Philippa sank down upon a plush-covered chair and looked around her. What a horrible room it was! The shabby furniture, covered with gloomy drapery, had an air of sombre complicity with all the tragedies that darkened human life. It was like a room only entered when some one was dead or dying. It was like the ante-room to a cemetery. Everything in it drooped, and seemed anxious to efface itself, as if ashamed to witness the indecent exposures of outraged human thoughts.
They brought Sorio at last, and the man’s sunken eyes gleamed with a light of indescribable pleasure when his hand met Philippa’s and clutched it with trembling eagerness.
They went out of the room together and moved down the long passage that led to the entrance of the place. As she walked by his side, Philippa experienced the queer sensation of having him as her partner in some diabolic danse-macabre, performed to the mingled tune of all the wild “songs of madness” created since the beginning of the world.
She couldn’t help noticing that the groups of people they passed on their way had an air quite different from persons in a hospital or even in a prison. They made her think—these miserable ones—of some horrible school for grown-up people; such a school as those who have been ill-used in childhood see sometimes in their dreams.
They seemed to loiter and gather and peer and mutter, as if, “with bated breath and whispering humbleness,” they were listening to something that was going on behind closed doors. Philippa got the impression of a horrible atmosphere of guilt hanging over the place, as if some dark and awful retribution were being undergone there, for crimes committed against the natural instincts of humanity.
A lean, emaciated old woman came shuffling past them, with elongated neck and outstretched arms. “I’m a camel! I’m a camel! I’m a camel!” Philippa heard her mutter.
Suddenly Adrian laid his hand on her arm. “They let me have my owl in here, Phil,” he said. “We mustn’t go far to-night or it’ll get hungry. It has its supper off my plate. I never told you how I found it, did I? It was pecking at her eyes, you know. Yes, at her eyes! But that’s nothing, is it? She had been dead for weeks, and owls are scavengers, and corpses are carrion!”
They crossed the garden with quick steps.
“How good the air is to-night!” cried Philippa’s companion, throwing back his head and snuffing the leaf-scented darkness.
They were let out through the iron gates and turning instinctively south-wards, they wandered slowly down to the river—the girl’s hand resting on the man’s arm.