Little by little, the steward’s horror of the stillness and the darkness overcame his dread of moving the handkerchief. He cautiously drew aside one corner of it, waited, looked, and took courage at last to draw the whole handkerchief through the wires of the grating. After first hiding it in his pocket, he thought of the consequences if it was found on him, and threw it down in a corner of the room. He trembled when he had cast it from him, as he looked at his watch and placed himself again at the grating to wait for Miss Gwilt.
It was a quarter to one. The moon had come round from the side to the front of the Sanitarium. From time to time her light gleamed on the window of the corridor when the gaps in the flying clouds let it through. The wind had risen, and sung its mournful song faintly, as it swept at intervals over the desert ground in front of the house.
The minute hand of the clock traveled on halfway round the circle of the dial. As it touched the quarter-past one, Miss Gwilt stepped noiselessly into the corridor. “Let yourself out,” she whispered through the grating, “and follow me.” She returned to the stairs by which she had just descended, pushed the door to softly after Mr. Bashwood had followed her and led the way up to the landing of the second floor. There she put the question to him which she had not ventured to put below stairs.
“Was Mr. Armadale shown into Number Four?” she asked.
He bowed his head without speaking.
“Answer me in words. Has Mr. Armadale left the room since?”
He answered, “No.”
“Have you never lost sight of Number Four since I left you?”
He answered, “Never!”
Something strange in his manner, something unfamiliar in his voice, as he made that last reply, attracted her attention. She took her candle from a table near, on which she had left it, and threw its light on him. His eyes were staring, his teeth chattered. There was everything to betray him to her as a terrified man; there was nothing to tell her that the terror was caused by his consciousness of deceiving her, for the first time in his life, to her face. If she had threatened him less openly when she placed him on the watch; if she had spoken less unreservedly of the interview which was to reward him in the morning, he might have owned the truth. As it was, his strongest fears and his dearest hopes were alike interested in telling her the fatal lie that he had now told—the fatal lie which he reiterated when she put her question for the second time.