Explicit! Here, with the hurly-burly of the quarrel is completed the exposition; what admired disorder ensued in the next fifteen minutes I described at the outset of my half-the-night’s scribbling.[¹] What has it meant? What does it portend? I am sure now that the intangible feeling impressed upon me in the Hall was one of hostility, not the sort divulged by semi-secret looks and half-heard imprecations, but a congeries of criss-crossed feuds hidden completely by the thick veneer of social amenity.
Well! sleep we must in spite of thunder. I have written as often I used to, feverishly, with absorption, but never with such a theme! What will to-morrow bring? What shall I have to relate to-morrow midnight? Nothing dull, I hope; I trust nothing grievous.
(Eve Bartholomew, whom I thought I heard prowling an hour ago, left a slip of paper under the door: “Money! I’ve known Sir Brooke to forget it before.”
Poor devil of a woman?)
¹ All this is more than four times as much as I wrote that night, but I did set down something more than five thousand words. (Author’s note.) [↩︎]
VI.
Strain
October 3. 9.15 P.M.
I awoke, late in the morning, of course, very much refreshed. For a moment or two I was puzzled by my situation; then the tenseness and terror of the preceding night stung me. I knew that brooding over those wild events would lead to no good—of this and other matters I had already made up my mind. I kicked off the bedclothes and ventured out of my door. It was a minute or two past ten, and on my secret march in last night’s borrowed dressing-robe down to Pendleton’s room for a bath, I found no sign of any other guest.
Half an hour later, in the dinner-room across the corridor from the Hall of the Moth, I sought breakfast. On the threshold, his back toward me, I found Ludlow vehement, making warlike gestures at someone inside.