‘We can’t wait. What’s the matter?’ But he had gone, and they were left to listen and wonder and whisper together a little longer in the darkness.
‘I’m frightened, I’m frightened,’ said Gladys at last, putting out a hand and coming close again.
‘So am I,’ replied Margaret. ‘But it’s really all right now, Gladys, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know.’
Then they waited in silence for the door to open.
CHAPTER XV
It had seemed as if dawn were postponed for ever, yet it came at last. Philip noticed a vague trouble in the air and then a faint greying of things. He alone appeared to be awake now. He was sitting in a chair, and his arms were around Margaret, who was leaning against him, curled across another and lower chair. For some time he had been sitting there, quiet, unstirring, numbed, but with his thoughts going on and on, like a river flowing through a frozen land. He seemed to have been there a long time now. Already the events of the night had receded; the struggle with Morgan in the hall here, along the corridor, in the kitchen, and the final victory that sent him, cowed, beaten, into the cellar; the fantastic interview with Miss Femm, who would not surrender the key of the door into the hall at first and had to be stormed at; the discovery of the lifeless bodies of Penderel and Saul Femm, one with his neck broken and the other mysteriously killed, perhaps from shock and a weak heart; the huddling away of the bodies, the scenes that followed with Margaret and Gladys and the two Femms; already these events were receding, a haze was creeping over them, though the tale was hardly three hours old.
He himself had not slept, though there was something hot and aching about his eyes and a weight upon their lids. He had been busy making Margaret comfortable, holding her securely, and now she slept. Not far away, Sir William, who had long been exhausted and had not easily recovered from the blow that Morgan had given him, was stretched out in the other armchair, dozing heavily. The rich baronet, Philip reflected, had come out of it all extraordinarily well. Brigand he might be, but he was certainly a man. He had shown courage and nerve during the fight with Morgan and later, and, what was even more surprising, he had been magnificent with Gladys afterwards, the ‘lass,’ as he had called her with a gruff tenderness that seemed to be part of the real North-country self he usually kept hidden away.
Philip watched the grey light steal into the room and then begin to creep towards every corner. There was Gladys, the most tragic figure among them. She was half-sitting, half-lying on the floor, with her head against Sir William’s knee and one arm flung across it. She, too, was sleeping peacefully at last, completely worn out after her long storm of sobbing. When she had first learned of Penderel’s death, she had been strangely quiet; and it was only afterwards, when in spite of all they could say to dissuade her she had gone to look at his body and had suddenly flung herself down upon it, that she had lost all her self-control. And now she was asleep, and when she wakened to the world again the night’s tragedy would have lost something of its stabbing power, would already be a memory, be softened, gauzed about with dream, and she would be ready to go quietly away, to complete—and how strange that seemed—her journey.
His thoughts wandered on as he watched the room tremble between darkness and light. Penderel and poor crazed Saul Femm had only seemed to be sleeping, as if suddenly weary of their long wrestling bout, when they had found them, twisted on the floor beneath the broken banisters. And there had seemed, he remembered, to be a queer brotherhood between them. You felt they were going to awaken somewhere else and immediately shake hands and talk it all out together.