THE HOUR OF DEATH

It was a very still night and frosty.  My candle had long burnt out.  There was still a faint moonlight, which fell in a square of yellow on the floor near the window, leaving the rest of the room in what to an eye less accustomed than mine had become to that faint light would have been total darkness.  Now, I am sure, I heard a soft whispering outside my door.  I knew that I was in a state of siege!  The crisis was come, and strange to say, I felt myself grow all at once resolute and self-possessed.  It was not a subsidence, however, of the dreadful excitement, but a sudden screwing-up of my nerves to a pitch such as I cannot describe.

I suppose the people outside moved with great caution; and the perfect solidity of the floor, which had not anywhere a creaking board in it, favoured their noiseless movements.  It was well for me that there were in the house three persons whom it was part of their plan to mystify respecting my fate.  This alone compelled the extreme caution of their proceedings.  They suspected that I had placed furniture against the door, and were afraid to force it, lest a crash, a scream, perhaps a long and shrilly struggle, might follow.

I remained for a space which I cannot pretend to estimate in the same posture, afraid to stir—­afraid to move my eye from the door.

A very peculiar grating sound above my head startled me from my watch—­something of the character of sawing, only more crunching, and with a faint continued rumble in it—­utterly inexplicable.  It sounded over that portion of the roof which was farthest from the door, toward which I now glided; and as I took my stand under cover of the projecting angle of a clumsy old press that stood close by it, I perceived the room a little darkened, and I saw a man descend and take his stand upon the window-stone.  He let go a rope, which, however, was still fast round his body, and employed both his hands, with apparently some exertion, about something at the side of the window, which in a moment more, in one mass, bars and all, swung noiselessly open, admitting the frosty night-air; and the man, whom I now distinctly saw to be Dudley Ruthyn, kneeled on the sill, and stept, after a moment’s listening, into the room.  His foot made no sound upon the floor; his head was bare, and he wore his usual short shooting-jacket.

I cowered to the ground in my post of observation.  He stood, as it seemed to me irresolutely for a moment, and then drew from his pocket an instrument which I distinctly saw against the faint moonlight.  Imagine a hammer, one end of which had been beaten out into a longish tapering spike, with a handle something longer than usual.  He drew stealthily to the window, and seemed to examine this hurriedly, and tested its strength with a twist or two of his hand.  And then he adjusted it very carefully in his grasp, and made two or three little experimental picks with it in the air.