"Indeed, your lordship is too considerate."
"The rest of my people have gone to bed, I believe; Durnford, will you light Monsieur Fétis to the hall?"
Herrick took a candle from a side table and led the way through the empty rooms, cold and dark and unspeakably dismal after the light and warmth of that cosy parlour in which the three men had supped. The atmosphere struck a chill to the soul of Fétis as he entered the first of those disused reception-rooms. Herrick's one candle shed but a faint gleam of light, which served only to accentuate the gloom. Gigantic shadows, strange forms of vague blackness, like the monstrous inhabitants of some mysterious underworld, seemed to emerge out of the corners and creep towards Fétis—dragon-like monsters, with spreading pinions and eagle claws. They were but the shadow-forms of incipient delirium tremens; but to him who beheld them they were unspeakably horrible.
Yet these were as nothing to that which came afterwards.
He crept with a curious cat-like gait across the room, shrinking from side to side to avoid the clutch of those shadowy claws, to avoid being caught up and enfolded for ever beneath those dark pinions, but on the threshold of the next room he gave a wild yell of agony, and fell on his knees, grovelling, the powdered wig pushed from his bald head by those nerveless hands of his, and drops of cold sweat breaking out upon his wrinkled forehead.
At the further end of the room, luminous in the faint rays of a lamp, he saw a shadow in a long white garment, a pale face, and dark eyes gazing upon him with a solemn stillness, a pale immovable countenance, like that of the dead.
"Spare me! spare me!" he cried. "O, pale, sad victim, have I not atoned? Haunt me no more, poor murdered wretch, betrayed, betrayed, betrayed at every turn! Thy cup of sorrow was full, but O, forgive thy much more wretched murderer! Pity, and pardon!"
The words came in short gasps—uttered in a shrill treble that was almost a scream. They had a sound like the cry of a tortured animal—seemed hardly human to those who heard them. He held his hands before his eyes, clasped convulsively over the eyeballs to shut out the vision that appalled him; and then gradually he collapsed altogether, and sank fainting on the threshold.
When consciousness returned he was seated in front of an open window, the cool night air blowing in upon him, sharp with the breath of late autumn.
"Where am I?" he faltered.