With one fist he beat on the door without putting the hurt man down, and continued to hit it until steps were heard, and bolts began to grumble, as though disturbed too early from their rusty sleep in stone sockets.

The door of the house with the balcony was opened by a servant who, when he saw who it was that Rodriguez carried, fled into the house in alarm, as one who runs with bad news.  He carried one candle and, when he had disappeared with the steaming flame, Rodriguez found himself in a long hall lit by the moonlight only, which was looking in through the small contorted panes of the upper part of a high window.  Alone with echoes and shadows Rodriguez carried the hurt man through the hall, who was muttering now as he came back to consciousness.  And, as he went, there came to Rodriguez thoughts between wonder and hope, for he had had no thought at all when he beat on the door except to get shelter and help for the hurt man.  At the end of the hall they came to an open door that led into a chamber partly shining with moonlight.

“In there,” said the man that he carried.

Rodriguez carried him in and laid him on a long couch at the end of the room.  Large pictures of men in the blackness, out of the moon’s rays, frowned at Rodriguez mysteriously.  He could not see their faces in the darkness, but he somehow knew they frowned.  Two portraits that were clear in the moonlight eyed him with absolute apathy.  So cold a welcome from that house’s past generations boded no good to him from those that dwelt there today.  Rodriguez knew that in carrying the hurt man there he helped at a Christian deed; and yet there was no putting the merits of the case against the omens that crowded the chamber, lurking along the edge of moonlight and darkness, disappearing and reappearing till the gloom was heavy with portent.  The omens knew.  In a weak voice and few words the hurt man thanked him, but the apathetic faces seemed to say What of that?  And the frowning faces that he could not see still filled the darkness with anger.

And then from the end of the chamber, dressed in white, and all shining with moonlight, came Serafina.

Rodriguez in awed silence watched her come.  He saw her pass through the moonlight and grow dimmer, and glide to the moonlight again that streamed through another window.  A great dim golden circle appeared at the far end of the chamber whence she had come, as the servent returned with his candle and held it high to give light for Dona Serafina.  But that one flame seemed to make the darkness only blacker; and for any cheerfulness it brought to the gloom it had better never have challenged those masses of darkness at all in that high chamber among the brooding portraits it seemed trivial, ephemeral, modern, ill able to cope with the power of ancient things, dead days and forgotten voices, which make their home in the darkness because the days that have usurped them have stolen the light of the sun.