The night was damp and chill but not really cold. He had no plan except to go up to the Miss Tremletts and see whether any light burned there or not. He had no further thought or purpose, and it came to him that it was a senseless one, because if the windows were all dark, it might mean that Thomasina was in bed and asleep, or it might mean that she was out and away. And if there was a light in her window, it could mean that she was awake. She could be reading in bed. She could be doing any one of the things you do when you don’t want to go to sleep. Or she could be out in the dark, with the light left in her window to guide her home.
He came up to the cottage and found all the front of it dark. What had been the stable yard now had a little paling round it painted green, and a gate with one of those fancy latches which are equally difficult to open or shut. It was shut when Peter came up to it, and he made a bad job of getting it open, pinching his fingers and swearing under his breath. Inside, most of the cobblestones had been left, but some square beds had been dug and filled with bulbs. In the dark they were soggy traps through which you blundered.
When he got round to the back, there were three lots of windows, and only one of them showed a light. The dark windows looked as if they were open, but the lighted window was shut, which meant that somebody was up, since you don’t open your window on a January night until you are ready to dive into bed and pull the clothes about you.
Well then, someone was up. But there was nothing to say that it was Thomasina. It might be Gwyneth, or it might be Elaine. And Thomasina out of the house and well away on a fool’s errand! He stood looking at the window and fighting down a rising fury and a rising fear.
There are states of mind in which time flies, and others in which it lags. Peter hadn’t the slightest idea how long he had stood looking up at the light filtering through curtains which gave it a blueish tinge, when he suddenly felt that he wasn’t doing any good. If Thomasina was here she was all right. But if she wasn’t here she was up at Deepe House, and the best thing he could do was to go and find her.
He blundered into another flower bed, shut the gate without bothering about the latch, and set off in the direction of the house. He had a torch, but he didn’t want to use it, and once away from the cottage, the path lay across the open park and was not really hard to keep. The mass of Deepe House showed up against the sky, first as mere density, then as a black rectangle with its two wings foreshortened.
He came into the courtyard between the wings and stopped to look and listen. Here it was absolutely dark, the skyline lost. And absolutely still. Not a breath, not a whisper, not the slightest, smallest sound. Since he had seen the place by day, he knew that the windows to the right were curtained and those on the left boarded-up. While straight ahead-now there he couldn’t remember whether the whole front was eyeless, every window nailed up against wind and weather, or whether here and there there was still glass in some of the windows.
He moved across the courtyard, his hands out before him. There was a door-he remembered that there was a door with some kind of canopy over it. Yes, that was it, a canopy with pillars. His hand touched one of them and felt a cold slime upon it. There were two steps, smooth and shallow, and beyond the steps a heavy door. He remembered seeing it in the daylight, with a scar on it where the knocker had been wrenched away, he supposed for salvage. His left hand found the place and felt it now. Quite a deep hole where a nail had been driven in. The nail, the scar, just touched his thought and was flung off it by the sudden realization that the surface he was touching was a slanting one. It should have been flat, and it wasn’t flat. It should have been steady, and it wasn’t steady. It slanted and it moved. The door was ajar.
CHAPTER XXXII
Whilst Peter Brandon stood looking up at her window Thomasina was following the footpath across the park. Like Peter, she had a torch but she didn’t want to use it. She could manage, because all you had to do was to get away from the trees and then there was enough diffused light from a hidden moon to show the direction of the big house and to help you to follow the path. All the same, she was not half way across the open park before the thought of the lighted room she had left behind her was tugging at her. She had to keep on thinking about Anna, and how infuriating Peter had been, and that only the most despicable kind of coward started out to do something and then turned back because he was afraid.
With these useful thoughts to spur her she got as far as the courtyard. Her feet came upon the slippery winter moss which furred the stones. You could walk without making any noise at all, but where you bruised it in the dark a faint smell of decay came up and hung in the air.
Insensibly she kept a little to the right, because behind the curtains of that right-hand wing there were people-six of them -Mr. and Mrs. Craddock-the three children-Miss Silver. The rooms would have had fires in them, and lights, even if they were dark now and growing cold. If she called out, someone would hear.
Why on earth should she call out? And why, if you please, had she come here at all? Not to stand in the dark and wonder if Miss Silver would hear her if she screamed. She had come to see whether she could get into the deserted part of the house and stop the horrid, growing thought that it might be hiding some dreadful secret about Anna Ball. This possibility, which had seemed quite strong and vigorous an hour ago, now dwindled to the merest wraith. The house was an empty ruin. The damp deserted smell of it came seeping through the rickety boards which blinded its shattered windows. It came to her that if she stood there for another single moment she wouldn’t be able to make herself go on, and that if she didn’t go on she would never stop despising herself.
She turned her back upon the inhabited wing and had taken a single step forward, when something moved, away to the left. She couldn’t have said that she saw even so much as a shadow, or that she heard anything at all. Only something had moved. She stood where she was. The movement came from outside the courtyard. She had a sense of its continuance. She thought someone or something was coming in from outside. She couldn’t see, and she couldn’t hear, but she thought that something went by in the dark.
And the next moment she was sure. A foot slipped on one of the shallow steps which went up to the door, a torch flickered, the door moved, and someone went in. She couldn’t see at all who it was, but she meant to find out. That thread of light from the torch had just touched the edge of the door and gone out. But it had taken with it nine-tenths of Thomasina’s fear. Silence, and darkness, and decay-these are the things which sap courage at the very roots of the race. Man has always been afraid of the enemy whom he can neither see nor fight. Thomasina certainly wasn’t going to let herself be afraid of an ordinary everyday object like an electric torch. That single flicker of light brought the whole thing down to a common human level. Somebody with an electric torch had just gone into the house, and she was going to make it her business to find out who that someone was. Ordinary visitors come up to a door and knock or ring. If they have got a torch they put it on. The person who had just gone into the house didn’t want to be seen or heard any more than she did herself.