“But what is the thing,” I said, “of which you speak? Is it a spirit of evil, or a human spirit, or what?”
“Good God!” he said, “how can I tell?” and then with lifted hand he sang in a strange voice a bar or two from Stanford’s Revenge.
“Was he devil or man? he was devil for aught they knew.”
This dreadful interlude, the very flippancy of it, that might have moved my laughter at any other time, had upon me an indescribably sickening effect. I stared at Basil. He relapsed into a moody silence with clasped hands and knotted brow. To draw him away from the nether darkness of his thoughts, I asked him how and in what shape the spirit had made itself plain to him.
“Oh, no shape at all,” said he; “he is there, that is enough. I seem sometimes to see a face, to catch the glance of an eye, to see a hand raised to warn or to encourage; but it is all impossibly remote; I could never explain to you how I see him.”
“Do you see him now?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Basil, “a long way off – and he is running swiftly to me, but he has far to go yet. He is angry; he threatens me; he beats the air with his hands.”
“But where is this?” I asked, for Basil’s eyes were upon the ground.
“Oh, for God’s sake, man, be silent,” said Basil. “It is in the region of which you and others know little; but it has been revealed to me. It lies all about us – it has its capes and shadowy peaks, and a leaden sea, full of sound; it is there that I ramble with him.”
There fell a silence between us. Then I said, “But, dear Basil, I must ask you this – how was it that you wrote as you did to me?”
“Oh! he made me write,” he said, “and I think he overreached himself – or my angel, that beholds the Father’s face, smote him down. I was myself again on a sudden, the miserable and abject wretch whom you see before you, and knowing that I had been as a man in a dream. Then I wrote the despairing words, and guarded the letter so that he could not come near me; and then Mr Vyvyan’s visit to me – that was not by chance. I gave him the letter and he promised to bear it faithfully – and what attempts were made to tear it from him I do not know; but that my adversary tried his best I do not doubt. But Vyvyan is a good man and could not be harmed.
“And then I fell back into the old spell; and worked still more abundantly and diligently and produced this – this accursed thing which shall not live to scatter evil abroad.” As he said these words he rose, and tore the score that lay on the table into shreds and crammed the pieces in the fire. As he thrust the last pieces down, the poker he was holding fell from his hands.
I saw him white as a sheet, and trembling. “What is the matter?” I said.
He turned a terrible look on me, and said, “He is here – he has arrived.”
Then all at once I was aware that there was a sort of darkness in the room; and then with a growing horror I gradually perceived that in and through the room there ran a thing like the front of a precipice, with some dark strand at its foot on which beat a surge of phantom waves. The two scenes struggled together. At one time I could plainly see the cliff-front, close beside me – and then the lamp and the firelit room was all dimmed even to vanishing; and then suddenly the room would come back and the cliff die into a steep shadow.
But in either of the scenes Basil and I were there – he standing irresolute and despairing, glancing from side to side like a hare when the hounds close in. And once he said – this was when the cliff loomed up suddenly – “There are others with him.” Then in a moment it seemed as if the room in which we sat died away altogether and I was in that other place; there was a faint light as from under a stormy sky; and a little farther up the strand there stood a group of dark figures, which seemed to consult together.
All at once the group broke and came suddenly towards us. I do not know what to call them; they were human in a sense – that is, they walked upright and had heads and hands. But the faces were all blurred and fretted, like half-rotted skulls – but there was no sense of comparison in me. I only knew that I had seen ugliness and corruption at the very source, and looked into the darkness of the pit itself.
The forms eluded me and rushed upon Basil, who made a motion as though to seize hold of me, and then turned and fled, his arms outstretched, glancing behind him as he ran – and in a moment he was lost to view, though I could see along the shore of that formless sea something like a pursuit.
I do not know what happened after that. I think I tried to pray; but I presently became aware that I was myself menaced by danger. It seemed – but I speak in parables – as though one had separated himself from the rest and had returned to seek me. But all was over, I knew; and the figure indeed carried something which he swung and shook in his hand, which I thought was a token to be shown to me. And then I found my voice and cried out with all my strength to God to save me; and in a moment there was the fire-lit room again, and the lamp – the most peaceful-looking room in England.
But Basil had left me; the door was wide open; and in a moment the farmer and his wife came hurrying along with blanched faces to ask who it was that had cried out, and what had happened.
I made some pitiful excuse that I had dozed in my chair and had awoke crying out some unintelligible words. For in the quest I was about to engage in I did not wish that any mortal should be with me.
They left me, asking for Mr Netherby and still not satisfied. Indeed, Mrs Hall looked at me with so penetrating a look that I felt that she understood something of what had happened. And then at once I went up to Basil’s room. I do not know where I found the courage to do it; but the courage came.
The room was dark, and a strong wind was blowing through it from the little door. I stepped across the room, feeling my way; went down the stairs, and finding the door open at the bottom, I went out into the snake-like path.
I went some yards along it; the moon had risen now. There came a sudden gap in the trees to the left, through which I could see the pale fields and the corner of the wood casting its black shadow on the ground.
The shrubs were torn, broken, and trampled, as though some heavy thing had crashed through. I made my way cautiously down, endowed with a more than human strength – it was a steep bank covered with trees – and then in a moment I saw Basil.
He lay some distance out in the field on his face. I knew at a glance that all was over; and when I lifted him I became aware that he was in some way strangely mangled, and indeed it was found afterwards that though the skin of his body was hardly contused, yet that almost every bone of the body was broken in fragments.
I managed to carry him to the house. I closed the doors of the staircase; and then I managed to tell Farmer Hall that Basil had had, I thought, a fall and was dead. And then my own strength failed me, and for three days and nights I lay in a kind of stupor.
When I recovered my consciousness, I found myself in bed in my own room. Mrs Hall nursed me with a motherly care and tenderness which moved me very greatly; but I could not speak of the matter to her, until, just before my departure, she came in, as she did twenty times a day, to see if I wanted anything. I made a great effort and said, “Mrs Hall, I am very sorry for you. This has been a terrible business, and I am afraid you won’t easily forget it. You ought to leave the house, I think.”