“Are you warm and dry?” he said; all she could see of him was his big hand clasped round the glass.
“Yes, quite,” she answered, though she felt her skin quivering with cold against the damp garments that seemed glued to it.
“Well, drink this now, right off. And listen—” as the door began to close—“if you get nervous or anything just come to your door and call me. I’ll leave mine open, and I’m a very light sleeper.”
Then before she could answer she felt the door-handle pulled from the outside and the door was shut.
She hastily took off her things and put on dry ones, and then shrugged herself into the thick wrapper of black and white that had been her mother’s. Even her hair was wet, she found out as she undressed, and she mechanically undid it and shook the damp locks loose on her shoulders. She felt penetrated with cold, and still overmastered by fear. Every gust that made the long limb of the pepper-tree grate against the balcony roof caused her heart to leap. When she opened the door to get her supper, the glow of light that fell from Barron’s room, across the hallway, came to her with a hail of friendship and life. She stood listening, and heard the creak of his rocking-chair, then smelt the whiff of a cigar. He was close to her. She shut the door, feeling her terrors allayed.
She picked at her supper, but soon set the tray on the center-table and took the easy-chair before the fire. The sense of physical cold was passing off, but the indescribable oppression and apprehension remained. She did not know exactly what she dreaded, but she felt in some vague way that she would be safer sitting thus clad and wakeful before the fire than sleeping in her bed. Once or twice, as the hours passed and her fears strengthened in the silence and mystery of the night, she crept to her door, and opening it, looked up the hall. The square of light was still there, the scent of the cigar pungent on the air. She shut the door softly, each time feeling soothed as by the pressure of a strong, loving hand.
Sometime toward the middle of the night the heaviness of sleep came on her, and though she fought against it, feeling that the safety she was struggling to maintain against mysterious menace was only to be preserved by wakefulness, Nature overcame her. Curled in her chair before the crumbling fire, she finally slept—the deep, motionless sleep of physical and mental exhaustion.
CHAPTER XXII
A NIGHT’S WORK
“Have is have, however men may catch.”
—Shakespeare.