The shock was horrid and without even the dignity of danger. He could easily have scrambled back but that, as he re-opened his eyes, he found himself gazing at a lantern, held up from across the pond. At that moment three shots flew past him, aimed at the bank he had so involuntarily and violently quitted. It seemed well to remain inconspicuous as might be; the bullets began to skip close to him, and, experimentally sinking, he found a fair depth and struck out under water for the opposite shore.
In the middle of the pond his hands touched a solid and terrifying obstruction. Heavens, what was this? Through what snares did he clumsily struggle to make his way? And in what nightmare? Involuntarily he came to the surface and found himself confronted by a high, overhanging shape, bulking featureless in the darkness and chilling him with a sort of superstitious despair. The more so that he seemed to be grasping something shaped like a foot; his hand climbed a vast, cold leg and the next moment he could have laughed aloud. He remembered, now, from his daylight forays, an ornamental wilderness of rocks and ferns, across which he had once glimpsed a stone lady; seated, and bending forward with a vase extended in her hand. The pond had been hidden by that wilderness; the vase had once been a playing fountain, and the lady herself sat on a rock in the middle of the waters. It was against this rock his hand had struck and it was her ankles which he thus ungallantly grasped. He hung to them a moment, resting in her shadow, and then with infinite precautions began to pull himself up those smooth, cold knees. She was very large and dense, a bulwark between him and the spitting bullets; he felt her rocky island beneath his feet, and gave himself, even with ardor, to her embraces.
The light upon the shore split in two and one-half of it began to skirt the pond at a brisk pace. He clambered across the stone lady's lap and crouched, kneeling, in the shadow of her arm. Thus sheltered, his first thought was for the priming of his revolver. It was soaked through! He could have cried out like a child! But already his breathing space was past.
The runner with the lantern had reached the spot where Herrick had plunged in and the surface of the pond was now raked with rays of light, crossing each other and striking perilously near his refuge so that they sought out at once the breast and the bent back of the stone lady. Herrick, as he blotted himself down the rock, observed that on the further side the pond was edged by a coping of rough stones rising, perhaps, two feet above the water and irregularly surmounted by small boulders—the beginning of the ornamental wilderness. He came up close against the wall; his fingers wedging themselves in a crack between the stones, and his head, shadowed by a boulder, half above the water. Thus, as he could hear and was not likely to be seen, he had every advantage of that dangerous neighborhood. And also time for a somewhat chill reflection. Suppose the life were not knocked out of him in the next five minutes, what use was there in going on with a useless pistol? It seemed even the outer grounds were being patroled or perhaps searched—he remembered the light shining from the house—it came in upon him that something unusual was going on, and that he might presently succeed in being either the victim or the witness of a climax. That thought was enough; his blood committed him beyond denial; and when the searchers, without having dropped a single significant remark, began scouting their own fears, and, accepting the surrounding silence as empty of intruders, turned back through the artificial wilderness toward the center of the estate, Herrick pulled himself out of the water and, sometimes on his hands and knees, sometimes upon his stomach, followed among the rocks.
The group with the lantern came out upon the carriage-way and paused. A horse and two-seated wagon awaited them, the horse's head turned toward the house; in the wagon sat Herrick's old friend, Mrs. Pascoe and the little old, old couple from the lodge. As the other men tumbled in the old lodge-keeper lifted up his voice: "I ain't slep' out o' the lodge, nor your ma ain't, either, in forty years!"
"Well, you'll have to to-night, pa," said Mrs. Pascoe. "An' there ain't any time to talk about it, either." She added, "You an' ma can come back when we're gone. Don't ferget M'ree's your great gran'niece by marriage. Have her visit yeh again." They were off and through the shrubbery; Herrick followed.
But the carriage-way was clear of everything save errant weeds and at an ordinary trot they very easily distanced him. After a while he ceased to hear the wheels, but now again he could see the house shine among the trees, and as he came closer still he listened for the sounds of their arrival but heard nothing.
It was extraordinary what a stillness had again fallen upon the night. No sound covered his approach, and when he came at last in view of the great entrance no wagon waited on the path nor did any voice challenge him from the doorway.
He stood among the trees and stared across the wide sweep of carriage-way. He saw on either side depths of lawn, kept cut and roughly trimmed, merging at last again into the darkness. The drive was bright from the great glowing portico, and from the entrance doors set wide into a stately hall; the hall was all in order as though for a reception, with rugs and palms and candelabra, and to its left a vast apartment like a ballroom flung from its long open windows, that crossed the left front of the house and shone far along the side, spaces of lamplight down the terraces. Save for one pane gleaming overhead, the rest of the house stood dark, as if unoccupied. But in that still yet quivering night, in that dense, black, vast but sultry silence, this made a great illumination, and that wing of the old mansion seemed to blaze like a palace in a wood; in the lack of sound or motion, it seemed swept, opened and made ready by enchantment, and waiting for the conqueror. It had indeed so great an air, so composed, so ordered, and of such stately openness that it seemed to rebuke suspicion; surely law and seemliness were on its side and not that of the dark, soiled, muddied, creeping figure that skulked, staring, in the shrubbery like a thief in the night; totally confounded, oppressed by every terror of the house-breaker and yet with empty hands. But the bright house, which should have threatened, invited him with every luster.
He was a fool, if you wish, but at least he knew his foolhardiness to the core. The wagon he had followed must have passed the house and gone on toward the river, but this bright vacancy and quiet had not been arranged for nothing. To go forward was most likely death; a death quite futile and unremarked, and scarcely a breathing-stage in the wild story whose blazed trail of ruin and murder he had already followed so far. Well, he had followed too far to go back. He was too near the goal; he was too near the turning of the page, and, as far as was mortally possible, he must read it.