Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/157

Rh wind, the sobbing of the rain, and the swish, swish of a branch as it was swept backward and forward against the roof.

At that instant the door swung forward with a bang, and the swagger, his hair almost on end, and perspiration dropping from every pore, sprang up with a loud shriek.

He knew where he was!

In that strange illumination of the mind, which neither depends on reason nor imagination, he remembered when he had last heard those same sounds, and the whole scene rushed before him with a vividness intensified by the hour and the place. Yet fascinated by the invisible, he stayed where he was, cowering in his corner like a wild beast in its lair. If he had only known it, within three paces of him stood the man who had followed him from the township!

For some minutes—which seemed to him hours, so full were they of a nameless dread—he gazed straight in front of him, when all at once a stream of moonlight struck obliquely across the room, taking shape to his excited fancy as a white-robed figure of giant proportions and unearthly form. But it disappeared almost directly, and all was in gloom again.

Half paralysed with fear, the swagger dragged himself along the floor to the door, which a gust of wind opened wide. He was thus able to crawl out into the air, and collect his scattered faculties. But the garden was as full of dread for him as the house. The rain had ceased, but the sobbing of the earth and the rush of the wind were, in his state of mind, fearsome things endowed with life. The moon, too, added to his terrors by casting strange and shifting shadows on the path, and investing the bushes and trees with terrible shapes. An equinoctial gale was blowing, and the place was alive with supernatural beings, yet the swagger was oppressed by its loneliness and silence.

The Yellow Book—Vol. XIII.