“You don’t mean that there is really any risk for you,” she exclaimed. “No, I am sure there isn’t,” she continued, after looking out of the window, and examining it for herself, “of course, if there was, I shouldn’t want you to go. You are laughing at me because you think me very silly—I am very sorry, but I can’t help it. I do so wish I hadn’t come here—I wish I could get out of the window too!”
“No, indeed, it would not be safe for you at all,” said Mr Morpeth, hastily, concealing his private opinion that the feat was not so easy as it looked. “I am a good climber and I’ve had plenty of practice. It is nothing for me, but it would be quite different for you—promise me, Miss Western, you will not try to get out of the window while I am away. I shall be as quick as I can, but I may not be able to find the others all at once.”
“Very well,” said Mary. “I do promise. Not that I ever meant to get out of the window, I assure you.”
Mr Morpeth clambered out successfully. Mary watched him groping along the ledge, holding on first by a projecting window sash, then by a water-pipe, then by what she could not tell—somehow or other he had made his way to the roof of the door porch, and was hidden from her sight. But, in a minute, a whistle and a low call of “all right” satisfied her as to his safety.
“He is very good-natured,” thought Mary. “He called out softly on purpose not to attract attention. What a silly girl he must think me, to make such a fuss about such a simple thing! But I can’t help it.”
She drew back from the window and sat down on one of the straight-backed, tapestry-cushioned chairs, and began to calculate how long she would probably have to wait. Ten minutes at most—it could not take longer to run round to the front of the house and find Mrs Golding.
“They will come back by that door,” said Mary, to herself, directing her eyes towards the invisible entrance by which she and Mr Morpeth had returned to the haunted room. “How glad I shall be when I see it open! How I wish I had a watch! It would pass the time to count the minutes till they come—but I could hardly see the minute hand on a watch even now. How dark it is getting! It is those great trees outside—in summer, no light at all can get in here I should think.”
She got up and turned again to the window, fancying that looking out would be a little less gloomy than sitting staring at the old furniture and the shadowy figures on the walls, growing more and more weird and gruesome as the light faded. But, standing there at the window, there returned to her mind the tragic story of which Mrs Golding had given, her the outlines, and, despite her endeavours to think of something else, her imagination persisted in filling in the details. “She had thrown herself out of the window in despair,” Mrs Golding had told of the unhappy prisoner, and Mary recalled it with a slight shudder.
Was it much to be wondered at? Any one would grow desperate shut up within these four gloomy walls—gloomy now, and gloomy then, no doubt, for the tapestry was very old—older, probably, than the date of the story—and the room had ever since been left much as it was at that time. It was a ghastly story, as much for what had preceded the final tragedy as for the catastrophe itself.
“It is so very horrible to think of any one’s having been shut up in this very room for days, and weeks, and months, perhaps,” thought Mary. “And to think that her only way out of it was to many a man she hated! Still, whoever she was, she must have been brave; the only inconsistent part of the story is her being supposed to haunt the place she must have had such a horror of. Dear me, how dark it is getting!—how I do wish they would come, and how I wish I had not heard that story!”