VIII

To the man who pays heed to that voice within him which warns him that twilight and danger are settling over his soul, terror is apt to appear an absolute thing, against which his heart must be safeguarded in a twink unless there is to take place an alteration in the whole range and scale of his nature.  Mercifully, he has never far to look for safeguards.  Of the immediate and small and common and momentary things of life, of usages and observances and modes and conventions, he builds up fortifications against the powers of darkness.  He is even content that, not terror only, but joy also, should for working purposes be placed in the category of the absolute things; and the last treason he will commit will be that breaking down of terms and limits that strikes, not at one man, but at the welfare of the souls of all.

In his own person, Oleron began to commit this treason.  He began to commit it by admitting the inexplicable and horrible to an increasing familiarity.  He did it insensibly, unconsciously, by a neglect of the things that he now regarded it as an impertinence in Elsie Bengough to have prescribed.  Two months before, the words “a haunted house,” applied to his lovely bemusing dwelling, would have chilled his marrow; now, his scale of sensation becoming depressed, he could ask “Haunted by what?” and remain unconscious that horror, when it can be proved to be relative, by so much loses its proper quality.  He was setting aside the landmarks.  Mists and confusion had begun to enwrap him.

And he was conscious of nothing so much as of a voracious inquisitiveness.  He wanted to know.  He was resolved to know.  Nothing but the knowledge would satisfy him; and craftily he cast about for means whereby he might attain it.

He might have spared his craft.  The matter was the easiest imaginable.  As in time past he had known, in his writing, moments when his thoughts had seemed to rise of themselves and to embody themselves in words not to be altered afterwards, so now the questions he put himself seemed to be answered even in the moment of their asking.  There was exhilaration in the swift, easy processes.  He had known no so such joy in his own power since the days when his writing had been a daily freshness and a delight to him.  It was almost as if the course he must pursue was being dictated to him.

And the first thing he must do, of course, was to define the problem.  He defined it in terms of mathematics.  Granted that he had not the place to himself; granted that the old house had inexpressibly caught and engaged his spirit; granted that, by virtue of the common denominator of the place, this unknown co-tenant stood in some relation to himself:  what next?  Clearly, the nature of the other numerator must be ascertained.

And how?  Ordinarily this would not have seemed simple, but to Oleron it was now pellucidly clear.  The key, of course, lay in his half-written novel—­or rather, in both Romillys, the old and the proposed new one.