"O yes, sir. Mrs. Weston gave me this letter for you, sir. Am I to wait for an answer?"
"No; there will be no answer. Good night."
"Good night, sir."
The young man went away; and Paul Marchmont heard him whistle a popular melody as he walked along the cloistered way and out of the quadrangle by a low archway commonly used by the tradespeople who came to the Towers.
The artist stood and listened to the young man's departing footsteps. Then, with a horrible thrill of anguish, he remembered that he had seen his last of humankind––he had heard his last of human voices: for he was to kill himself that night. He stood in the dark lobby, looking out into the quadrangle. He was quite alone in the house; for the girl who had let him in was in the laundry with her mother. He could see the figures of the two women moving about in a great gaslit chamber upon the other side of the quadrangle––a building which had no communication with the rest of the house. He was to die that night; and he had not yet even determined how he was to die.
He mechanically opened Mrs. Weston's letter: it was only a few lines, telling him that Peterson had arrived with the portmanteau and dressing–case, and that there would be a comfortable room prepared for him. "I am so glad you have changed your mind, and are coming to me, Paul," Mrs. Weston concluded. "Your manner, when we parted to–night, almost alarmed me."
Paul groaned aloud as he crushed the letter in his hand. Then he went back to the western drawing–room. He heard strange noises in the empty rooms as he passed by their open doors, weird creaking sounds and melancholy moanings in the wide chimneys. It seemed as if all the ghosts of Marchmont Towers were astir to–night, moved by an awful prescience of some coming horror.
Paul Marchmont was an atheist; but atheism, although a very pleasant theme for a critical and argumentative discussion after a lobster–supper and unlimited champagne, is but a poor staff to lean upon when the worn–out traveller approaches the mysterious portals of the unknown land.
The artist had boasted of his belief in annihilation; and had declared himself perfectly satisfied with a materialistic or pantheistic arrangement of the universe, and very indifferent as to whether he cropped up in future years as a summer–cabbage, or a new Raphael; so long as the ten stone or so of matter of which he was composed was made use of somehow or other, and did its duty in the great scheme of a scientific universe. But, oh! how that empty, soulless creed slipped away from him now, when he stood alone in this tenantless house, shuddering at strange spirit–noises, and horrified by a host of mystic fears––gigantic, shapeless terrors––that crowded in his empty, godless mind, and filled it with their hideous presence!
He had refused to believe in a personal God. He had laughed at the idea that there was any Deity to whom the individual can appeal, in his hour of grief or trouble, with the hope of any separate mercy, any special grace. He had rejected the Christian's simple creed, and now––now that he had floated away from the shores of life, and felt himself borne upon an irresistible current to that mysterious other side, what did he not believe in?