half past two o'clock on the following night, Mrs. Forrester came broad awake in her bedroom on the third floor of the old mansion on Beacon Street. Something—a subconscious intuition, perhaps—warned her of peril, of some black deed even now in process of consummation.
All was silent, however. No sound came from the housekeeper's room, below stairs, at the rear; none from Disney's, next her own. None could come from that room; for the girl had that afternoon gone to Worcester to play accompaniments for a Conservatory friend of hers, who was giving a recital there.
Very plainly Mrs. Forrester heard the tall old clock on the lower stairway measuring out its tiny segments of eternity. From the library, on the second floor, she heard nothing. When she had gone to bed, at eleven, she had left old Lockwood playing chess there with Dr. Mayhew, his most intimate friend. No voices reached her now. Yes, surely the doctor was gone; and Lockwood, as his habit was, had probably remained awake to read and smoke and ponder on many things. Sometimes, she knew, the old man stayed there in this fashion till three or four of the morning.
“Nerves!” thought Mrs. Forrester, trying to let the silence calm her; but still she tingled with a consciousness that something ominous and terrible was taking place.
Then, all at once, something became audible.
The woman heard what seemed a stifled outcry, a gasp, in the library. There followed a peculiar and dull sound, as of a thing that heavily fell.
Silence again, for a moment; then a slight grating noise; and after that, stillness more profound than ever.
Mrs. Forrester sat up in her big walnut bed, listening acutely, her eyes wide with consuming terror, her heart throbbing painfully. For a few seconds she remained there, every sense on the stretch. Then, constrained by a force more compelling than her own panic, she got out of bed. She slipped on a blue kimono, kicked her feet into slippers, and, with her hair tumbling all about her shoulders, stepped noiselessly out into the hall.
At the stairhead she stood motionless, listening, peering in the vague light from the open library door, a prey to nameless and quivering fear. Outwardly, all yet seemed well. No untoward sound or sight marred the peace of the ancient dwelling. Calm silence possessed it. Still from the lower hall she could hear the clock on the landing as it kept its unhurried rhythm—tic-tac, tic-tac—marking off the seconds irretrievably for good or evil.
Down Beacon Street, a belated taxi purred along. From indefinite distances, out in the harbor, blurred the vague rumor of a steamer's whistle. An alley cat , after the manner of its kind. Mantles of night obscurely held old Boston town.
The woman's racing pulses quieted a little.
“I must have been dreaming,” she thought.
But still she did not turn back to her own room. Something deeper than her conscious reasoning told her that this was no dream, convinced her that the sounds in the library had been real, that they portended some catastrophe which she trembled to ascertain, yet was constrained to investigate.
With more courage than it seemed possible to muster in those shaken nerves, the frightened woman crept on down the stairs, silently, in slippered feet. Still no motion, no sound save the creak of the ancient stair tread and the tic-tac, tic-tac of the clock, whose tone now bore an ominous quality of warning.
All at once, in a voice that seemed not hers at all, Mrs. Forrester exclaimed:
“Hello! Who's there? What was that?”
There was no answer—only a leaden cope of silence.
“Father! Are you there?”
The utter stillness terrified her more than any outcry. Old Lockwood, of course, might have fallen asleep over his books; but in her heart of hearts Mrs. Forrester seemed to know that worse, infinitely worse, than that had befallen.
She gripped her courage and went on down the last of the stairs. She reached the hallway; advanced, a bluish wraith in the vague adumbration of light from the library door.
At that door she paused and peered through.
“Father!”
No answer coming, she forced herself to enter. Then, of a sudden, she became aware of a dimly outlined something, a formless body, that lay in a huddled heap—lay by the fireplace, under the light of the reading lamp, half hidden by Lockwood's huge armchair.
She caught a gasp of breath, and crept a little onward.
“What's that?” she whispered tensely.