are on edge and imagination plays its part.
Must I name myself a coward then, because I sat with quickened breath, listening for I know not what, when bravery itself is nothing but a knowledge and a crushing down of fear? For what agonies of bravery may not be endured in the making of a coward’s reputation! What lack of sensibility and imagination may not go to the winning of a hero’s fame!
But, coward or no, when I saw the door which was just ajar, swing slowly open to a wider angle, my flesh crept—my heart skipped a beat. It was the big tabby Tom. As he rounded the corner of the piano and saw me, he gave a little squawk of pleasure, and jumped up on my knee, purring with satisfaction, and expressing his appreciation of my caresses, by the digging in of his curving claws.
He had broken the spell. I leaped to my feet, and pulling down the other switches, flooded the room with a rosy glow from the shaded lamps. I relighted my pipe, and perching the cat on my shoulder, I began to pace the room again.
I had set out to come to some reasoned understanding with myself as to the doctor’s innocence or guilt, and my fit of nerves conquered, I would finish my self-appointed task. When with him, how steady and kind he seemed to be—his unalterable calm, the natural outcome of his hidden strength. But away from him, and here alone in the quiet of the night, how damning the evidence against him, and how easy to revalue that self-same unalterable calm and label it afresh—cynical, cold-blooded, sinister or callous!
I had to confess that I had not succeeded in my attempt to play the role of an impartial critic logging up a list of facts. I knew it even as I wrote my notes. Horrible as it may sound, I had found myself longing and searching for some further possible evidence against Miss Summerson—something that might incriminate Annie or cook—anything, however trivial and absurd, that might in some small measure relieve the doctor of the burden of suspicion that weighed him down, and help to take the guilt of murder further away from the members of our little party.
Impartial? No, I had not been impartial. While I had endeavored to disperse and lighten the dark shadows that were gathering ever more closely round the figure of the impassive doctor, I had eagerly sought out every evil and distorted possibility to place among my scandalous notes about the rest. And my list of motives! God save the mark, how absurd they all of them sounded. I had turned dear old Dalehouse, with its honest square red face, into a veritable “Abode of love,” honeycombed with unacknowledged love-affairs, unrequited passions, and murder-urging jealousies.