‘I should think you did,’ Philip returned. It was rude, but he couldn’t help it. ‘What was it?’ he demanded bluntly.
The other leaned forward again. ‘It must have been Morgan. That fellow is drunk, as you know. He is probably making a disturbance in the kitchen.’
The sound had not come from the direction of the kitchen, but Philip couldn’t very well pursue the topic, although his mind had not dismissed it. They were wasting time. ‘Well, what about the lamp?’
Mr. Femm bit his lip and then looked apologetic. ‘Listen,’ he began, ‘I want you to excuse me from accompanying you. I am tired and I am not strong. I cannot face any more stairs. I should have told you before, but vanity—the vanity of age—would not allow me. You know where it is, I believe. You will find it on a small table nearly at the end of the next landing above’—he pointed—‘at the top of the stairs there.’
The man was so obviously lying that Philip could have laughed in his face. His excuses were sheer impudence. There was something very strange in all this, but there was nothing to be done about it. ‘All right. I see,’ he said, looking him steadily in the eyes. ‘I’ll go and get it. I suppose,’ he added, remembering his companion’s objection downstairs, ‘it’s not too heavy for me to carry?’
‘Not at all,’ came the reply. So that had been a lie too. The man was made up of them. What an extraordinary shifty, spectral creature he was! That’s what’s the matter with him, why I haven’t liked him from the first, Philip told himself: he’s a born liar himself and he makes everything, yes, the whole world, seem hollow and false.
‘I shall want that, you know.’ And Philip held out his hand for the candle. Mr. Femm begged him to wait a moment and disappeared into his room. When he returned he was carrying a burning night-light and, without a word, he now handed over the candle and remained standing at his door while Philip hurried forward to the foot of the next staircase.
He was not half-way up when he heard the sound of a door closing behind him. Evidently Mr. Femm had retired into his room. And the next moment there came the sound of a door either being bolted or locked. It seemed as if Mr. Femm were determined to feel secure. It was all very strange, and Philip stopped to tell himself so and to listen again. Somehow he didn’t like the sound of that door. It was odd how a little thing like that could leave you feeling uncomfortably insecure yourself, almost as if you were left naked. He went on, but now he trod very lightly on the stairs. They were narrower than those below, uncarpeted and given to creaking long after your feet had passed over them. In the moving glimmer of candle-light everything here looked very uncared for and melancholy. Above his head was a little black skylight where the rain went rap-rapping. It was a place of dust and mildew and long decay, of things forgotten by the sunlight, as strangely remote as some house, fragmentary, shadowy, in the dark of a dream.
Here was the landing before him, and there, nearly at the end of it, were the little table and the lamp. To examine them coolly was to disperse the fairy-tale dusk that had somehow gathered in his mind as this absurd little errand had lengthened out and become touched with fantasy. The lamp was one of those old-fashioned double-branched affairs, its twin glass cylinders covered with dust. With care, he ought to be able to carry it down in one hand. The light of his candle fell on an old steel engraving hanging above the table, and it showed him a bewhiskered officer standing, sword in hand, in front of a large cannon, while in the background there towered a quite impossible pagoda. For a moment he stopped to gaze at this unknown, evidently a hero of one of the old Chinese wars, and to wonder how he came to be there, with his sword and his cannon and his pagoda. Then he took up the lamp, held out the candle at arm’s length, and returned, more slowly and carefully now, along the landing.
He had been in such a hurry to discover the table and the lamp that he had never noticed that door on the left. Now, as he walked slowly back, it invited his attention, then arrested it. There was nothing very odd about its appearance; it was merely a stout old door that had lost most of its paint; but there was something very odd about the way in which it was closed. Then he saw what it was. The door had two large bolts. It was fastened on the outside. Why should they have done that? Did they suppose someone would break into the house that way? The very idea of anyone breaking into this house was monstrous. Pondering these things, he had actually passed the door, when something pulled him up. He seemed to hear somebody moving about. Surely there was the sound of a voice too, a kind of muttering not very far away? It could only come from behind that door. There was somebody inside that room, the thickness of a wall away from him, behind that bolted door. And what about that stifled cry he had heard a few minutes ago, that battering noise? Curiosity, like a little flame in the mind, burned and brightened for a moment and then suddenly went out, leaving him in a crawling darkness, with doubt and terror. He felt suddenly sick and terrified of life.