"I thought—thought I saw some one—something," I replied blunderingly.
She laughed as she helped me with the shutters.
"You're seeing the ghosts, Tinman," she whispered.
CHAPTER IV
[THE COMING OF THE WOLVES]
I slept but badly that night; it seemed so strange that I should be under that roof in these days of ruin and disaster—hiding, as it were, from the sight of men, and striving to plot, in my own feeble futile way, against forces that must in time inevitably overwhelm and sweep me away. I had been a poor prisoner for so many years; I was like a child in the world now, with whatever powers I had once had dulled and blunted. Passionately I desired to help this girl, who already smiled at me with the eyes of her dead mother, and whose speaking of that absurd name of mine—Tinman—was like a caress. Yet what could I do?—how could I help her or the boy she loved?
I thought, too, more than once of that shadowy figure I had seen on the terrace, hovering like a lost soul outside the house—of that face that had stared in at me from the darkness outside into the room where the father and daughter were. Unless by any chance I had been deceived, who was this woman who moved silently about the grounds at night, and what was her interest in the girl? I tried to dismiss from my mind the whole thing as a mere hallucination—a something bred of all the dreams that once had been mine in that house; but I could not shut out that face that had stared in at me. I remembered how the eyes had held mine for one long moment before I cried out; I remembered in a puzzled way that there had been something curiously familiar about them—as though that figure, too, had come out of the dreams of the past to haunt me. I remembered what the girl had said on the staircase about the ghosts in the great dreary house; I found myself sitting up in bed in the dark room, with my hands clasped round my knees, thinking about it all, and asking myself over and over again what I should do. Almost I wished myself back in my cell in prison, with the certain knowledge upon me that nothing could ever disturb me there, and that the world outside was dead. I hated the thought that I had been dragged out again into such a tangle as this.
Better resolves came with the morning; the wintry sunlight seemed to warm me, and to warm any faint resolution that was beginning to shape itself in my mind. I would be strong and watchful; I held a power here that no one suspected, because I knew so much, and had loved so strongly, and was, after all, only a poor creature with whom fate had done its worst and could do no more. Yes—I would be strong.
There was, of course, nothing for me to do, save to kill time; I was allowed to wander about as I liked. Yet there was in me an insane desire to see the girl—to watch this new Barbara that was to me the old Barbara come alive again. I hung about, foolishly enough, on the chance of seeing her—watched her when presently she went out of the house and started for a walk. She was so much to me, and I desired so strongly to watch over her, that I found myself following, perhaps with the fear that some harm might come to her, and that I might be able to prevent it.