"Be you a-goin' fur, sir?"
"No further than I need."
"Then I think I'll go along wi' you, sir."
"No, George, I may be back before the moon is up. At least—no, it will be high-risen when I return, most likely. Only pray assure my aunt that I am doing the very best for myself." So saying, I left the faithful George staring after me and shaking dubious head.
I walked at a leisurely pace, deliberating how best to contrive the desperate task I had set myself to accomplish, how best to bring it to a final and certain issue.
And presently up came the moon in glory and I stared up at her as one does who may behold her perhaps for the last time. Calm and serene she arose, and as I walked amid this tender light, I seemed to breathe in something of her passionless serenity and knew a strange exaltation of mind, placid and untroubled. Gone were my fever dreams, the foul horrors that had haunted me, and my obscene demons were vanished utterly away and with them, as it seemed, the inertia of my late sickness.
To die, and in so doing take evil with me, leaving the world so much the better? To die, and perhaps find for myself that oblivion, that untroubled rest that I so earnestly desired? Surely Death, after all, was the Great Good Thing? So I walked on at leisurely pace, serene, assured and utterly content.
Reaching the high road, I followed it until I espied a rutted byway bounded on the one hand by lofty trees and on the other by a high and sinister wall. At the same leisurely pace I strolled down this dark lane and thus arrived at a pair of tall and very massive iron gates.
Here I paused, and though the adjacent trees cast much shadow, presently discovered a bell handle to which I applied myself forthwith.
After some delay the door of the lodge opened and a figure appeared, though strangely vague and indistinct and then, peering at me through the bars of the gate, I saw a gigantic negro, his skin as black as his livery.