Possessing a keen eye for men he began to recognise now why Berknowles had not chosen the easy-going Hennessey to look after Phyl and her affairs, and he guessed, just by the little bit he had seen of Kilgobbin and the servants, the slipshoddedness and waste going on behind the scenes in the absence of a master and mistress.
Pinckney loathed waste as he loathed inefficiency and as he loathed dirt. They were all three brothers with Drink in his eyes and as he leaned back in the chair now, his gaze travelling about the room, he could not but perceive little things that would have brought exclamations from the soul of a careful housekeeper. The furniture had been upholstered, or rather re-upholstered in leather some five years ago. There is nothing that cries out so much against neglect as leather, and the chairs and couch in the library of Kilgobbin, without exactly crying out, still told their tale. Some of the buttons were gone, and some of them hung actually by the thread in the last stage of departure. There was a tiny triangular rent in the leather of the armchair wherein Phyl had been sitting and another armchair wanted a castor. The huge Persian rug that covered the centre of the floor shewed marks left by cigar and cigarette ash, and under a Jacobean book-case in the corner were stuffed all sorts of odds and ends, old paper-backed novels, a pair of old shoes, a tennis racquet and a boxing glove—besides other things.
Pinckney rose up, went to the book-case and placed his fingers on top of it, then he looked at his fingers and the bar of dust upon them, brushed his hand clean and came back to his chair by the fire. He heard the stable clock striking eleven. The sound of the wind that had been raging outside all during dinner time had died away and the sounds of the house made themselves manifest, the hundred stealthy accountable and unaccountable little sounds that night evolves from an old house set in the stillness of the country. Just as the night jasmine gives up its perfume to the night, so does an old house its past in the form of murmurs and crackings and memories and suggestions. Notwithstanding Dunn’s attentions there were rats alive in the cellars and under the boarding—and mice; the passages leading to the kitchen premises made a whispering gallery where murderers seemed consulting together if the scullery window were forgotten and left open—as it usually was, and boards in the uneven flooring that had been preparing for the act for weeks and months would suddenly “go off with a bang,” a noise startling in the dead of night as the crack of a pistol, and produced, heaven knows how, but never by daylight.
Even Pinckney, who did not believe in ghosts, became aware as he sat now by the fire that the old house was feeling for him to make him creep, feeling for him with its old disjointed fingers and all the artfulness of inanimate things.
He was aware that Sir Nicholas Berknowles was looking down at him with the terrible patient gaze of a portrait, and he returned the gaze, trying to imagine what manner of man this might have been and how he had lived and what he had done in those old days that were once real sunlit days filled with people with real voices, hearts, and minds.
A gentle creak as though a light step had pressed upon the flooring of the hall brought his mind back to reality and he was rising from his chair to retire for the night when a sound from outside the window made him sit down again. It was the sound of a step on the gravel path, a step stealthy and light, a real sound and no contraption of the imagination.
The idea of burglars sprang up in his mind, but was dismissed; that was no burglar’s footstep—and yet! He listened. The sound had ceased and now came a faint rubbing as of a hand feeling for the window followed by the sharp rapping of a knuckle on the glass.
“Hullo,” cried Pinckney, jumping to his feet and approaching the shuttered window. “Who’s there?”
“It’s me,” said a voice. “I’m locked out. Byrne’s bolted the front door. Go to the hall door, will you, please, and let me in?”
“Phyl,” said Pinckney to himself. “Good heavens!” Then to the other, “I’m coming.”