CHAPTER LII

Owen had cheered me up a little; I was glad I had come; and during my return journey I pondered the advice he had given me and decided that I must follow it. I waited till nine o’clock, by which hour I thought Gerald would probably have gone out, for I wanted to avoid him: then I went up to Derryaghy. So far as I could see, the only way was to call just as usual, and trust to luck to get a few minutes with Katherine alone.

But at the door my courage failed me, and I stepped softly round to the terrace, and, standing hidden in the deep shadow of the house, looked to see who was in the room. The curtain was as usual undrawn and the room was full of lamplight. They were all there. Gerald was sprawling on his back on the sofa; Katherine was working at her table-cloth, her head bent over it so that I could not see her face; Miss Dick was writing; Mrs. Carroll was playing “Patience.” Presently Katherine looked up, and, for a moment or two, before she returned to her work, I saw her gaze out into the darkness. The others, except Mrs. Carroll, had their backs to me; a small fire was burning in the grate. I stood there under a kind of fascination. The impression was strange, and even slightly weird. Looking in upon them, all so silent and so unconscious of my presence, I had a peculiar feeling that, if I came right into their line of vision, they would still not see me. I had a strange feeling that I was actually invisible, and, moreover, that I was not the only watcher there, and, that if we were invisible to the inmates of the room, we might not be invisible to each other. Other faces, pale and dim, peered in at other windows; the house was surrounded by shadowy presences――shadowy forms that hovered outside here on the terrace, that glided up and down the wide, dark, creaking staircase, or stood motionless in the upper rooms. I stepped back and looked up at the long line of black, unlit windows, with just here and there a glimmering light. And I felt as if I no longer belonged to the same world as the occupants of the room I watched. I was but a memory, a ghost; my place was upstairs; in dim passages; by trembling blinds, pulled aside for just a moment that we might peep out; in shadowy rooms; behind doors whose handles the timid maid, hurrying by in her glimmer of unsteady candlelight, feared to turn. I was the breath that set the curtains at the bed’s head trembling; the faint sound as of a chair pushed back on the upper floor; the draught――was it a draught?――that made the lamp-flame flicker; the pale reflection passing across the looking-glass and gone before there was time to strike a match. I was that mysterious something one turned one’s head quickly to see, and did not see; the cold touch that awakened just before dawn; the gray, ghostly figure sitting by the window in the first wan light, and that was no longer there when one rubbed one’s eyes; the tapping on the window-pane as of a leaf――the tapping that must surely be only a leaf moved by the wind.

I do not know how long I stood there: it may have been but a few minutes, yet it was long enough for me to realize that the simple act of entering the room was become an impossibility. It would have required too violent an effort, too sharp and brutal a wrench, an effort I shrank from as from physical pain. I must write to Katherine. How could I go in there as if nothing had happened? If she came out on to the terrace I might find courage to speak to her, but she would not come. Gerald, on the other hand, almost certainly would; and if he discovered me prowling about like this what would he think? I slipped away, then, like a veritable ghost, my footsteps making no noise upon the faded grass.